I was giving you probably the most elementary lesson you've ever had, I hope so, on the basic what's what about the universe and about ourselves and the theme of last night's discussion was simply that the fact of existence of reality consists of something and nothing, stimulus and no stimulus, presence and absence, here and not here, under whatever form you want to dress these things up, the form of light, the form of sound and basically the form of touch and the game that is played with these two principles is first of all that though they are different, that they are different and not one, obviously they are one because

[01:06]

you don't get one without the other but they look so different that it almost seems that you could have one without the other and so out of that there develops the anxiety that one of them which is defined as not being there might win, so in opposition to that one plays the game that the one that is there, the one that's positive that's distinct from negative ought to win and that generates a whole series of games and I developed the idea that the very far out people are the people most lost in this game and the people most concerned that black shall not win over white and that white shall win over black. On the other hand I described the very far in people who know that there is nothing to be worried about, that this thing goes this way and it goes that way and it's all alright because it's all existence, it's all reality and that's the same thing as you yourself only

[02:10]

you imagine that you're just something that arrived here instead of something that really belongs. Most of us are trained to think that way. We think we came into the world and then we began and when we die we'll go out of it like that, you see, and therefore we don't really belong here. Many people, it's the common sense, it's in the whole history of Western thought, the notion that I am a stranger in the earth, that I came from somewhere else altogether which was a kind of a nowhere. I came for a little time into being. The earthly hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes or it prospers and the non-light snow upon the desert's dusty face lighting a little hour or two is gone. You see, that whole Fitzgerald masquerading as Omar Khayyam story is that you are a flash of awareness in the midst of

[03:16]

eternal nothingness. If it ever struck you that if that were so, the flash would be the same as eternity because it would be all there is and there wouldn't be anything outside of it, it couldn't even have ends, it couldn't have a beginning because there has to be something on the other side of the beginning and something on the other side of an end. You can't have a boundary at all if there's nothing on the outside of it. And so, there are the far-end people then, I was saying, those who really aren't worried because they know that all light is the front side of darkness and all darkness is the back side of lightness. And that's what there is and that's what's you because you, instead of being a stranger in the world, came from somewhere else altogether, appeared without any reason in this thing.

[04:19]

What is essentially you is essentially the same substance or energy or whatever you want to call it, that is being, that is reality. But it's great fun to make people think that they're not. That's hide-and-seek game, that's getting lost. And one of the very rum things about Judaism, about Christianity, is that it is a game in which the patriarch, the priest or prophet, speaking for the super-patriarch God, wags his finger at people and says, Don't you presume to think you're anything. You're just nothing called into being by the whim of the Almighty Creator. And you'd better watch your step. See? That's the game of making everybody doubt and wonder, you see, whether they really ought to be confident. And that's one way of playing the game. That black might win over white, you see.

[05:27]

And if it puts on a beard, and if it looks very authoritative, and it wags its finger most impressively, that's all part of the game. See, that makes the game work. So you, to keep in with the game, if you just let that fellow win, and you count down, say to this fellow with a beard and a wagging finger, Yes, oh father, you're quite right, excuse me. Then you've given in, there's no game. And he doesn't bother anymore to wag his finger, because there's no comeback. See? It's like making wool to a go who gives in instantly. It's too easy, and it ceases to be interesting. There must always be a little tension. So when you fish, if every time you cast your line into the water, up came the fish, everybody would abandon fishing. There's no sport to it. So in the same way, if the father waggles his finger at all the children, and all the children say, Yes, father, yes, father, father, oh, what a bunch of rotten children. They have no spirit. But if they

[06:32]

come back, and look at him, and kind of narrow their eyes, and put their heads on one side, and take a peek, then he knows he's got spirited children. That is to say, children who have the spirit, know that they've got it within them too. All right, now, another thing that we looked at last night, and that I now want to develop, is that the rhythm constituted by yes and no is kind of a uniform rhythm. It doesn't, in itself, have very many possibilities. As a matter of fact, if you listen to that rhythm, there's no energy in it. You notice when you listen to a clock ticking, you've got one of those old-fashioned alarm clocks that makes a loud tick, and it's just going like this. First of all, you don't interpret it as tick, [...] tick. You interpret it as tick, tock, tick, tock, tick,

