Program Notes
Guest speaker: Alan Watts
NOTE: This program is still available at the Internet Archive.
Alan Watts’ son sent the following message requesting that his father’s talks be removed from the Psychedelic Salon … bye bye Alan!
Mark Watts Said,
Lorenzo if you leave the Alan Watts materials up you will be sued before this month is out.
February 25, 2011 @ 10:15 am · Edit
Lorenzo, my father’s talks are copyright protected. Please don’t post any more of his talks on your podcast and remove the ones you have in the archive.
If you want to listen to this talk you will have to pay his son for the privilege. … Too bad, I thought information wants to be free. I wonder what Alan would say about this?
… although, if you Google “alan watts mp3 torrent” you can find thousands of Web sites that provide free downloads of Watts material.
Also, you will find many hours of free Alan Watts videos on YouTube. … So maybe it is only the Psychedelic Salon that Mark objects to.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Alan Watts.]
“Christianity is, of all religions in the world, the one uniquely preoccupied with sex.”
“Most churches in America and in England and in other parts of the Western world are, frankly, sexual regulation societies.”
“So we have, in a very special way, got sex on the brain, which isn’t exactly the right place for it.”
“There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.”
“That the physical world is transient, it seems to me, to be part of its splendor.”
“Neither the church nor the opponents of the church have clearly understood that the secret, or unconscious, motivation of sexual repression is to make it all the more interesting. And on the other side, it has not been clearly understood that sexual biology and all that goes with it is a figuring force, on the level of biology, of what the whole universe is about, ecstatic play.”
“If you’ve got a prudish father and mother you should be very grateful to them for having made sex so interesting.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And if you heard my last podcast, the one before this one, then surprise, surprise,
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I’m getting in this podcast long before I thought I’d be able to.
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In other words, our forced move is proceeding better than I thought it was going to.
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So I’ll save those stories until the end of the podcast if I get a chance.
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But thanks for all of your words of encouragement,
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and I want you to know that everything is proceeding smoothly.
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But right now, what I want to do first is to thank some of our fellow salonners
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who made donations to help keep these podcasts online,
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even though they thought that I wouldn’t get around to thanking them publicly here in the podcast.
00:01:03 ►
So a big thank you for keeping the salon’s fire burning goes to Chris T., Alec M.,
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and longtime salon supporter Mark C., who sent a note that read,
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No need to mention me on the show anymore, and I hope you get other regular, quote, subscribers, unquote.
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Thanks for your continued work, and happy holidays.
00:01:23 ►
Now, the reason Mark said that is that for the past year or so, Mark has made a modest donation to the salon every month.
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And the reason I find his contribution so remarkable is that, unlike many podcasters, I’ve not set up a way to automatically have a donation sent to the salon.
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So Mark has had to think of it on his own each month and go to the trouble of sending another donation.
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And that’s why he puts subscribers in quotes.
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He’s not referring to the thousands of iTunes subscribers
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and other subscribers through the RSS feed,
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without whom I wouldn’t have much reason to do these podcasts, by the way.
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And in case you’re wondering why I don’t set up something like he suggests
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a regular subscription donation button
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well, it’s because I’d then feel obligated to do a program each and every week
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as do the professionals like my friends KMO and the Dope Fiend
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however, I have to admit that it was Mark’s donation that got me back into action this week
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and so I’m dedicating this first podcast of 2011 to Mark C., Chris T., Alec M. Thank you. moving expenses. And in particular, I want to thank Alan A. for what must be a record payment
00:02:46 ►
for a pay-what-you-can novel. That was way over the top, Alan, and I deeply appreciate it.
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In fact, to all of our supporters out there in podcast land, hey, thanks for being here. And
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as one of our fellow salonners just told me, I’ll say the same thing should go for all of us,
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and that is to press on.
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Which is what I’d better do right now, or we’ll never get to the heart of this program, which is a lecture by Alan Watts.
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I first heard part of this talk in an audio file that I received from, oh, I guess about a half a dozen people.
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And my guess is that it must have been part of a torrent, because when I first opened it, I discovered that only half the talk was there, and that was the case in all the copies that were sent to me.
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So I put it aside and more or less forgot about it.
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But when I was looking for another Alan Watts talk to play today, the title jumped out at me right away, because the file was titled Religion and Sexuality.
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And to be honest, that may actually be the most
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accurate title for this talk.
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Anyway, I started searching the net for the whole talk, and while I never found it all
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in one piece, I did find it broken into ten-minute bits on YouTube, at least parts of it, but
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even that sounded as if it had been kind of kludged together from different recordings.
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So what I’m about to play is a collage that may actually be put together
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very close to the way the talk was first given, at least I hope so.
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And as you already know, I’ve used a different title.
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In fact, I actually found this talk under a number of different titles,
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but being a retired marketing guy and realizing that I had to get people’s attention
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to come back into the salon after my being away for a few weeks, well, I thought maybe I should use a more
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provocative title, particularly since his main focus is Christianity, which is only
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natural, of course, since he was an ordained Episcopalian priest. But today, however, of
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course, he’s mainly known as one of the first popularizers of Zen Buddhism here in the States.
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So, now let’s listen to what Alan Watts thought about why sex is such a taboo in almost every religion.
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And then I’ll come back and add a quick thought or two about psychedelics and sex,
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which, for sure, I’m probably a lot more confident to talk about than religion.
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So, anyway, here’s Alan Watts.
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than religion. So anyway, here’s Alan Watts.
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I don’t think I need to tell you that in a very special and peculiar way,
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Western man is hung up on sex.
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And the major reason for this
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is that he has a religious background
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quite unique among the religions of the world.
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I’m thinking specifically of Christianity and in the secondary way Judaism,
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insofar as Judaism in Europe and the United States is strongly influenced by Christianity.
