ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL HUMANS ADDICTION TO SEXUAL PLEASURES

 

ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL HUMANS ADDICTION  TO SEXUAL PLEASURES

Για να δείτε την μετάφραση του κειμένου στα Ελληνικά πατήστε ΕΔΩ

I present to our exquisite readers an interesting and philosophical lecture by the philosopher/ theologian Dr Alan Watts about the addiction of modern people to all kinds of sexual pleasures.

The main subject is Sexuality and the "Christian Ethics" of  Christianity Religion, which first is a tributary or if you prefer an appearance of Eros.

The modern Christian and non-Christian thinking of many people, Eros is today completely identified with sexuality. Are these things the same? Also, in many people mind Sexuality is completely identified with the fall and the evil that is supposed, to lurk from the existence of creation in matter, and therefore physicality and related to it are evil, hateful, immoral and sinful.

This addiction to various sexual pleasures is psychological but especially deeper than we think because it is holistic (psychosomatic) and since as incarnate and earthly people according to the natural law of attraction and the transient state of things, we are addicted to (and with) the various pleasures and passions of body and soul.

The "Christian Ethics" mainly of the Religion of Western Christianity (Papism or Protestantism) seems to be the usual suspect of human's manic tendency towards sexual passions, which secondarily push (extrude) them to the denial of that Christianity, thus leading them to atheism / agnosticism or heterodox religions that particularly satisfy them sexual instinct (mainly Islam or Eastern Asiatic Religions).

This valuable transcription of the entire lecture to which we refer was made by the friend and partner of the "APOLOGITIKA" blog  mrs Ourania Vasilakakou. She also undertook the potential translation from English into Greek, in order to satisfy our readers who are completely ignorant of English language. I owe her many heartfelt thanks.

Will follow in Greek translation about Alan Watts lecture.

By Panagiotis Nounis

Mental & Spiritual Health Consultant

Researcher of Analytical Psychology

† Theologian / Religious Scholar

LIFE COACH

 

P.S.: All kinds of sexual pleasures in orthodox Christian Theology are considered indiscriminately as prostitution, that is, sins of the flesh. The widespread and unbridled absolutization or even overestimation of sexual pleasures leads to pansexualism, that is, to psychological addiction. Sexual pleasures of all kinds in combination with mysticism, religious mysteries,  syngritism or ecumenism theology, occultism or magic and so on. In Orthodox Patristic Theology and plain theological language is objectively referred to as the Cognitive sect (Cognitism) of (new)Nikolaitism or Ba(r)laamism.

 

ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL HUMANS ADDICTION  TO SEXUAL PLEASURES

By Alan Watts

Most churches in America and in England and in other parts of the western world, ah thank the 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 that you consider important ministers, bishops, priests and so on, they can live in envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitable myths and be in perfectly good standing about the moment, anything about their sexual life becomes a little unusual out you go and that’s about the only thing you can go 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 are 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 is not exist exactly the right place for it.

 

Now this need 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 the 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 relationships 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 is one reason, why it is problematic. The other reason, why it is 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 of female there are various other gradations, but basically their 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 in 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 do not 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 is normally said you see, yes, the Christianity is the religion in which sex is taboo, and this is simply no getting around it.

 

I am up to date ministers today, think sex is all right. It is perfectly ok if you are married, and you have gotten a mature relationship with a woman. It is all right and they kind of Damn it with saint praise, but if you read anything of Christian writings prior shall we say to eighteen hundred and fifty to set a date arbitrarily you will find that it is not all right not at all. It is 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 is better to merry than 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 six 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 having 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 do not think is 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 having sex prurient and in an exciting, in a kind of dirty way, and I suppose, is 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 that our first thing I mentioned, why it is that there has been a problem for human beings about pleasure and will take sexual about taking 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? The point is simply, isn’t it?

 

That the physical world is transient, it is impermanent, it falls apart and bodies where, once, were strong, smooth, and lovely in youth, they begin to wither and become corrupt and turn that last into skeletons. And if you cling on to one of those and it suddenly turns into a skeleton in your hands, 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 do not set your heart on mortal beauty, but you set your heart on spiritual values, that are imperishable.

 

Even that supposed tipler and drake, Omar Khayyam says, that:

 

“The wordily Hope that men set their hearts upon Turns to ashes or it prospers; and anon like snow upon the desert’s dusty face Lighting a little hour or two is gone”.

 

And so do not 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 will not 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 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 colour 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 do not be attached. You will find this all over the place. That 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 mean is, in some way, responsible for the existence of a creation, and if this creation is, basically, a snare, why He did do it. 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 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 with your body is that of a rider to a horse.

 

Saint Francis called his body rubber ass and that you are a rational soul in charge of an animal body, and therefore, where if you belong to the old-fashioned school you beat it into submission as Saint 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 is your horse. Even in Freud there is a very, very strong element of Puritanism.

 

Read Philip Roth’s book on Freud «THE MIND OF THE MORALIST» and how he shows that Freud basically thought that sex was degrading, but nevertheless is something biologically unavoidable, something terribly necessary which could not just be swept aside. It had to be dealt with, but there is, you see, that heritage our 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 is thoroughly cleaned up.

 

I suppose that 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 pick of use. But it has never struck me, that it is something to gripe about, that the physical world is transient. It seems to me to be part of its splendour.

 

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 waxworks, and you would discover, as the matter of fact, that people who hand 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 unfold up, are going to be replaced by very skilfully 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 is 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 a twitch 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 is conducting, and he has got it now make it, and they all have to do right now. I see of course, right now that it is 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. 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 is happened, and you have had it.

 

By Alan Watts

 

*Απομαγνητοφώνηση για το Ιστολόγιον «ΑΠΟΛΟΓΗΤΙΚΑ»: υπό της κ. Ουρανίας Βασιλακάκου.

 

**Φιλολογική και Θεολογική Επιμέλεια και ο Πρόλογος: του Παναγιώτη Νούνη.