i don't think i need to tell you that in a very special and peculiar way western man is hung up on sex. [Music] and the major reason for this is that he has a religious background. [Music] 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 prioritism. 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 these are a 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. [Music] you know very well that there you do not mean that they are engaged in a business to

defraud the public by the sale of uh badly made bread or uh anything of that kind. You know that they're not uh setting up a check forgery business. No, people who are living in sin are people who have an irregular sexual partnership. [Music] In the same way, when you say something is immoral, uh 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. [Music] And also, I might point out that the present company accepted the Unitarian Church being somewhat unusual. Most churches in America and in England and in other parts of uh 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 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 are done how grave they are for mostly for the advice of confessors and they're always arranged according to the ten commandments and uh 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 [Applause] [Music] now this needs going into because it is not as simple as it looks [Music]

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. [Music] Do what you may, life is sexual. In the sense, for example, that you are either male or female. There are various other gradations, uh, but basically they 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, uh, 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 this is simply no getting around it. [Music] I know up-to-date ministers today, I 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 [Music] best. If 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 saint paul himself right through to saint ignatius loyola or any of the great relatively modern uh leaders of catholic spirituality or you can look at calvin. You can look at great protestants john knox on the whole the 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 a 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. [Music] prurient and in exciting in a kind of dirty way. And I suppose is to be recommended for people who are not feeling very frisky and uh need to be pepped up. The other side of the problem is much more interesting, that is to say, uh the first thing I mentioned. Why it is that there has been a problem for human beings about pleasure. And we will 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? [Music] 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. [Music] 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 tippler and rake omar khayyam says that the worldly hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes or it prospers and a non-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. [Music] 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. [Music] You 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 has, uh, in 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 they 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. [Music] Saint Francis called his body brother ass, that you are irrational soul in charge of an animal body. And therefore, where if you belong to the old-fashioned school, you beat it into submission as said 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 Rief's book 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. [Music] And therefore, all success in life, spiritual success, requires the spiritualization of the animal component, the sublimation of its dirty and the 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. [Music] 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 30, 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 wax works. [Music]. 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 use, 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. [Music]. 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. See, of course, that's the whole art of like 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. [Music] And then it's happened, and you've had it. [Music] You

Peoples Addictions To Sexual Pleasures - Alan Watts

Peoples Addictions To Sexual Pleasures - Alan Watts