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and the United States is strongly influenced by Christianity.
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But Christianity is, of all religions in the world,
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the one uniquely preoccupied with sex.
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More so than priapism, more so than tantric yoga,
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more so than any kind of fertility cult which has ever existed on the face of the earth.
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There has never, never, never been a religion
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in which sexuality was so important. And there are certain very simple standards
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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
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mean that they’re engaged in a business to defraud the public by the sale of badly made
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bread or anything of that kind.
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You know that they’re not setting up a check forgery business. No. People who are living in sin
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are people who have an irregular sexual partnership.
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In the same way, when you say something is immoral,
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it pretty much means that it’s something sexually irregular.
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I remember when I was a boy in school,
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we used to have a preacher.
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He came to us every year, the same man once a year, and he always talked on the subject
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of drink, gambling, and immorality. I remember the, I might point out that if present company accepted the Unitarian
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Church being somewhat unusual, most churches in America and in England and in other parts of the Western world, are, frankly, sexual regulation societies.
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They occasionally get excited about other moral issues, but really not very much.
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In other words, when you ask, what can people get kicked out of church for?
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Let’s suppose that you consider important ministers, bishops, priests, and so on.
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They can live in envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, and be in perfectly good standing.
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But the moment anything about their sexual life becomes a little unusual, out you go.
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And that’s about the only thing you can go out for.
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You study, for example, a Roman Catholic manual of moral theology.
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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,
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mostly for the advice of confessors. And they’re always arranged according to the Ten Commandments.
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And when they get to the commandment, Thou shalt not commit adultery, the volume expands like this. In fact it occupies two-thirds of
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the whole book. All the details. So we have in a very special way got sex on
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the brain, which isn’t exactly the right place for it.
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Now, this needs going into because it is not as simple as it looks. There are really two roots of the whole problem.
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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.
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This is not only true in Christianity. I say Christianity emphasizes it in a certain way. But in Asian religions
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also, especially
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in India, there is a prevailing
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view that if you want to attain
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real heights of spirituality,
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the one thing you must give up
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is sexuality.
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In the ordinary sense of
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genital
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sexual relationships with
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man or woman, as the case may be.
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And this reflects in part, you see, an attitude to the physical world, because it is after
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all through sexuality that we have, along with eating, our most fundamental relationship to materiality, to nature, to the physical universe.
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And it is the point at which we can become most attached to the body, to the physical organism, to material life.
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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.
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do what you may, life is sexual, in the sense, for example, that you are either male or female.
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There are various other gradations, but basically they are forms of maleness and femaleness.
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And also that every one of you is the result of sexual intercourse.
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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,
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is simply repressed sexuality. Or on the other hand you can say that human sexuality is a manifestation, a particular form or expression
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of what is spiritual, metaphysical, divine, or whatever you want to call it. I hold to
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the latter view. I don’t think that religion is repressed sexuality. I think, however,
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I think, however, that sexuality is just one of the many forms in which whatever all this is expresses itself.
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But you see, if this thing is something you cannot get rid of,
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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.
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Then we come to a view of a religion in which sex is a very special taboo, which is rather
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unusual.
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It’s normally said, you see, yes, that Christianity is a religion in which sex is taboo, which is rather unusual. It’s normally said, you see, yes, that Christianity is a
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religion in which sex is taboo, and there’s simply no getting around it. I know up-to-date
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ministers today think sex is all right. It’s perfectly okay if you’re married and you’ve
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got a mature relationship with a woman,
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it’s all right, and they kind of damn it with faint praise.
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But if you read anything of Christian writings prior, shall we say, to 1850,
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to set a date rather arbitrarily, you will find that it’s not all right.
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Not at all. It’s tolerated
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between married couples and strictly for the procreation of children. But on the whole,
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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.
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But always, consistently, there is simply no getting away from it.
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In all the writings of the church fathers, from St. Paul himself right through to St. Ignatius Loyola,
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or any of the great relatively modern leaders of Catholic spirituality,
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or you can look at Calvin, you can look at great Protestants, John Knox.
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On the whole, sex is sin and sex is dirt.
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And you can say very simply that this is all bad and something very wrong,
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but I want to point out that there is another side to all this.
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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.
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And as a result of all these centuries of sexual repression and associating it with dirt, the West has developed
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a peculiar form of eroticism. But that is an aspect of this whole problem which I don’t
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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.
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It is simply a method of making sex prurient and exciting in a kind of dirty way.
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And I suppose is to be recommended for people who are not feeling very frisky
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and need to be pepped up.
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The other side of the problem is much more interesting.
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That is to say, the first thing I mentioned,
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why it is that there has been a problem for human beings about pleasure.
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And we’ll take sexual activity as a supreme pleasure,
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as a supreme involvement of oneself with the body and with the physical
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world. Why should there be a problem here? Well, the point is simply, isn’t it, that
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the physical world is transient, it’s impermanent, it falls apart. And bodies that were once strong, smooth and lovely in youth
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begin to wither and become corrupt and turn at last into skeletons. And if you cling on
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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.
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And there has been for centuries a lament about this, that life is so short that all
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the beauties of this world fall apart.
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And therefore if you are wise, you don’t set your heart on mortal beauty,
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but you set your heart on spiritual values that are imperishable. Even that supposed
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Tipler and Rake, Omar Khayyam, says that the worldly hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes or it prospers.
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And anon like snow upon the desert’s dusty face, lighting a little hour or two is gone.
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And so don’t bet on that horse.
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And read any kind of spiritual literature you want to,
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Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist,
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all of them seem to emphasize the importance of detachment
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from the body, from the physical world,
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so that you won’t be engulfed in the stream of impermanence.
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The idea being, you see, that to the degree that you identify yourself with the body.
