[APPLAUSE]
 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 a secondary way, Judaism, insofar 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 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 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?"
 I'm supposing 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 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 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 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 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 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, yes, 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 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 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.
 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 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 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
 on heart, 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 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 you are simply 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.
 View yourself, identify yourself with the eternal, spiritual, unchanging self, the witness
 of all 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
 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 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 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 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 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 go, pfft, right now, you see?
 Of course.
 That's the whole art of life.
 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 Taoists and
 Hindus will often talk about detachment, does not mean to be non-participative.
 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.
 You feel empty, you feel something was lost.
 And therefore you want it again.
 You have to keep repeating, repeating, repeating, 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.
 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 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,
 lip-licking way.
 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.
 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.


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