I don't think I need to tell you that in a very special and peculiar way, Western man is hung up on sex. And the major reason for this is that he has a religious background quite unique among the religions of the world. I'm thinking specifically of Christianity and in the secondary way Judaism, in so far as Judaism in Europe and the United States is strongly influenced by Christianity. But Christianity is, of all religions in the world, the one uniquely preoccupied with sex. More so than priapism, more so than tantric yoga, more so than any kind of fertility cult which has ever existed on the face of the earth. There has never, never, never been a religion in which sexuality was so important. And there

[01:15]

are certain very simple standards by which this can be judged. In popular speech when you say of a given person that he or she is living in sin, you know very well that you do not mean that they're engaged in a business to defraud the public by the sale of badly made bread or anything of that kind. You know that they're not setting up a check forgery business? No. People who are living in sin are people who have an irregular sexual partnership. In the same way when you say something is immoral, it pretty much means that it's something sexually irregular. I remember when I was a boy in school, we used to have a preacher. He came to us every year, the same man once a year, and he always talked on the subject of drink, gambling, and immorality. I remember the way he rolled it around his tongue and

[02:20]

it was very clear what immorality was. And also, I might point out that present company accepted the Unitarian Church being somewhat unusual. Most churches in America and in England and in other parts of the Western world are, frankly, sexual regulation societies. They occasionally get excited about other moral issues, but really not very much. In other words, when you ask what can people get kicked out of church for, let's suppose you consider important ministers, bishops, priests, and so on, they can live in envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness and be in perfectly good standing. But the moment anything about

[03:23]

their sexual life becomes a little unusual, out you go. And that's about the only thing you can go out for. You study, for example, a Roman Catholic manual of moral theology. These manuals of moral theology are technical books about sins of all kinds, just exactly what they are, how they're done, how grave they are, mostly for the advice of confessors. And they're always arranged according to the Ten Commandments. And when they get to the commandment, thou shalt not commit adultery, the volume expands like this. In fact, it occupies two thirds of the whole book. All the details. So we have, in a very special way, got sex on the brain, which isn't exactly the right place for it. Now, this needs going into because

[04:25]

it is not as simple as it looks. There are really two roots of the whole problem. One of them is the problem of why sexual pleasure, of all pleasures, as a kind of really supreme pleasure, is singled out for religious people to be particularly afraid of. This is not only true in Christianity. I say Christianity emphasizes it in a certain way. But in Asian religions also, especially in India, there is a prevailing view that if you want to attain real heights of spirituality, the one thing you must give up is sexuality, in the ordinary sense of genital sexual relationships with man or woman, as the case may be. And this

[05:29]

reflects in part, you see, an attitude to the physical world. Because it is, after all, through sexuality that we have, along with eating, our most fundamental relationship to materiality, to nature, to the physical universe. And it is the point at which we can become most attached to the body, to the physical organism, to material life. That's one reason why it's problematic. The other reason why it's problematic is more subtle. And that is that sexuality is something which you cannot get rid of. Do what you may, life is sexual, in the sense, for example, that you are either male or female. There are various other gradations, but basically there are forms of maleness and femaleness. And also

[06:33]

that every one of you is the result of sexual intercourse. And this feature of life can be looked at in one of two ways. You can say on the one hand that all man's higher ideals, his spirituality, and so forth, is simply repressed sexuality. Or on the other hand you can say that human sexuality is a manifestation, a particular form or expression, of what is spiritual, metaphysical, divine, or whatever you want to call it. I hold to the latter view. I don't think that religion is repressed sexuality. I think, however, that sexuality is just one of the many forms in which whatever all this is expresses itself. But you see, if this thing is something you cannot get rid of, and if you realize that indeed a way

[07:39]

of life in which sexuality is in some way put down or repressed is nonetheless an expression of sexuality, then we come to a view of a religion in which sex is a very special taboo, which is rather unusual. It's normally said, you see, that Christianity is a religion in which sex is taboo, and there's simply no getting around it. I know up-to-date ministers today think sex is all right. It's perfectly okay if you're married and you've got a mature relationship with a woman. It's all right. And they kind of damn it with faint praise. But if you read anything of Christian writings prior, shall we say, to 1850, to set a date rather arbitrarily, you will find that it's not all right. Not at all. It's tolerated