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And with the pleasures of the body.
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To that degree, you are simply going to be something that is sucked away in the course of transiency.
00:19:07 ►
So, therefore, hold yourself aloof.
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As in, for example, the advice of many Hindus in the practice of yoga,
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you are advised to look upon all sensory experiences as something out there, which you simply witness.
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You yourself identify yourself with the eternal, spiritual, unchanging self,
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the witness of all that goes on, but who is no more involved in it than say, the smoothness or the color
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of a mirror is affected by the things which it reflects.
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Keep your mind like a mirror, pure and clean, free from dust, free from flaws, free from
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stain, and just reflect everything that goes on, but don’t be attached.
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You will find this all over the place.
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But it has always seemed to me that that attitude of essential detachment from the physical universe
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has underlying it a very serious problem.
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The problem being why a physical universe at all in that case?
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If God is in some way responsible for the existence of a creation.
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And if this creation is basically a snare, why did he do it?
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And of course, according to some theologies,
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the physical universe is looked upon as a mistake, as a fall from the divine state.
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As if something went wrong in the heavenly domain and causing spirits such as we are
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to fall from their highest state
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and to become involved with animal bodies.
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And so there is an ancient analogy of man which runs right through to the present
00:21:28 ►
time, that your relationship to your body is that of a rider to a horse. St. Francis
00:21:37 ►
called his body, rather, ass. That you are a rational soul in charge of an animal body.
00:21:49 ►
And therefore, if you belong to the old-fashioned school,
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you beat it into submission.
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As St. Paul said, I beat my body into submission.
00:22:02 ►
Or if you are a Freudian,
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you treat your horse not with a whip,
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but with lumps of sugar.
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Kindly.
00:22:11 ►
But still it’s your horse.
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Even in Freud,
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there is a very, very strong element
00:22:17 ►
of Puritanism.
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Read Philip Reif’s book
00:22:22 ►
on Freud, The Mind of the Moralist,
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and how he shows that Freud basically thought that sex was degrading.
00:22:34 ►
But nevertheless, something biologically unavoidable, something terribly necessary,
00:22:40 ►
which couldn’t just be swept aside, it had to be dealt with.
00:22:46 ►
But there is, you see, that heritage of thinking of ourselves as divided, the ego as the rational soul of
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spiritual origin, and the physical body as the animal component. And therefore therefore all success in life spiritual success requires the
00:23:12 ►
spiritualization of the animal component the sublimation of its dirty and strange
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urges so that it’s thoroughly cleaned up
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I suppose
00:23:27 ►
the ideal sexual relationship
00:23:30 ►
of such persons
00:23:31 ►
would be held on an operating table
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under disinfectant sprays
00:23:35 ►
now it is of course true
00:23:44 ►
that the physical world, its beauty and so on is transient.
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We are all falling apart in some way or another, especially after you pass the peak of youth but it’s never struck me
00:24:07 ►
that that is something to gripe about
00:24:09 ►
that the physical world is transient
00:24:14 ►
seems to me to be part of its splendor
00:24:17 ►
I can imagine nothing more awful
00:24:22 ►
than say attaining to the age of 30 and suddenly being frozen.
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In that age for always and always, you would become a kind of, we would all be a sort of animated waxworks.
00:24:39 ►
In that age for always and always, you would become a kind of,
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we would all be a sort of animated waxworks.
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And you would discover, as a matter of fact,
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that people who had that physical permanence would feel like plastic.
00:25:03 ►
And that is, as a matter of fact,
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what is going to be done about us
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by technology
00:25:08 ►
in order to attain perpetual youth.
00:25:11 ►
All the parts of us that decay and fold up
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are going to be replaced
00:25:16 ►
by very skillfully manufactured plastic parts.
00:25:21 ►
So that in the end,
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we will be entirely made of very, very sophisticated plastic.
00:25:29 ►
And everybody will feel like that.
00:25:32 ►
And everybody will be utterly bored with each other.
00:25:37 ►
Because the very fact you see that the world is always decaying and always falling away is the same thing as its vitality.
00:25:50 ►
Vitality is change. Life is death. It is always falling apart. And so there are certain supreme
00:26:00 ►
moments, you see, at which in the body we attain superb vitality and that’s the
00:26:09 ►
time make it then that’s the moment just like when an orchestra is playing the
00:26:16 ►
conductor wants to get a certain group of say violins to come in at a certain
00:26:22 ►
moment and he’s conducting and he’s got to now make it.
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And they all have to go right now, you see? Of course, that’s the whole art of life.
00:26:31 ►
To do it at the right time, to do it in time, like you dance or you play in time.
00:26:37 ►
And so in the same way, when it comes to love, sexuality, or equally so,
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in all the pleasures of gastronomy,
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timing is of the essence.
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And then it’s happened,
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and you’ve had it.
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But that’s not something
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that one should look upon with regret.
00:27:03 ►
It only is something regrettable if you didn’t know how to take it when it was timely.
00:27:11 ►
And this is really the essence of what I want to talk to you about.
00:27:17 ►
Because you see, to be detached from the world, in the sense that Buddhists and Taoists and Hindus will often talk about detachment,
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does not mean to be non-participative.
00:27:39 ►
You can have a sexual life very rich and very full, and yet all the time be detached.
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By that I don’t mean that you just go through it mechanically and have your thoughts elsewhere.
00:27:59 ►
I mean a complete participation, but still detached.
00:28:09 ►
And the difference of the two attitudes is this.
00:28:18 ►
On the one hand, there is a way of being so anxious about physical pleasure,
00:28:25 ►
so afraid that you won’t make it, that you grab it too hard.
00:28:32 ►
That you just have to have that thing.
00:28:37 ►
And if you do that, you destroy it completely.