[07:37]

tock, tick, tock. And then you begin to project on it. I remember someone used to say that when I make a silly face and the clock strikes, the face will always stay stuck. And you begin to project tunes into it. And you hear sub-rhythms. It begins to go tick, [...] tick. And you know what we're looking for, and what we are kind of seeking here, is a thing in rhythm which is a sort of syncopation. You know if you have a weight on the end of a string, and you want to whirl it around your head, you won't make a uniform circle with your hand. You'll make an ellipse with your hand. And at every turn, you'll give it a little tweak. So it'll go yoink, [...] and that'll set the weight swinging. Now, the sun must do the same thing with the earth going round it. That's why the earth

[08:41]

doesn't go round the sun in 360 days, which would make it a regular circle, you see. But 365 in an awkward fraction. Because, oddly enough, the orbit of the earth is not a circle, but an ellipse, like this thing here, you see. Yoink, yoink, yoink, yoink. And the nebulae, as we look out at them, the galaxies, aren't perfect circles. They also are kind of elliptical things. As I drew the helix for you last night, it has two centers. An ellipse has two centers. You know if you want to draw an ellipse, you put two pins on the paper, and you put a ring of string around them, put your pencil inside the string, draw it tight, and pull the ellipse, and it gives you, you see, two centers, the two pins. And so this yoink, [...] yoink is a rhythm that is a little off this, you see. Like that. And that's what really sets things going. Once we've got that, we've got what people call lilt, or swing, or character,

[09:51]

see. This has no character. It's perfectly ordinary. But that begins to swing, see. Now, that's the basic life motion. You listen to your heart. It's got lilt to it. And that kind of oddness, you see, is a similar intervention or development of the game of yes and no, quite comparable to the fear that no might win instead of yes. Or let's make yes win instead of no. See, I showed you last night that those are the two fundamental games. So this alteration of the regularity of yes-no is comparable.

[10:53]

It's the same sort of thing that develops out of yes and no, black and white, the primordial pair, something interesting. Now, you will see quite obviously that that same rhythm is what we call orgiastic. It is the sex rhythm. And it is the dance rhythm of all primitive dancing. And it's, what, to use a specific word, it is a rhythm that is convulsive. It's like the peristaltic action of the alimentary canal which carries the food down it. We don't get our food down into our stomachs by something that just goes wiggle, [...] like that. It has this flip in it, you see. The same way when you crack a whip, it has a blip in it, you see.

[11:58]

And it's that blip which is the essential life motion. And so, when you dance, say, the rumba, and all comparable types of dances, the twist, and so on and so forth, they've all got this movement in of the whole body where a flip, a blip, goes through the whole of you from top to bottom. And, of course, the center where you swing is the point which emphasizes the flip. That's where you see it easiest. I suppose some of you studied the work of Wilhelm Reich. And, no, poor man, what a genius. And yet, like so many geniuses, he got off on a tack where he committed himself to an idea that got him into trouble, or the idea of orgone and the energy that could be derived from sitting in metal boxes which he sold, and therefore the government accused him of

[13:01]

practicing foaming medicine. But whatever you may think of that side of his work, he did it. He had marvelous insight into the nature of biological rhythms, the fundamental rhythms in accordance with which we live, and the curious way in which we have built up in high cultures a resistance to those rhythms. That's what I want to go into tonight. He said, for example, if you get a worm and you bruise or wound the worm in the middle, the worm gets a calloused section in its body. And so the worm can't do a clean wiggle all the way through because of the calloused bit that's there, that's stiff and rigid and dead. So, the worm goes blah, blah, you know, and it has a block in the middle of this thing. It's like the famous story of what is it that goes 99 bump, 99 bump, 99 bump? The answer is a

[14:07]

worm. Now, he said human beings are also like these worms, civilized human beings, they get a stiffness in their diaphragm, a rigidity there. They seem to be pressing to hold something down. And because of that, they can't wiggle all the way through, and therefore they fail to have a fully natural orgasm. They resist it. They don't give, they have no give. And there's something about the orgiastic movement which many people find disgusting. They resist it and it wants to make them throw up. There's something about the whole thing which they find highly reprehensible. And so you will see that in high cultures when people dance, they tend to dance in accordance with a martial rhythm. This is especially true of the West, and it's to some extent true of the Japanese and the Chinese. The Hindus have a much more lilting thing, and of course the Negroes are way out. But in high culture we dance according to it.