[08:40]

between married couples and strictly for the procreation of children. But on the whole, to do without it is best. As St. Paul put it, it's better to marry than to burn. To burn with the fire of lust and ultimately to burn in hell. But always, consistently, there is simply no getting away from it. In all the writings of the Church Fathers, from St. Paul himself right through to St. Ignatius Loyola, or any of the great relatively modern leaders of Catholic spirituality, or you can look at Calvin, you can look at great Protestants, John Knox, on the whole, sex is sin and sex is dirt. And you can say very simply that

[09:55]

this is all bad and something very wrong, but I want to point out that there is another side to all this. There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it. And as a result of all these centuries of sexual repression and associating it with dirt, the West has developed a peculiar form of eroticism, the most salacious, the most prurient, the most kind of weird form of eroticism that exists anywhere in the world. The kind of eroticism that goes with black lace panties, high-heeled shoes, long black gloves that go up to here, whips, all kinds of weird things.

[11:01]

That, you see, all that black lace, all that kind of extraordinary thing is a kind of vestigial remainder of clerical garments, of black against pink. And as you see, you might say the unconscious or secret intent of prudery is prurience. Prudery is a way of pushing down on a force in order to make the force stronger and more exciting. And so if that's your dish, if that's the way you like to do these things, then of course you must join the ranks of those who will put the biggest

[12:06]

possible kinds of taboo on sex and all the prohibitions against it. And you will be doing this with the secret intention of making it more fun. And so it is, you see, that you turn it into something in a very special sense of the word dirty. You well know that an enormous number of men, particularly in our culture, find sex something to snicker about and wouldn't tolerate it on any other basis at all. It's not something holy, indeed no, it's not something beautiful, but it's something you can tell a certain kind of story about and you can have a certain kind of laugh about. It's all right so long as it's dirty. And this kind

[13:10]

of person, you see, is actually cultivating in himself a special style of eroticism. There are other kinds of people, for example, for whom sex is holy. Sex is something extremely deep and important, a very beautiful relationship. And among such people there might, for example, be sexual rites, which in our culture we would call orgies. The one kind of person you never invite to an orgy is a person with a dirty mind. I've been once in a house where there wasn't an orgy but where there was dancing going on and there was one girl who was quite a fine dancer and she simply disrobed and danced and she was very beautiful. And nobody had any thoughts of committing sins with her or anything of that kind except the one man present who had a dirty mind. And he snickered and couldn't take it. Because, you see, he had

[14:11]

got a style of erotic feeling which required that the atmosphere of sex be associated with the dirt and the evil. And so he was totally out of place among people who had actually pure minds, for whom the naked woman was simply beautiful and so what? But that is an aspect of this whole problem which I don't think is really very profitable to explore. I just want to mention it in passing, that the whole attitude of anti-sexuality in the Christian tradition is not as anti as it looks. It is simply a method of making sex prurient

[15:15]

and exciting in a kind of dirty way. And I suppose it's to be recommended for people who are not feeling very frisky and need to be pepped up. The other side of the problem is much more interesting. That is to say, the first thing I mentioned, why it is that there has been a problem for human beings about pleasure. And we'll take sexual activity as a supreme pleasure, as a supreme involvement of oneself with the body and with the physical world. Why should there be a problem here? Well, the point is simply, isn't it, that the physical world is transient. It's impermanent. It falls apart. And bodies that were once strong, smooth, and lovely in youth, begin to wither and become corrupt and turn at last

[16:25]

into skeletons. And if you cling on to one of those and it suddenly turns into a skeleton in your hand, as it will if you speed up your sense of time a little, you feel cheated. And there has been for centuries a lament about this, that life is so short that all the beauties of this world fall apart. And therefore if you are wise, you don't set your heart on mortal beauty, but you set your heart on spiritual values that are imperishable. Even that supposed tipler and rake, Omar Khayyam, says that the worldly hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes or it prospers, and an on-like snow upon the desert's dusty face, lighting a little hour or two, is gone. And so don't bet on that horse. And read any kind of spiritual