00:28:40 ►
And therefore, after every attempt to get it,
00:28:41 ►
you feel disappointed.
00:28:45 ►
You feel empty, you feel something was was lost and therefore you want it again you have to keep repeating repeating repeating
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repeating because you never really got there and it’s this that is the hang-up
00:28:56 ►
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
00:29:09 ►
one is grasping it. I knew a little girl to whom someone gave a bunny rabbit. She was
00:29:19 ►
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
00:29:34 ►
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
00:29:48 ►
have life, and to have its pleasure, you must at the same time let go of it. And then you
00:30:00 ►
can feel perfectly free to have that pleasure in the most gutsy, rollicking, earthy, lip-licking
00:30:08 ►
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.
00:30:30 ►
If you are willing to be abandoned.
00:30:34 ►
It’s funny that word, abandon.
00:30:36 ►
We speak of people who are dissolute as being abandoned.
00:30:41 ►
But we can also use abandon as the characteristic of a saint. A great spiritual
00:30:50 ►
book by a Jesuit father is called Abandonment to the Divine Providence. There are people who just aren’t hung up.
00:31:07 ►
They are the poor in spirit.
00:31:14 ►
That is to say, they spiritually are poor in the sense they don’t cling on to any property.
00:31:17 ►
They don’t carry burdens around.
00:31:19 ►
They’re free.
00:31:27 ►
Well, just that sort of spiritual poverty that let go-ness
00:31:30 ►
is quite essential
00:31:32 ►
for the enjoyment of any kind of pleasure at all
00:31:36 ►
and particularly sexual pleasure
00:31:38 ►
now when I was a boy in school
00:31:41 ►
I’ll go back to this
00:31:42 ►
because my experience may not be
00:31:44 ►
I don’t know how typical it would be of children brought up in the United States in a religious environment.
00:31:51 ►
But my experience in England was quite fascinating.
00:31:56 ►
About, you know, when one is baptized as a child, and you don’t know anything about it, and your godfathers and godmothers are your sponsors.
00:32:01 ►
and you don’t know anything about it,
00:32:04 ►
and your godfathers and godmothers are your sponsors,
00:32:08 ►
then there comes a time when you are about to enter into puberty,
00:32:10 ►
when you are confirmed,
00:32:13 ►
when you undertake for yourself your own baptismal vows that were made on behalf of you.
00:32:18 ►
And in England, confirmation into the Church of England,
00:32:21 ►
which is Episcopalian in this country,
00:32:25 ►
confirmation is preceded by instruction.
00:32:28 ►
And this instruction
00:32:29 ►
consisted very largely of lessons in church history
00:32:32 ►
because the British approach to religion
00:32:34 ►
is peculiarly archaeological.
00:32:37 ►
It is based on the great past,
00:32:41 ►
the great Christian saints and heroes.
00:32:44 ►
And it’s really quite interesting
00:32:46 ►
because it somehow associates you
00:32:49 ►
and puts you in the tradition of King Arthur
00:32:52 ►
and the Knights of the Round Table and all that sort of thing.
00:32:56 ►
But the time comes when every candidate for confirmation
00:32:59 ►
has a private talk with a school chaplain.
00:33:06 ►
And obviously in every process of initiation into mysteries,
00:33:11 ►
from time immemorial, there has been the passing on of a secret.
00:33:18 ►
And so there’s a certain anticipation about this very private communication.
00:33:23 ►
Because you would think if you were being initiated into a religion, what the secret consists of is some marvelous
00:33:28 ►
information about the nature of God, or the fundamental reason for being, and so on. But
00:33:36 ►
not so in this case. The initiatory secret talk was a serious lecture on the evils of masturbation.
00:33:50 ►
What these evils were were not clearly specified.
00:33:57 ►
And so, but it was vaguely hinted that ghastly diseases would result. And so we used to,
00:34:06 ►
sort of in a perverse way,
00:34:08 ►
enjoy tormenting ourselves with imaginations
00:34:11 ►
as to what kind of terrible venereal diseases,
00:34:15 ►
epilepsy, tuberculosis,
00:34:16 ►
and the great Siberian itch
00:34:18 ►
would result from this practice.
00:34:24 ►
Now the extraordinary thing about it is this,
00:34:27 ►
that the very chaplain who gave these lectures
00:34:30 ►
had in his own upbringing been given the same lecture
00:34:33 ►
by other chaplains,
00:34:35 ►
and this went back some distance in history, I imagine.
00:34:38 ►
And they all knew perfectly well
00:34:40 ►
that one of the characteristic behavior patterns of adolescence is ritual defiance of
00:34:49 ►
authority but you have to make some protest against authority and in this you are in league with all
00:34:56 ►
your contemporaries your peer group and nobody of course would dream of giving anybody else away, because that would be to be a tattletale, a skunk, definitely not one of the boys.
00:35:10 ►
And so, therefore, quite obviously, masturbation provided the ideal outlet for this ritual defiance,
00:35:16 ►
because it was fun, it was also an assertion of masculinity, and it was very, very wicked.
00:35:22 ►
and it was very very wicked.
00:35:29 ►
So I meditated on this some time as to why the system continued
00:35:31 ►
and I came to the realization
00:35:34 ►
that the Christian put down of sex
00:35:39 ►
is an extremely mysterious thing.
00:35:46 ►
In the religious background of the Western world we have in the main
00:35:50 ►
two traditions. One Semitic
00:35:53 ►
and one Greek. So far as the Semitic tradition is concerned
00:36:01 ►
the material world and sexuality are definitely good things
00:36:06 ►
both Jews and Muslims
00:36:10 ►
think that God’s creation of beautiful women
00:36:15 ►
was a grand idea
00:36:17 ►
in the Arabic book
00:36:20 ►
which is their Islamic version of the Kama Sutra
00:36:24 ►
known as the perfumed garden
00:36:27 ►
the book opens with a prayer to Allah which is a thanksgiving a very full detailed thanksgiving
00:36:34 ►
for the loveliness of women with which Allah has blessed mankind
00:36:41 ►
and in the book of proverbs we are enjoined to enjoy our wives while they are young.