[15:10]

Boom, boom, boom, boom. And that um-pa-pa, um-pa-pa, um-pa-pa, um-pa-pa is very polite. You see? And imagine the gabap and the minuet and the dances of our forefathers. And they all, Orientals say that Western music, whoever it's by, sounds like a march, military march. But it's all written on a very simple number of construction of the bar. So it all sounds that way. So the dance and the march, it's sound to those ears you see alike. So that's because, as ladies and gentlemen, as people who have somehow or other a claim to be above the primitive, are setting up a resistance to that basic orgiastic rhythm. And now we've got to understand

[16:13]

why and what all that means. The opposition of the regular rhythm, that's like a march, to the orgiastic rhythm that has syncopation or a lilt in it, is a sort of symbol of our whole style of culture. It's a symbol of control. Because about the orgiastic rhythm, there is something a little bit out of control. Do you see that just in the same way as the basic rhythm is now you see it, now you don't. In the moment of now you don't, you're out of control. And that's why now you don't, is a little bit longer than now you do.

[17:15]

So you get this That's why a great artist would say that supreme art always consists in the controlled accident. There is something about the work of a great artist that is the result of discipline and technique. But that never is the complete answer. There is always something in his work that is not under his own control. That is, as we say, the gift of inspiration, the gift of the demon, the gift of the gods. And so we say of such a person that he's inspired. So he's always a little bit out of control, and yet in. But a little bit more out of control than in control. You see, that's why a great artist is always like the small boy I was talking about last night, who was daring something to get to do something that he doesn't know whether

[18:23]

the adults will approve of it or not. He suspects they won't. But let's see if he can get away with it. And so an artist is doing the same thing with other domains, other domains save in the moral domain or the legal domain. In the aesthetic domain, he's always just on the edge of losing control, but marvelously coming back. He's like a tightrope walker that always is just looking to the audience as if he's about to fall off and rescues himself. And there's nothing more that an audience loves than that. Same with a play. They like the play where the villain practically wins. And you think it's inconceivable that he can't win. And yet somehow at the last minute all is rescued. You see, that's the same thing. Well, that generates in many people, you see, a fundamental anxiety. And therefore they work to see if they can keep it down.

[19:26]

They say, as it were, now look, you people don't rock the boat so much. What we need is not this daring giving in to nature and recovering ourselves at the last minute. We need reliability. And therefore there begins the generation of a whole culture of repression. And repression means holding that flip room and keeping it down as near as possible to march time. And that's why very anxious people who are repressing the orgiastic are terribly worried about clocks, terribly concerned about time, about regularity, about people being there exactly when they say they'll be there. And everything that goes with that, about having a clean record, about being tidy,

[20:26]

about everything being completely neat and in order. But you always find that interesting people aren't exactly messy. They are slightly messy. There's always something a little bit out there that makes all the difference, you see, between a room that looks as if it was ready to be photographed for better homes and gardens and a room that looks as if it was a home and was lived in. So, then, what's happening? The kind of culture that we have lived in for so long is working against its orgiastic rhythm and pushing it with a regular rhythm. And so we get a conception of ourselves and of what is proper deportment, you see, and which is antagonistic to our fundamental biological rhythm.

[21:32]

The way ladies and gentlemen move doesn't and mustn't swing. And it's all based on military patterns. Men's clothing, for example, is nothing but a sort of weird relic of military uniforms. And what we consider good posture, chest out, stomach in, shoulders back, is a very unnatural pose. But it's the way of holding yourself in so that nothing untoward, nothing swinging, shall happen. And, of course, the amazing apparatus that, until only a short time ago, was worn under the dress by ladies. The things to hold one in, the pulley wheels, the blocks and tackles, the amazing ways

[22:39]

of being all held together in case by any mischance we should get out of control and go bleh. It's all based on this. But what's funny about this is that it isn't pure repression. If you go to those very, very unrespectable cigar and magazine stores that litter the city, you can go in the back and you can find pornographic magazines entirely full of photos of girls in very tight corsets. And these are only bought by men who enjoy the idea of absolutely tying these women up. The Japanese have all sorts of magazines, not that way, in which they show pictures of girls roped up and chained in the most fantastic ways. And they love these things.

