Surpassing Sexuality

When I came out to my parents at eighteen years old as gay, there was some sadness on their part, tears shed over a progeny that wouldn’t be, a feeling of guilt that they had maybe done something wrong. When I came out to them recently as beyond sexuality, neither gay nor straight, not bisexual, asexual or anything else, they just stared silently.

I have worn the mantel of homosexuality for the past eight years. It was a label that seemed inevitable to accept – I was physically attracted to men, I wanted to have sex with men, so I must be gay. But unlike some men who embrace a whole gay identity, who delve deeper into it, creating a lifestyle based on their sexuality, I always remained a bit on the periphery. Despite living in New York and Los Angeles, I never attended, nor desired to attend a gay pride parade. I found it difficult to form friendships with other gay men and romantic relationships were impossible. In eight years, my feelings towards men never surpassed lust. In fact, all of my emotional bonds and fulfilling relationships have been exclusively with women.

And one day recently, just as suddenly as it had appeared at some forgotten point in adolescence, my desire for men disappeared. It was realized through meditation – not a conscious epiphany, but a feeling of transcendence: I was free from desire. It was not necessarily replaced with a desire for women, but that sexual desire as such had simply been erased. The same way that one day I stopped desiring alcohol, the lust for men also ceased.

The true immortal self has no particular sexuality. Meditation is a practice to drop the ego, to become a void so that one is filled with the universal. It is possible to transcend sexuality, to go beyond physical desire. In Tantra, this is the notion of raising your Kundalini energy into a higher state.

It is a more enlightened position to eschew all artificial labels. When you take on a label, it becomes an adopted identity. In man’s desire for self-discovery, he often stops short. He may realize some small truth about himself and identify with the closest thing that resembles it. But this is to renounce your individuality, that which is your fundamental nature.

Sleep with whomever you desire, you don’t need to label it. That is to exclude the possibility of the unknown, limit yourself mentally to just one category of experience. How do you know you might not fall in love with a woman or a man or a tree in ten years time?

It is human nature to want to categorize. This is the mind which functions through comparison, analysis. The mind wants to have a purpose. But if you can go beyond the mind, when meditation becomes your state of being, then all labels are forgotten, unnecessary.

To consider yourself any one thing is to limit yourself, cut yourself off to possibility. Why be one thing when you can be everything? The entire universe is contained within you, the same way the candle shares the light of the sun. You are limitless.