00:36:47 ►
But on the whole it is the Semitic belief
00:36:53 ►
that sexuality is justified solely for purposes of reproduction of the species.
00:37:09 ►
This makes it good in the eyes of God and sexual energy should not really be wasted for other purposes. That’s the limitation put on it. Now on
00:37:16 ►
the other hand we have a Greek tradition which is peculiar in that it is strongly influenced by a dualistic view of the universe,
00:37:28 ►
in which material existence is conceived as a trap,
00:37:34 ►
as a fall into turgid, clogging matter,
00:37:42 ►
which is antagonistic to the lightness and freedom of the spirit and
00:37:48 ►
therefore for certain kinds of Greek religion among which we must name the
00:37:53 ►
Orphic mysteries the new platonic point of view and the later Gnostic points of
00:38:00 ►
view being saved means being delivered from material existence into a
00:38:09 ►
purely spiritual state from this point of view sexual involvement is the very archetype of material involvement.
00:38:28 ►
Mater, mother, matter, matter
00:38:30 ►
are really the same word.
00:38:35 ►
And so the love of woman
00:38:36 ►
is the great snare.
00:38:43 ►
This is, incidentally, a doctrine invented by men and it goes back to the
00:38:53 ►
words of Adam the woman that thou gavest me she tempted me and I did eat now in the development of Christian theology
00:39:10 ►
from approximately the time of St. Paul
00:39:13 ►
through the beginning of the Renaissance
00:39:20 ►
it was universally held
00:39:24 ►
that sex was a bad thing. You should read
00:39:29 ►
St. Augustine on this. He said that in the Garden of Eden before the fall, reproduction
00:39:37 ►
took place in just the same way and with just the same lack of excitement as one excretes or passes water and there
00:39:48 ►
was no shameful excitation of the sexual parts.
00:39:56 ►
And the whole attitude of the church fathers in those centuries was
00:40:05 ►
that the virgin state was immensely superior spiritually
00:40:10 ►
to the married state and that sexual relationships were excusable
00:40:16 ►
only within the bonds of marriage
00:40:20 ►
and for the sole purposes of reproduction
00:40:23 ►
and the manual the moral penitentiaries of the
00:40:28 ►
theologians of the middle ages list all sorts of penances that must be said even by married couples
00:40:37 ►
who performed sexual intercourse on the night before attending mass were still before receiving
00:40:43 ►
holy communion and of course it must utterly be avoided on certain great church festivals.
00:40:51 ►
So although in theory marriage is a sacrament,
00:40:56 ►
which somehow blesses this peculiar relationship,
00:41:00 ►
there is a definite attitude that it is after all dirty and not very nice.
00:41:08 ►
Now you must realize too that in those days the institution of marriage was not what it is today.
00:41:18 ►
Marriage at the time of the rise and development of Christianity
00:41:24 ►
was a social institution for
00:41:28 ►
alliances between families.
00:41:31 ►
You did not marry the person of your own choice, except under the most peculiar circumstances.
00:41:36 ►
You married the girl your family picked out for you.
00:41:39 ►
And they thought it over carefully, from its political point of view as well as from the point of
00:41:45 ►
view of eugenics and whether this was a good healthy girl and whether this was a good healthy
00:41:51 ►
man and they had an economic bargaining about it and you married this girl.
00:41:54 ►
You weren’t necessarily in love with her.
00:41:58 ►
And it was perfectly well understood in the secular world that on the side you had other
00:42:03 ►
arrangements. in the secular world that on the side you had other arrangements you had if you could afford them
00:42:08 ►
concubines or even second third and fourth wives
00:42:13 ►
and these subsidiary wives
00:42:17 ►
were there was a somewhat more choice open to you
00:42:21 ►
in getting those than in the first one first one is definitely
00:42:24 ►
a family
00:42:25 ►
arrangement now that’s the context of it don’t forget that so what the church was saying was
00:42:33 ►
only that woman should be your bedfellow whose marriage has been arranged by paternal authority.
00:42:48 ►
The idea of romantic love does not arise in connection with marriage until
00:42:52 ►
the troubadour cults of southern France, of Provence,
00:42:57 ►
in the late Middle Ages.
00:43:00 ►
When there begins to be this idea
00:43:03 ►
of the idealization of a woman as the inspiring goddess, almost, of the knight-errant.
00:43:16 ►
Dante’s Beatrice is the inspiring woman who leads him to heaven. Now historians are not agreed as to whether
00:43:30 ►
the lady loves of the chivalrous knights were in fact their mistresses or whether they were
00:43:38 ►
simply idealized women. But the influence of the cult of romantic love on the West was profound.
00:43:47 ►
And it brought about a weird combination of ideas.
00:43:53 ►
One, the notion of the married state being the only licit relationship
00:44:01 ►
in which sexual play might be carried on and two the notion that
00:44:08 ►
the girl you marry should be the one you’ve fallen in love with two more
00:44:13 ►
ill-adjusted ideas could hardly be put together
00:44:19 ►
because naturally when you love someone very much indeed, in the enthusiasm and ardor of youth, you say things that are hardly logical or rational.
00:44:34 ►
You stand up before an altar and you say, my darling, my sweetheart, my perfect pet, I adore you so much that I will live with you forever and ever until death do us part.