[23:43]

They're very erotic. And this is carrying repression, you see, to its furthest point of seeing that if you can set up, if you can contain the orgiastic rhythm and somehow squeeze it so that it will still go but you squeeze it so that it does it with greater difficulty. This is a way, you see, of experiencing the energy of life in a more intense fashion. And this is what you have to understand about all puritans and prudes and blue noses and every kind of repressive agency. Now this is a terribly important point. And it's connected with this ultimate Buddhist or Hindu realization that there is no way of deviating from the dharma, from the

[24:43]

suchness, from the unity of the cosmos. However frightened you get, however much of a sick duck you are, you're still a form of the cosmic play. Only you'll be a very, very far out wiggle on it. So far out that people think it's really not connected at all. They say you're an idiot. That means a purely private, disconnected person, separate. The word idiot means separate in Greek. But really there's nothing separate. Now in the same way, it's, you see, it's been fashionable now for many years for liberated and enlightened people to sneer at puritans and prudes and say that they are against life and that they're awful and that they ought to be abolished. But I want you to understand and have compassion for these people and to understand the very deep motivations and the very strange things they're going through

[25:48]

without really knowing it. Because they're in it unconsciously, but they're in a very, very mysterious game. You see, I've always been bemused and puzzled by these people. Imagine, for example, a Baptist deaconess from the south. And what is she? She's a cube in figure and she's awfully nice, hospitable, does wonderful plain cooking and is real nice. She may hate niggers, but still she's in her own culture nice. But, oh dear me, they don't dance. They don't ever let their hair down. All the parties are non-alcoholic, unalphabetic, and just very, very subdued.

[26:57]

And I puzzle over those people. I had such people like that in my family in England, because my grandfather on my mother's side was a Bible bender. And so they belong to very strict, sort of non-conformist, Protestant sects. And I always wondered what made them tick. And it took me ages and ages and ages to find out what makes them tick. What they're doing is they're dancing, not dancing. They're setting up a counter-pressure against the rhythm and energy of life, out of which they're getting a huge secret bang. And therefore, it's nice when you can get to that point of view, because you can after all respect people like that.

[28:01]

You can admit once again that they're human, although they seem sometimes not to be. And if you are a different kind of person, and you're in conflict with one of these, and because, for example, you may be the child of one of them, or you may be under the strong influence of one of them, what you have to do, you must never get mad at them. You must kid them, until they start giggling and blush. Because, deep down, they've all got the same thing. They all really are just as erotic as anybody else. But they keep up this pose of pretending they're not. And the more you come on in a disgraceful and open way, the more they'll retreat behind an attitude of being shocked and disgusted, etc., etc. But that's not the way to deal with them at all. You have to tickle them gently under the chin, and bring them out, and laugh at them,

[29:06]

and finally they'll get to giggling and admit that really they're like anybody else. Now, the whole history of Christianity is an amazing example of this thing. And there are some very, very peculiar problems about it, which aren't at all clear. About the origins of the anti-orgiastic or anti-erotic attitude in Christianity. And anything that may be said about this is speculative. It has to be taken with a grain of salt, because there's an awful lot that we don't know. And it was based on the reverence, and the glorying in, and the worship of the erotic spirit. And this prevailed certainly in ancient times, say prior to 2000 BC, all over the Mediterranean and European world. When, for example, the Hebrews invaded Palestine in their migration from Egypt,

[30:15]

what they found there was the religion of what are called the Baaleen. Baal, or Baal as people sometimes pronounce it, was the name of a sky god. And the main feature of the religion was the fertilization of the earth. Suffice it to say, that prior to the capture of the Greco-Roman world by the Christian religion, sexual amores were very loose and very easy, almost everywhere. The original religion of Europe, so far as anybody can make it out, that old-time religion, was frankly phallic. It was a fertility arrangement. And it was based on the reverence, and the glorying in, and the worship of the erotic spirit.

[31:25]

And this prevailed certainly in ancient times, say prior to 2000 BC, all over the Mediterranean and European world. Was the fertilization of the earth by the sky god. And this was a very natural agrarian religion for planters, and also it might be for hunters. But you must remember that the Hebrew were not originally planters. They were shepherds. They were herdsmen.

[32:27]

They were related to the Arabs of today who adapt themselves to the desert. Rather, and are nomadic, rather than settled people in fertile areas. Fertile settlers always tend to be matriarchal, and in favor of the erotic. Whereas nomadic people who live in deserts and dry places seem to tend to be patriarchal, and to very be suspicious of the erotic. Actually they tend to be homosexual. But that's always something a little bit on the underside, and not admitted. Now then, the Hebrew religion, coupled with its later elaboration into Christianity, coupled with also certain trends in Greek culture,

[33:29]

arising for probably similar reasons, constitute an enormous opposition to the, not only the erotic in the sense of the sexual, but also in a very large measure to the simply sensuous. They are ways of life emphasizing the greater value of strife rather than pleasure. So, the Hebrews found the fertility rights of the Palestinians disgusting. They felt that such things were emasculating, that they took away manly energy.

