Is Premarital Sex Okay?
Questioner: So when we enter college, being a student, there is an open environment in the college where we can freely mingle with the people of opposite gender. Now, when one is away from the family and they are yearning for some intimacy, it is quite common in our generation that people engage in casual physical intimacy. So, according to you, is it right? Is pre-marital sex or casual physical relations right or not?
Acharya Prashant: The question is based on a few assumptions, Chetna. You have asked about premarital sex. If the center of the question is marital, then why not begin with postmarital sex? That is something that you have taken as granted. Do you see the assumption implicit in your question? You're saying postmarital is okay, so I don't even need to question that. I'm questioning only premarital. Let's begin with postmarital rather. So you're asking me, "Is premarital sex okay?" I'm asking you, "Is postmarital sex okay?" Please tell me.
Questioner: Depends.
Acharya Prashant: Depends, right? That's the answer—"depends." Is postmarital sex okay?
Questioner: Depends on the people who are engaging in it.
Acharya Prashant: The same thing applies to premarital also. Even in postmarital sex, there can be a lot of violence, a lot of exploitation. You know of that, right? Even the law admits that now, that the wife indeed can approach for a legal redress. There can be marital rape, just as there can be the worst kind of sexual encounter after marriage. Equally, there can be a very bad kind of sexual encounter before marriage.
The marital word does not matter. What matters is the quality of the encounter. What is the mind like? What is the quality of the union of these two people? And if two people are not meeting in actual love, then it doesn't matter whether the thing is postmarital or premarital. It is simply just abominable. So do not approve of cultural prejudices too easily, Chetna. In India, we have boys and girls who preserve their chastity and then literally hand it over to a stranger post-marriage.
Equally, we have boys and girls who just go for casual flings while at college, and they just bring each other down in all this. Don't you see all that happening? Not only in the metro cities now, it's happening everywhere. And it doesn't even wait for the college days to come. It now begins in class 8th, class 6th — the nibba-nibbi affair, as you call it these days.
So a class 6 girl would say, “That one — he's my boy,” and the boy belongs to class 7. The boy says, “That's my girl,” and together these two are even trying to have some kind of physical thing. That's just an abuse of the body. Is that not? You do not know who you are. You do not know what life is. You do not know what a relationship means. You do not know what to relate to the other for. And you are just trying to emulate something you saw on the screen, something that the adults were doing, and you want to copy that. All that is so nonsensical.
Equally, what is happening after the marriage is just so life-degrading. It's just that what happens after marriage is approved by law and religion and society, so we don't want to talk about that. We say it is legal. We even say it is sacred because it is sanctioned by religion. The priests or the maulvis — they were present when the ceremony took place. So now, even if they have the worst quality of physical encounters as husband and wife, all that is okay. That is passable.
You know, even the government resists a lot when the court says that marital rape has to be taken as a crime. The government says if you turn that into a law, then the family system will collapse. They do not know what they are admitting. Otherwise, why will the family system be threatened if you make marital rape a punishable crime? But they are saying, “No, no don't turn marital rape into a legal crime, otherwise the family system will collapse.” Look at what that implies.
Questioner: Families are built on….
Acharya Prashant: It's not even about the family system. It's about the quality of individuals. We are not raising conscious individuals.
An unconscious man, an unconscious woman — they reach the age of 25 or 30, or sometimes just 18 or 20, and they get into that nuptial arrangement, the sacred vows and the ceremonies, and they are declared husband and wife. What is this? An exercise in unconsciousness.
Nobody really knows what is going on. Since everybody does that, since it has been traditionally happening, we too will do this. And after that, we will have sex. What will be the quality of that union? So it's not about whether the whole thing is happening before or after marriage. The question is: what is the level of consciousness of these two people?
We want an awakened society. We want a spiritually literate society. And then you will not need to tell the man and the woman what to do in life.