00:44:44 ►
And that’s the way
00:44:45 ►
you feel at the time in a rather similar mood ancient peoples would hail their kings and say
00:44:53 ►
oh king live forever obviously this was not literally meant they were just wishing him a
00:44:59 ►
long life but to live forever no sir no mortal does that so the trouble was you see that when
00:45:08 ►
certain kinds of extravagant poetic expressions
00:45:13 ►
got in the hands of people like augustine and tertullian who were
00:45:19 ►
rather influenced by roman literalness they wrote it into the law books and so
00:45:28 ►
this amazing situation came about but we still have not fully explored the
00:45:35 ►
subtlety of it let us consider certain periods when this attitude of prudism towards sexuality was in an ascendancy.
00:45:49 ►
Nearest to our times is the bourgeois revolution.
00:45:54 ►
You might call it in Victorian England and the United States.
00:45:58 ►
We all say Victorian as an adjective to indicate grundyism,
00:46:13 ►
extreme monogamy, a definite disgust for all things sexual.
00:46:24 ►
And yet, when we really go into the history of the Victorian period, we find that it was an extremely lascivious epoch.
00:46:30 ►
One has only to look at the lushness of Victorian furniture to realize that chairs are disguised women.
00:46:37 ►
That the way even piano legs are shaped.
00:46:42 ►
I mean, this kind of thing is throughout Victorian art forms.
00:46:48 ►
And the conduct of the British aristocracy during that period,
00:46:52 ►
beggared description.
00:46:56 ►
People like Freud and Havelock Ellis
00:46:59 ►
made a certain mistake.
00:47:02 ►
made a certain mistake they said about the church
00:47:09 ►
and about religion in general
00:47:10 ►
that it was nothing but
00:47:12 ►
a form of sublimated sex
00:47:15 ►
they said these people for curious reasons
00:47:18 ►
suppress sex
00:47:19 ►
and therefore it becomes
00:47:22 ►
a very powerful force for them.
00:47:26 ►
You must remember, of course, that they worked on a hydraulic analogy of human psychology,
00:47:31 ►
that they liken it all to a river.
00:47:33 ►
If you dammed it up, it would burst the dam.
00:47:36 ►
It doesn’t actually follow that human psychology is hydraulic,
00:47:39 ►
but this is the metaphor they used.
00:47:43 ►
Now, they said the church has repressed sex,
00:47:46 ►
but actually if you look at its symbolism,
00:47:48 ►
it is nothing but an expression of sex.
00:47:52 ►
Everything is reduced to libido as the fundamental reality.
00:48:00 ►
And the church replied, it’s nothing of the kind.
00:48:03 ►
We deny this.
00:48:05 ►
We think that this reduction of everything to sex is just a way of attacking holy things.
00:48:12 ►
And on the contrary, we would say that people who are fascinated with sex and make it their god are repressing religion.
00:48:23 ►
Now the problem in this debate everybody missed the boat
00:48:26 ►
uh the church should have been in the position to say to freud well of course thank you very much
00:48:34 ►
uh yes indeed our symbolism is sexual the steeples on our churches, the vesicle shaped windows and the heraldic shields on which we put images
00:48:52 ►
of the crucifix or the virgin mother of God.
00:48:55 ►
These are all quite plainly sexual, but you see the sexual biology in its turn reveals the mysteries of the universe
00:49:06 ►
sex is not mere sex
00:49:08 ►
sex is a holy thing
00:49:11 ►
and is
00:49:13 ►
one of the most marvelous
00:49:17 ►
revelations of the divine
00:49:19 ►
but imagine
00:49:21 ►
the church just couldn’t say that
00:49:24 ►
if you look at Tibetan Buddhist
00:49:29 ►
iconography their images or you look in Hindu temples you will find things that
00:49:37 ►
Europeans and Americans have never been able to understand. Here are images of Buddhas and of the gods engaged in amazing
00:49:48 ►
diversions with their female counterparts. And everybody thinks that these are kind of
00:49:53 ►
dirty sculptures. Now they’re nothing of the kind. They are saying to the people who look at them, the play of man and woman
00:50:05 ►
is on that level,
00:50:10 ►
on the level of biology,
00:50:12 ►
a reflection of the fundamental play of the cosmos.
00:50:16 ►
The play of the positive and negative principles,
00:50:20 ►
of the light and the dark,
00:50:22 ►
of the mental and the material,
00:50:26 ►
they all play together.
00:50:37 ►
And the function of sexual play is not merely the survival and utilitarian function of reproducing the species as it is among animals to a very large extent.
00:50:48 ►
is among animals to a very large extent what peculiarly distinguishes human sexuality is that it brings the partners closer and closer to each other in an intense state of united
00:50:57 ►
feeling in other words it is a sacrament the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace bringing about love and so if that is peculiar to human beings it is perfect nonsense to degrade human sexuality
00:51:15 ►
by saying it should only be carried on in the way that the animals do theirs
00:51:19 ►
because they have not yet as it were evolved to the place where sex
00:51:26 ►
is the sacramental expression
00:51:29 ►
of man and woman’s love
00:51:32 ►
and love in that sense
00:51:35 ►
is a kind of enthusiasm
00:51:37 ►
which means a
00:51:39 ►
being possessed by the divine
00:51:42 ►
falling in love
00:51:45 ►
although considered by practical people
00:51:48 ►
to be a sort of madness
00:51:49 ►
is actually the same sort of thing
00:51:52 ►
as the mystical vision
00:51:53 ►
a grace
00:51:56 ►
and in its light
00:52:00 ►
we see people
00:52:02 ►
in their divine aspect when as the song says every
00:52:10 ►
little breeze whispers Louise there is a sort of extraordinary state of mystical
00:52:18 ►
intoxication in which the ideal woman has become the goddess.