[34:32]

They were rights, of course, in which people gave in to the orgiastic look. And they felt, there's something about that which makes me ashamed of myself. I should be able to hold myself in. Similarly, and probably about the same time in history, they were developing a comparable thing in Greek culture called the agon, from which we get our word agony. The agon is the contest. The games held in the village arena, that was the arena is the agon, that's what the word means in Greek, agon, arena. And in the agon, it was the place for the development of manly and military virtues, for the development of the possibility of being what we think of now as a stoic, one who can hold himself still in the presence of both ecstasy and pain,

[35:38]

and look as if he's not having either. That's the point. Pain and ecstasy, the two poles of the orgiastic process, must not be admitted. The man in control keeps a poker face. It's so, isn't it, in the game of poker? If you're losing, you mustn't show it, or you'll give it away. If you're winning, you mustn't show it, or you'll give yourself away. And so, as Greek ideas and Hebrew ideas flowed together to form Christianity, the great cultural molding force of the West, we became entirely dominated with the notion of the agon, the contest, of the spirit against the flesh, the mind against the body, and the will against the passions, and reason against the emotions.

[36:40]

Saint Augustine, writing at 400 AD approximately, a little thereafter, his great treatise, The City of God, describes a condition in the Garden of Eden, when Adam had sexual relations with Eve without any pleasure. Just, indeed, as one might go to the bathroom. He said there were no shameful orgiastic emotions and pleasures. Shameful. Why did he say that? Why was he ashamed of it? Because it was something not under control. He hoped that Adam and Eve had children, just as you might press a button and say, children today, clonk, and press the button and there they are. But what made him ashamed was that there was a sexual phenomenon not under control, where he said those parts of the body assumed an unseemly independence.

[37:47]

The very words he uses. So that's the whole thing. Keep that control. And so, you see, that generates an entire culture and an entire morality, which we will call agonistic, the contest. Now, there are many, many peoples and many cultures that don't share this view at all. Both the Chinese and the Japanese are somewhat agonistic. The Hindus aren't particularly. And some of the least agonistic people are the peoples of the equatorial regions. Bali, Indonesia, Polynesia, uh, Indians of Central America, uh, so on. A lot of these people don't have the agonistic ideal.

[38:50]

And they are very simple because they believe that the purpose of life is pleasure. That in pleasure, in orgiastic motion, life is fully and completely lived. And so, we consider all such people, because they lack the military virtues, and they don't care to fight about it. If you want to fight with them, they say, all right, um, we'll give in. Because what's the, why, why waste blood? And eventually, they may put up a bit of a fight, but they eventually give in. You can always defeat them. But they simply go underground. But notice that we despise, we tend to despise these people. And this is one of the great secret elements in the whole racial problem in the United States. We always tend to identify the Negro with something a bit disreputable. What do those Negroes do, you know?

[39:58]

We're a little doubtful about. What, how they amuse themselves. And we all think they're, um, decadent in some way. They may be tough as all get up. They may be great, strong men. They, uh, are in no danger of not surviving at all. But we think that if we were somehow influenced by their attitudes and their morals, we should be corrupted. So, we associate, you know, the, the exotic everywhere with the decadent. And we think that if we give in to the lilt of life, we should become emasculated. And that's why in the WASP culture, that's white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture of Europe and America, uh, there is a terrific fit of, uh, of, [...] And they have, uh, they have a bit of a thing about manliness. It has its corresponding thing in the Latin cultures, which I think they call machismo

[41:00]

in Spanish. Theirs has a slightly lighter touch, but they prove their masculinity by the love of danger, bullfighting, things like that. We like to prove our masculinity by insensitivity, by, uh, I don't know why that's funny, but it is. We tend, you see, to prove our masculinity by a posture of gruffness, of toughness, of, that is to say, non-emotionality, of being able to take it, and that again is agonistic. It isn't true at all, of course, that people who lilt aren't masculine.