They will know the decisions to make. They will know the partner to choose. They will know what the body means. They will understand where lust comes from. They will know the purpose of life. They will also know the meaning of attachment. And they will know what to avoid. They'll also know what to get into. Getting it?
So we have to educate our youngsters, not regulate them. You need to mentor them, not police them. Guiding someone is one thing, throwing light on someone's path is one thing, and dictating somebody's life and path is something totally different, right? Throw light on their way and give light to their eyes, and the rest they will decide on their own and they have to. Otherwise, it's a disgrace if you have to handhold a young man or a young woman.
To be young is to no longer be a kid. Right? So maturity is the hallmark of youth. If a young person is not mature enough to make the basic decisions in life, then the society is answerable. What kind of youth has the society raised? What was the quality of education? What kind of influence did the environment have on the consciousness of that young person? So enable them, empower them — not condition them, not dictate them. Liberate, not dictate. And Liberation is the best help, the best service, and the foremost indicator of love.
If you love someone, give them wings. Give them light. Give them self-knowledge, and then they will fly on their own.
All this does not sound convincing, is it?
Questioner: So you said two things. In the previous question, you said that body identification is the root cause of most of the evils in the world and in myself as well. And body identification is strengthened by identifying myself as the gender. So I want to understand this a bit more.
Acharya Prashant: Where does sex come from? From birth. When the kid takes birth, you immediately mark M or F (Male or Female). So see, you get it from there. It's in the body. And then the gender role that you are provided — that comes from the sex. If you are a girl, you'll have pink toys. Even the paint on the walls of baby girl rooms — that's pink. So that's how your gender identity develops. Pink fans and dolls and soft toys to play with. No guns, no tanks. We know of these stereotypes, right?
Boys get police cars to play with. Girls get dolls and frocks to play with. So that's how this thing develops. And the basis is the sex that you are born with at the time of birth. It's a sticky thing that carries on from there.
Your very language is so sex-centric, is it not? You don't address a person just as a person. You say "he," "she," "Aaya-Aayi" — as if the person is nothing sans the gender. You don't want to conceal the gender in any way. You don't want to think of the person as consciousness. You are constantly thinking of that person as the body. So if the body is female, the person will be addressed in one way. If the body is male, the person is addressed in some other way. Can you imagine the kind of effect it will be having on the mind?
Even language is built in a way that is constantly turning you body-centric. You are just sitting, reading a book. And when you are immersed in a book, you are no longer a girl. You are just pure consciousness engaging with the author, engaging with knowledge. Right? You're sitting, immersed, and someone comes and says, "Kya Padh rahi hai?" What have you been reminded of?" You have been reminded of your gender. See what language has done? It has turned you into a woman. You were the consciousness, and you have been made a body. Getting it?
That's the principal battle you have to fight in life — to identify, first of all, with consciousness rather than the body.
The body is just a fact. The body is not your reality, and the body is not at all your destination. The body is something that biology, Prakriti, has given you. It's an irreversible fact. Okay. I'm born a woman, but that's something I start out with. That's not something I want to end at. The body can at most be my beginning point. It cannot be my destination. And I cannot decide my beginning point. You do not decide your chromosomes. You are born a woman. You had no say in that. That's okay. But you have all the say over what you want to be in life.
And what you want to be is something very gender-neutral. You have to be liberated in life. And liberation has no gender. Liberation is when you transcend your gender. Right? Truth has no gender, the sky has no gender, freedom has no gender. That's where you have to reach. So you begin as a woman, but you have to reach the sky. You have to transcend your gender. That's the purpose of life.
Incidentally, you know, the word beauty comes to my mind. You know who is the most beautiful woman? One who has transcended her woman-ness. A woman who lives by her feminine traits, her hormones, and the rest of it, and the social conditioning — just cannot be beautiful. At most, she can be physically attractive. But —
A truly beautiful woman is someone who has transcended the sex and gender identity. That's when you have beauty.
The same applies to men as well.
Questioner: Thank you, sir.