00:52:27 ►
Which is, from one point of view,
00:52:31 ►
what every woman is,
00:52:33 ►
if you see her with the scales of your eyes.
00:52:37 ►
And likewise every man,
00:52:40 ►
seen with the scales of her eyes.
00:52:43 ►
seen with the scales off her eyes so
00:52:48 ►
what happened then
00:52:51 ►
as a result of this historical situation
00:52:53 ►
was mutual name calling
00:52:55 ►
between the proponents of religion
00:52:59 ►
and the proponents of
00:53:01 ►
scientific naturalism
00:53:04 ►
such as Freud and Havelock Ellis and in our own times
00:53:10 ►
Albert Ellis and people of that kind, they’ve never got together because they’ve never understood.
00:53:24 ►
Neither the church nor the opponents of the church have clearly
00:53:27 ►
understood that the secret or unconscious motivation of sexual repression is to make
00:53:33 ►
it all the more interesting. And on the other side, it has not been clearly understood that The sexual
00:53:47 ►
Biology and all that goes with it
00:53:53 ►
Is a
00:53:57 ►
Figuring forth on the level of biology of what the whole universe is about
00:54:07 ►
Ecstatic play so as a result
00:54:13 ►
there has been
00:54:17 ►
a kind of compromise
00:54:20 ►
today in ecclesiastical circles
00:54:23 ►
sex is being damned with faint praise
00:54:26 ►
people are saying after all
00:54:31 ►
yes sex was made by God
00:54:33 ►
and we should remember the Jewish point of view
00:54:35 ►
and it is perhaps for something more than reproduction
00:54:41 ►
to bring about the cementing of the marriage ties between
00:54:45 ►
husband and wife.
00:54:47 ►
But still in practice it remains the frightening taboo. And the opposition to Christian prudery goes overboard.
00:55:12 ►
And always moves in the direction of total license.
00:55:17 ►
You see, what’s going on is a contest between the people who want the skirts pulled down to the floor
00:55:22 ►
and the people who want them pulled up to the neck.
00:55:29 ►
And you know, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere but the play between these forces is where are we going to draw it well that’s very exciting
00:55:34 ►
provide neither side wins i mean imagine what it would be like if the libertines won and they took over the church so that on wednesday evenings
00:55:47 ►
the young uh presbyterian group would meet for prayer through sex
00:55:52 ►
every child would go to the school physician for a course in hygienics and they would have classes
00:56:02 ►
and they’d have plastic models and all the children would do it in class
00:56:06 ►
in very clean hygienic circumstances
00:56:09 ►
all sprayed with rubbing alcohol
00:56:10 ►
and it wouldn’t bind.
00:56:12 ►
Imagine how boring it would all become.
00:56:16 ►
So you see,
00:56:17 ►
the people who say
00:56:18 ►
no, modesty is important
00:56:20 ►
have something right about them
00:56:22 ►
that they mustn’t be allowed
00:56:23 ►
to get away with it.
00:56:27 ►
But they mustn’t be allowed to get away with it but they mustn’t be obliterated you see life works that way
00:56:30 ►
let’s take an entirely different analogy
00:56:33 ►
let’s take a given biological group
00:56:35 ►
a species we’ll call A
00:56:37 ►
it has a natural enemy B
00:56:40 ►
now one day A gets furious at the natural enemy B and says let’s obliterate it. And they
00:56:48 ►
gather their forces and they knock out their natural enemy. Well suddenly after a while they
00:56:54 ►
begin to get weak. They get overpopulated. There’s nobody around to eat up their surplus creatures
00:57:00 ►
and they don’t have to keep their muscles tens tense against any enemy and they begin to fall apart
00:57:05 ►
because they destroyed their enemy what they should do is cultivate the enemy that’s the
00:57:11 ►
real meaning of love your enemy there is such a thing as a beloved enemy and if you don’t have
00:57:20 ►
a beloved enemy in other words if the flies and the spiders don’t go together there’s going
00:57:26 ►
to be too many spiders or too many flies and these balances keep the course of nature going well it’s
00:57:32 ►
exactly the same thing as between the libertines and the prudes they need each other and you should
00:57:40 ►
thank if you’ve got a prudish father and mother, you should be very grateful to them for having made sex so interesting.
00:57:55 ►
So don’t defy them completely.
00:57:57 ►
Don’t go around campus with placards bearing four-letter words.
00:58:02 ►
Because that’s going to spoil the show.
00:58:08 ►
letter words because that’s going to spoil the show but every generation must react to the one before you see to keep this tension going and it is by this tension this play of the opposites
00:58:16 ►
that we have the love that makes the world go round
00:58:19 ►
you’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,
00:58:27 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:58:33 ►
I have to admit that just now when he said,
00:58:37 ►
so if you’ve got a prudish father and mother,
00:58:39 ►
you should be very grateful to them for having made sex so interesting.
00:58:44 ►
And my first thought was that I should also be thanking all of the nuns and priests in Catholic school
00:58:49 ►
who made sex such a great big bad thing that I became interested in it much sooner than my public school friends.
00:58:56 ►
And of course, I brought them up to speed as quickly as I could.
00:59:00 ►
Now, since Watts didn’t focus on our sacred medicines in this talk
00:59:04 ►
and how they can be used to enhance sexual pleasure,
00:59:07 ►
I thought I should add just a word or two on the topic to get you interested into looking into it on your own.
00:59:13 ►
Not that it takes any encouragement, I guess.
00:59:15 ►
But first of all, if you just put the words sex and psychedelics in a Google search box, you’ll get almost a million hits,
00:59:22 ►
including a link to the full text of the very
00:59:25 ►
famous 1967 Playboy magazine article that was titled, Sex, Ecstasy, and the Psychedelic Drugs.