[42:07]

Actually people who lilt, uh, can be just as tough, just as, uh, efficient in the martial arts, and sometimes more so than people who are stiff. Notice for example how, what are characteristic WASP attitudes to judo. Judo is cheating, judo is trickery, judo is something that nice people don't do, but only horrid Orientals, but of course since the Second World War, uh, that attitude to judo in particular has changed, and there are judo schools all over the United States, but in the old days it used to be thought that judo was somehow something only a cad would indulge in, because it was easy, because it didn't involve colossal muscle power, it used intelligence, and in the same way, in school, the boy who, or girl, who rises by intelligence rather

[43:15]

than sports is considered somehow a bit of a cad. The person who hits the books is a little bit despised. In England we call a person like that a SWAT, which is a term of abuse, I don't know what they're called here, a bookworm, a what, a grind, yes, or an apple polisher sometimes, they think they make special flavors for the teachers. You see what is happening here is that intelligence is defeating mere brawn, as the sailor who uses the wind will eventually get there faster than the man who just uses oars, because the man who uses the oars may go faster for a while, but he can't last the whole journey. But, at the same time, now, having seen all this, there is underneath this stiff attitude,

[44:32]

this repressive stance towards nature, some sort of necessity, because it is this which, unknown to itself, apart from its own overt intentions, it is this which revitalizes nature. Obviously, any pleasure that is too easy loses its savor, it becomes disordered, and when it's really important that a pleasure be revived, the obvious way of reviving it is to make it rare, and that's exactly what Christianity did with sexuality, it put its foot on it,

[45:41]

made it relatively rare, didn't succeed very much, you know, but there was some relativity to this, it did get away with a certain amount of making it rare, and of course, therefore, this resulted in an immense stimulation of erotic fascination, and the development of a peculiar style of eroticism, which has become sort of characteristic of European culture. This comes out in a peculiar way in European styles of dress. How thoroughly we are covered, but you see, the more you cover, the more you create interest

[46:46]

in what's underneath. The old, old game, hide and seek, pretend there's nothing there, and by a joke there is something there. The Spaniards, in particular, developed this sort of thing, and they developed it in a single, in return, present, with a little note saying, Her Majesty the Queen of Spain has no legs. So you see, then, the function of this repression, how it makes everything connected with sexuality secretly exciting, it therefore revives it, just as pruning trees revives the energy of trees. But, it contains a danger in it, every far-out game contains a danger, the danger of an excess,

[47:55]

the danger not just of pruning trees healthily, but of warping them. It's interesting to compare this with the Japanese art of growing dwarf trees. There was a moment in the history of dwarf trees when they loved deformed trees. There is a kind of Rococo period in dwarf trees, where the trees are contorted out of all recognition. You know, they start, the root is on the top and the tips are on the bottom. The thing grows and is made to come right down and then to, like this, and that's very far out. But it's exactly the same sort of thing as is represented in, say, Churigo-esque architecture, which is the culmination of the Rococo period, where it's a sort of early Victorian Baroque.

[49:02]

That's the only way I can think of describing it. It's just the most fantastically dressed-up stuff you could think of. No tiny little space is allowed to be free from a curl or a wiggle or an arm. You see? Whereas modern practitioners of the art of dwarf trees have gone and thrown that all over. And they say a dwarf tree, a fine bonsai, as they call them, should look just like a tree in nature. They've made some gorgeous things. I've seen little beech trees, only so high, and they look like giant beech trees in a forest. They're only that big.

[50:04]

Fully, beautifully proportioned, but there's nothing contorted about it. There it is. But the contortion, corresponding to the hourglass waist of Victorian women and all those pulling things tight, is the desperate effort to revive a flagging spirit. It is successful. Everything breaks loose. What Freud started up, just think of it. And then, when it all begins to be so usual and ordinary that people lose interest in it, you will notice, probably, the agonistic temper arising again. But the point that I want to make, and I repeat.

[51:07]

There is really no possibility of any movement or spiritual intent being against life and against sex. You can't go against it. As Goethe wrote in his fragment on nature, all men serve nature. He who works against nature still serves her. You can't go against it. Just in the same way as in a mighty stream, you cannot swim against the current. Even if you turn round and go through the motions of swimming against the current, you will still move with it. And so it is with this. And that is why all manifestations of, say, an apparently anti-sexual religion, are full of concealed eroticism. This was where Freud was right in pointing out erotic symbolism throughout, say, Christian ritual symbolism and doctrine.

[52:12]

But this is not to say, those religious people have dirty minds after all. It is to say that, hooray, you know, thank heavens it has this symbolism. And that you can't really get away from it. And it's always there. Because that thing is the physical symbolism of the divine and of the essence of all things. So let's have an intermission. You've been listening to Alan Watts with part two from the seminar entitled, Religion and Sexuality. If you'd like to have an audio cassette copy of today's talk to hear again or to play for a friend, you can see... .

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@Text_v004
@Score_JC