[17:34]

literature you want to. Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, all of them seem to emphasize the importance of detachment from the body, from the physical world, so that you won't be engulfed in the stream of impermanence. The idea being, you see, that to the degree that you identify yourself with the body and with the pleasures of the body, to that degree going to be something that is sucked away in the course of transiency. So therefore hold yourself aloof. As in, for example, the advice of many Hindus in the practice of yoga, you are advised to look upon all sensory experiences as something out there which you simply witness. You yourself identify yourself with the eternal, spiritual, unchanging self, the witness of all

[18:45]

that goes on, but who is no more involved in it than, say, the smoothness or the color of a mirror is affected by the things which it reflects. Keep your mind like a mirror, pure and clean, free from dust, free from flaws, free from stain, and just reflect everything that goes on but don't be attached. You will find this all over the place, but it has always seemed to me that that attitude of essential detachment from the physical universe has underlying it a very serious problem. The problem being, why a physical universe at all in that case? If God is in some way responsible for the existence of a creation, and if this creation

[19:51]

is basically a snare, why did he do it? And of course, according to some theologies, the physical universe is looked upon as a mistake, as a fall from the divine state, as if something went wrong in the heavenly domain, and causing spirits such as we are to fall from their highest state and to become involved with animal bodies. And so there is an ancient analogy of man, which runs right through to the present time, that your relationship to your body is that of a rider to a horse. Saint Francis called his body Brother Ass. That you are a rational soul in charge of an animal body. And therefore, if you belong

[20:55]

to the old-fashioned school, you beat it into submission. As St. Paul said, I beat my body into submission. Or if you are a Freudian, you treat your horse not with a whip but with lumps of sugar. Kindly, but still it's your horse. Even in Freud, there is a very, very strong element of Puritanism. Read Philip Reif's book on Freud, The Mind of the Moralist, and how he shows that Freud basically thought that sex was degrading. But nevertheless, something biologically unavoidable, something terribly necessary, which couldn't just be swept aside. It had to be dealt with. But there is, you see, that heritage of thinking of ourselves as divided. The ego as the rational soul of spiritual origin, and the physical

[22:00]

body as the animal component. And therefore, all success in life, spiritual success, requires the spiritualization of the animal component. The sublimation of its dirty and strange urges, so that it's thoroughly cleaned up. I suppose the ideal sexual relationship of such persons would be held on an operating table under disinfectant sprays. Now it is of course true that the physical world, its beauty, and so on, is transient. We are all falling apart in some way or another, especially after you pass the peak of youth. But it's never

[23:07]

struck me that that is something to gripe about. That the physical world is transient seems to me to be part of its splendor. I can imagine nothing more awful than, say, attaining to the age of thirty, and suddenly being frozen, in that age for always and always. You would become a kind of, we would all be a sort of animated waxworks. And you would discover as a matter of fact, that people who had that physical permanence would feel like plastic. And that is as a matter of fact what is going to be done about us by technology in order to attain perpetual youth. All the parts of us that decay and fold up are going to be replaced by very skillfully manufactured plastic parts. So that in the end, we will

[24:12]

be entirely made of very, very sophisticated plastic. And everybody will feel like that. And everybody will be utterly bored with each other. Because the very fact, you see, that the world is always decaying and always falling away, is the same thing as its vitality. Vitality is change. Life is death. It is always falling apart. And so there are certain supreme moments, you see, at which in the body we attain superb vitality. And that's the time. Make it then. That's the moment, just like when an orchestra is playing, the conductor wants to get a certain group of, say, violins, to come in at a certain moment, and he's conducting, and he's got to now make it. And they all have to do it right now, you see? Of course. That's the whole art of life.

[25:17]

To do it at the right time. To do it in time, like you dance or you play in time. And so in the same way, when it comes to love, sexuality, or equally so in all the pleasures of gastronomy, timing is of the essence. And then it's happened, and you've had it. But that's not something that one should look upon with regret. It only is something regrettable if you didn't know how to take it when it was timely. And this is really the essence of what I want to talk to you about. Because, you see, to be detached from the world, in the sense that Buddhists and Daoists and Hindus will often talk about detachment, does not mean to be non-participative.