00:59:32 ►
And keep in mind, that’s not ecstasy as in MDMA, because this article came out well before Sasha
00:59:39 ►
Shulgin reintroduced the world to that important compound. But speaking of MDMA, whose street name is ecstasy,
00:59:46 ►
I want to clear up what seems to be a common misconception.
00:59:50 ►
And that is that you can’t have sex on ecstasy.
00:59:54 ►
What you can’t have on ecstasy is an orgasm.
00:59:56 ►
But unless you think like blowjob Bill Clinton
00:59:59 ►
that you have to have an orgasm in a vagina to have sex,
01:00:02 ►
you’re really missing out on some incredible sexual play
01:00:05 ►
while on MDMA. Now, I’m not going to go into any of the details, but I was lucky enough to be living
01:00:12 ►
in Dallas, Texas during the year when it was ground zero for the widespread use of ecstasy.
01:00:17 ►
Personally, I knew well over a hundred people using it before it became illegal, and almost
01:00:22 ►
all of them were using X in private, just as a couple,
01:00:26 ►
and staying up for hours in sexual play. You see, while orgasms are next to impossible on X,
01:00:32 ►
most men found that they could have an erection that would last for hours, and for some reason
01:00:38 ►
their partners never seemed to mind that their men didn’t have an orgasm. I think you get the
01:00:43 ►
picture. But if there is a psychedelic drug that in many cases does work somewhat like an aphrodisiac,
01:00:50 ►
I’d think it must be LSD.
01:00:52 ►
And again, the use of these substances in romantic settings with just two people
01:00:57 ►
is the way to find out if it works for you.
01:01:00 ►
Unfortunately, most people today are using those two substances mainly in large groups while dancing.
01:01:05 ►
And don’t get me wrong, hey, that’s a lot of fun too.
01:01:08 ►
It’s just that there are many ways to use and abuse these mind-altering chemicals,
01:01:13 ►
so don’t get too set in your ways and rigid about how they can be used.
01:01:18 ►
Now, how do I transition from talking about drugs and sex to a couple of announcements I’d like to make?
01:01:24 ►
I transition from talking about drugs and sex to a couple of announcements I’d like to make.
01:01:30 ►
I guess the best way, since Ann and Sasha Shulgin have talked about this topic several times in their Ask the Shulgin’s Talks, I’ll pass along a little news about Sasha, who, as you know,
01:01:35 ►
has been suffering through a series of physical setbacks. The good news is that he is now back
01:01:41 ►
home and that they were able to save his foot from being amputated.
01:01:46 ►
And even with all the physical problems he’s going through right now,
01:01:47 ►
his new book, The Shulgin Index,
01:01:49 ►
has been sent off to the printers
01:01:51 ►
and will be available shortly.
01:01:53 ►
And there’s actually a lot more news about Sasha
01:01:55 ►
that Ann and his caregivers
01:01:57 ►
have been posting on his Facebook page.
01:01:59 ►
So if you’re on Facebook,
01:02:00 ►
be sure to friend him
01:02:01 ►
and catch up on all the latest news
01:02:03 ►
about our dearly beloved Sasha, who Ann tells us has still retained that merry Sasha sense of humor and
01:02:10 ►
joy that has really always been his trademark.
01:02:14 ►
And so something I think we should all keep in mind is that even with all of his current
01:02:19 ►
physical problems, on the inside he’s still the same old Sasha, and that’s really basically
01:02:24 ►
true of all of us old guys,
01:02:26 ►
which technically I am, even though I don’t feel very old, most of the time at least.
01:02:31 ►
You know, just the other day I was talking to Gary Fisher, and he told me that even though he’s almost 80 years old
01:02:37 ►
and that he feels around 19 inside, well, that goes for me too and some of my other friends,
01:02:43 ►
who are what I guess is considered old,
01:02:45 ►
and they all say the same, they’re somewhere between 18 and 30 on the inside.
01:02:50 ►
I’m not sure exactly what I think about that, to tell the truth, but maybe it’s something worth thinking about.
01:02:57 ►
You know, if we feel inside that we’re much younger than we actually are,
01:03:01 ►
well then what happened at that age to cause our thought patterns from time to time to become
01:03:05 ►
so deeply ingrained all these years later? And how do we go about rebooting our thinking to
01:03:11 ►
take into account the changes that have taken place in our lives since then? And by the way,
01:03:16 ►
if you happen to be in that 18 to 30 age range right now, maybe you should take close note of
01:03:21 ►
the fact that a significant number of people seem to get stuck in the mindset they hold at that age
01:03:26 ►
and then get it massaged to where you can live with that particular mindset for the rest of your life,
01:03:32 ►
because odds are you will.
01:03:34 ►
I wonder if this has something to do with the fact that until not too long ago,
01:03:39 ►
the average human lifespan was probably only around 30 years or so,
01:03:42 ►
and when you think about it from that angle, it raises a whole new set of interesting speculations,
01:03:47 ►
which I’ll leave for you to do on your own.
01:03:50 ►
But don’t worry, it’s not a homework assignment.
01:03:52 ►
There are no quizzes, tests, or exams here in the psychedelic salon.
01:03:56 ►
Just a little brain candy for you to chew on from time to time.
01:04:01 ►
Well, even though there are several more things I should be passing along right now,
01:04:06 ►
I’ve got more boxes to pack.
01:04:08 ►
But I’ll try to get another program out in a week or so.
01:04:11 ►
So again, I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:04:17 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects
01:04:20 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license.
01:04:24 ►
audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license. And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at
01:04:29 ►
the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find through psychedelicsalon.org.
01:04:35 ►
And if you’re interested in books with a psychedelic flavor, you may want to listen
01:04:39 ►
to my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:04:48 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:04:53 ►
Be well, my friends.