[26:22]

You can have a sexual life very rich and very full, and yet all the time be detached. By that I don't mean that you just go through it mechanically and have your thoughts elsewhere. I mean a complete participation, but still detached. And the difference of the two attitudes is this. On the one hand, there is a way of being so anxious about physical pleasure, so afraid that you won't make it, that you grab it too hard. That you just have to have that thing. And if you do that, you destroy it completely. And therefore, after every attempt to get it, you feel disappointed.

[27:25]

You feel empty, you feel something was lost, and therefore you want it again. You have to keep repeating, [...] because you never really got there. And it's this that is the hang-up. This is what is meant by attachment to this world, in an evil sense. And it's this that is the hang-up. This is what is meant by attachment to this world. In an evil sense. But on the other hand, pleasure in its fullness cannot be experienced when one is grasping it. I knew a little girl to whom someone gave a bunny rabbit. She was so delighted with the bunny rabbit and so afraid of losing it, that taking it home in the car, she squeezed it to death

[28:31]

with love. And lots of parents do that to their children, and lots of spouses do it to each other. They hold on too hard, and so take the life out of this transient, beautifully fragile thing that life is. To have it, to have life, and to have its pleasure, you must at the same time let go of it. And then you can feel perfectly free to have that pleasure in the most gutsy, rollicking, earthy, lip-licking way, provided you don't hang on. And you see, in, for example, in sexuality, in women, the sexual orgasm, which is something practically undiscussed in the literature of sexuality,

[29:38]

prior to very modern times indeed, the female orgasm doesn't happen without surrender, without a complete giving up of oneself. And this is equally true of a kind of male orgasm or sexual pleasure, which isn't just a kind of brief sneeze in the loins, but a complete, one's whole being taken over by a kind of undulative, convulsive ripple, which is like the very pulse of life itself. This can happen only if you let go, if you are willing to be abandoned. It's funny that word, abandon. We speak of people who are dissolute as being abandoned, but we can also use abandon as the characteristic of a saint,

[30:43]

a great spiritual book by a Jesuit father is called Abandonment to the Divine Providence. There are people like that, who just aren't hung up. They are the poor in spirit. That is to say, they spiritually are poor in the sense they don't cling on to any property. They don't carry burdens around. They're free. Well, just that sort of spiritual poverty, that let-go-ness, is quite essential for the enjoyment of any kind of pleasure at all, and particularly sexual pleasure. But you see, what do we do instead? We have confused mature sexuality with one of the most fantastic institutions ever cooked up from the human brain. It's called marriage.

[31:53]

Now, long ago, marriage was a more or less political arrangement on a small scale. Families had to exist for various reasons, the bringing up of children, for creating units of human association smaller than villages. In other words, for purely logistic, managerial reasons, families as sub-units of a village were very convenient, and they made alliances between one another by arranging intermarriage of their children. And so your spouse was chosen for you by your elders and supposedly betters, and you weren't supposed to fall in love with the person they chose for you, you were supposed to raise children. And they tried to find someone who was suitable to you, eugenically and emotionally, and that was the

[32:58]

person you live with. If, on the other hand, you felt the mysterious attractions of love, then that was something you arranged for on the side. In some societies only men were allowed to do this, in other societies women were allowed to do it too. We, of course, come of a patrist line of authority in which this was a privilege reserved for men. However, in course of time it became apparent to Western man that women are people, and that you can't just buy and sell women. In early Christian culture, they admitted women were people, but only in one respect, that is to say insofar as they were like men, that is to say they had souls. But by and large the recognition that women are people, and that they are too capable of all the

[34:07]

personal feelings of love, is something that has dawned on the West very slowly indeed. But as it did dawn, and it dawned to a large extent through the movement of romantic love that originated uh among the troubadours in the south of France, very slowly it dawned on us that marriage had a different quality. That it should be not a an arranged affair, but something which expressed the mature choice of two persons. That they should love each other and enter into the same contract, the same legal contract, which existed for an arranged marriage, with the usual safety valves provided on the side. But of course in this case, where it was a love relationship, the contract did not provide for the safety valves on the side.

[35:10]

So what happens in our kind of marriage, is the two young people get together with a great deal of inexperience, and with very highly aroused sexual feelings. And in order to love each other, they stand before an altar or a justice, and solemnly curse and and sign on the dotted line, that they will always feel this way towards each other, and will remain in association until death do them part. Now of course in certain cases, because this is a roulette wheel, it works out that they did indeed choose the right person, and they do stay together for the rest of their lives, and are happy about it. But in, I would say, a majority of cases, this does not happen. And it especially does not happen,

[36:16]

when on either side of the picture, there is an anxiety that it must happen. In other words, to the degree that we take the contract, the legal obligation, the responsibility of marriage seriously, to that degree we tend to destroy it. And as I think I mentioned last week, it is obvious isn't it, when you ask someone, do you really and truly love me, that you do not want the answer, I am trying my best to do so. Now that's very significant, very important. You want the person to confess that they are absolutely overwhelmed by you, that they are incapable of even the thought of not loving you.

[37:22]

They are your happy and total slave, emotionally. That's what we mean when we want someone to be really in love with us. And so this fantastic inconsistency exists because of the notion that, when we look at love as a spectrum, on one end is red and the other violet. Red is the most Freudian kind of libidinous libido, lust. Violet is divine charity. And in the middle, green is, shall we say, warm human endearment. All that is involved. Now, the minute you require that your partner in marriage shall always be violet towards you,

[38:27]

that is to say, shall whether, I mean, you know, sexual vigor is not going to last forever. And you're going to be old crones one of these days. But still there may very well tie you together the violet love, or the green love. But if you require that it shall be there, it's highly unlikely that it will be. And on the other end, where the spectrum is red and hot, the same thing equally applies. If you push it, shove it, and say to it, you must happen, it won't. And so, it so often is, as you, I'm sure I don't need to tell most of you this, as a matter of practical experience, that where a couple gets together for the first time and wants to engage in sexual play, so often there is male impotence and female lack of surrender.

[39:33]

And the reason is that they're too eager. That men think, well, I ought to behave in the expected way, and it won't happen. How wayward of it, how perverse. And that is again exactly because your body knows better than you do. It's a wonderful thing, it knows, and it won't perform if you push it around and say, you must love. You've got to let go of your body and say, well, let's see what happens. Nothing's supposed to happen, nothing special ought to happen, just let it take its course and let's see what does happen. And then your body will act in a natural way, it will do what is expected to do. But it won't if you push it. And so, it's exactly the same sort of principle

[40:46]

as when you are terribly hungry and you think, now let's have a great meal. And you get a lot of stuff together and you bolt it down, you get indigestion. Because, look, when you taste something, when you put steak into your mouth or a boiled egg or whatever, it won't improve the taste to push on it hard with your tongue. That may wear out your tongue muscles so that they become a little bit numb as a matter of fact. The point is, you see, you cannot force or pursue pleasure. Now, to think of pursuit, you can run after a girl, you can go hunting for deer, you can catch fish in a net, but that's not the same thing as catching pleasure. All right, get the girl, but to have pleasure with her is not enough to have her. Catch your fish,

[41:54]

but for the fish to be pleasure, you've got to know how to cook it. That's quite an art. Laozi, the Chinese philosopher said, govern a great state as you cook a small fish. That means, when you have a small fish in the pan, don't keep fidgeting with it, otherwise it all breaks up. And above all, Americans, please note, cook your fish rare. Don't overdo it. You see, that's terribly important. In other words, one has to have an approach to sensuous pleasure that is a light touch, because the nature of pleasure is, you can't make it come to you, but it will come to you. You can't, let me put it this way, you can't go and get it, you can only let it happen. The nature of our nerves, the nerve ends upon which all

[42:56]

pleasurable stimulations fall, is such that they are receptive instruments. They are not muscles. So, you do not see more clearly by staring. Did you see that picture in the papers of the President of the United States and Billy Graham praying? They had their heads down and they were frowning. That's not the way to pray, because that's screwing up your vital center. There is this, you know, according to yoga, there's a very important spiritual center between the eyes. That's why Buddhas have gems, you know, it's their third eye. And the thing is to open that up. And so, if you get openness between the eyes, right here, you relax it, and you wouldn't, you would do anything but frown. That's why Buddhas always look so smooth and so peaceable. They're not frowning. But when you frown, this is serious, you've got to get this, see? That's the, just shoving it out. That's not the attitude for prayer.

[44:02]

That's why the original prayer figure, the orante, is always shown like this. Open. Please, come in. Not this kind of thing. So, when you, you want the pleasure of the eyes, the pleasure of the ears, the pleasure of the skin, it must be receptive. And you have to get quiet, and wait. And particularly in sexual relationships, this is something that has continued to amaze me. I must be naive or something, but how people in armies and so on, can line up outside whore houses, and one after another, one after another, go in and do that

[45:07]

thing, is utterly incomprehensible. Because the only way for a man and woman to relate to each other, in a very deep sexual way, is to have plenty of time, and to be in a spirit of total absence of hurry. This is, in other words, the fallacy of the Kinsey report, the deep spiritual fallacy underlying the whole thing, is it describes each act of sexual congress as an outlet. Why not an inlet? But outlets, so many outlets, in other words, as if the problem of the human male and the human female, is that they were a steam kettle, in a state of tremendous tension, which had to be released. This was Freud's idea. Freud thought of sexual pleasure as occurring

[46:08]

primarily in the moment of ejaculation. He had no real understanding of the importance of everything that goes before. And so he had the whole idea that release from tension was the important thing. But if you really understand anything at all about this, the art of building up tension, and letting it happen slowly, is just great. But as I say, letting it build, not forcing it. This is a remarkable thing, but sexual excitation, where in the male being, something becomes extremely hard, is not something done muscularly. It cannot be this act of strength, and of male hardness cannot be produced by will, by gritting one's teeth. It has to happen, be allowed, permitted. And so I would say in this whole coming together

[47:16]

of spirit and nature, man and woman, heaven and earth, I and thou, the whole point about it is, don't grab. Because as you grab the material world, it falls apart. As you lean on it, it gives way. That's the entire secret. I told you at the end of the last lecture that nature helps us to let go, because it is disintegrating. It is always dissolving. And to the degree that you see that and get with it, and thoroughly go with the insecurity of things, you will be freed, and you will find out that you are

[48:19]

eternal. But to the degree that you don't do that, that you hang on, you will identify yourself with the dissolution of each individual form, and everything will be disappointing, and you will, as you get older, feel that the pace of life is getting faster, [...] and out you go. So, as in that situation, as you understand that, the fact that as you get older, all your friends are dying, and you're getting false teeth, and bad eyes, and hard hearing, and so on, as you do that, it's okay. Go with it, go with it, go! And then you suddenly find you grow old gracefully, and live to a wonderful old age. Or so, at this other level. If you don't, you see, a lot of people, for example, have very, very queer kind of

[49:27]

sexual lives, because they're always looking for an occasion to grab it. And so, nobody satisfies them. They go from one partner to another, [...] to another. I don't say there shouldn't be a certain variety to be the spice of life, but when you get this compulsive promiscuity, it means that the individual concerned can't relate to anyone, because they've never stayed around long enough to let it happen. So, the essence of love, and thus of the true basis of ethics, of morality, is to let go. Now, I've shown you this in the course of these lectures on quite a number of different levels. We discussed the basic problem of law, as between human beings. The basic problem of a social organization. And I tried to show that that involves, above all else,

[50:32]

mutual trust. And even if that trust is disappointed, there is no alternative but to give it. Society based on non-trust is a police state, and is not worth living in, and should be gotten rid of. So also, an attitude to yourself, to your body, with all its impermanence, with its potentials for disease and falling apart, must likewise be an attitude of trust. Let go. And finally, one's attitude to the other person with whom you have the most intimate human relationship, likewise has to be one of trust. An attitude which our current institutions of marriage flout and make very difficult.

[51:33]

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