Peoples Addictions To Sexual Pleasures - Alan Watts
Summary
TLDRThe speaker discusses Western society's complex and unique relationship with sexuality, particularly within Christian traditions. He argues that Christianity is preoccupied with regulating sexual behavior more than any other religion, linking sin and immorality predominantly to sexual irregularity. The speaker explores how repression of sex has heightened its taboo and allure, while contrasting Western religious views with other spiritual traditions that also advocate detachment from bodily pleasure. He emphasizes that the transient nature of life and physical pleasure, while fleeting, is central to the vitality of existence.
Takeaways
- 📿 Christianity is uniquely preoccupied with sex compared to other religions, more than tantric yoga or fertility cults.
- ❌ The term 'living in sin' almost exclusively refers to sexual irregularities, rather than general unethical behavior.
- ⛪ Churches are often seen as sexual regulation societies, where sexual transgressions lead to exclusion more frequently than other moral failings.
- 📘 In Christian moral theology, sexual sins occupy a significant portion of discourse, especially compared to other commandments.
- ❓ Sexual pleasure, especially its religious repression, has been historically treated with fear, not just in Christianity but also in other major religions like Hinduism.
- 🧘 Detachment from the body and physical pleasures is a key teaching in many spiritual traditions, such as yoga, to avoid the transient nature of material life.
- 🎭 Sex and the body are seen as unavoidable parts of life, and repressing sexuality can paradoxically lead to an obsession with it.
- ⏳ The transient, decaying nature of physical beauty and pleasure is often lamented, which leads to spiritual detachment from the physical world.
- 🎻 Timing is essential in life’s pleasures, including sexuality, where the right moment defines the experience, much like playing in time during music.
- 🌀 Vitality and change are intertwined with life and death; life is dynamic, always decaying and transforming, which adds to its richness.
Q & A
Why is the speaker suggesting that Western man is 'hung up on sex'?
-The speaker believes that Western culture, particularly influenced by Christianity, has placed an unusual emphasis on sex, often making it a taboo subject and associating it with sin.
What religions does the speaker highlight as influencing Western attitudes toward sexuality?
-The speaker highlights Christianity as the primary influence, with Judaism being influenced in a secondary way due to its interaction with Christianity in Europe and the United States.
What does the speaker mean by 'living in sin' in the context of Western religious beliefs?
-In popular speech influenced by Christian values, 'living in sin' typically refers to people who are in irregular sexual relationships, not necessarily involving other forms of immoral behavior such as fraud or theft.
How does the speaker describe the role of churches in the West regarding sexual regulation?
-The speaker describes most Western churches as being primarily concerned with regulating sexual behavior, often more than other moral issues, with deviations in sexual conduct being one of the few reasons someone could be expelled from a church.
Why does the speaker say that sexuality is problematic in many religious traditions?
-Sexuality is seen as problematic because it connects people to their physical bodies and materiality, which many spiritual traditions view as a distraction from higher spiritual goals. It's also something deeply ingrained in life and cannot be entirely avoided.
What two perspectives on human sexuality does the speaker present?
-The speaker presents two views: one sees sexuality as a repressed form of spirituality, while the other sees it as a manifestation or expression of spirituality. The speaker supports the latter view.
How does sexual repression in Christian tradition affect Western society's view of sex, according to the speaker?
-The speaker suggests that sexual repression has made sex more prurient and intriguing by associating it with dirt and taboo, thus heightening its allure in a kind of perverse way.
Why does the speaker think that detachment from the body and physical world is emphasized in many spiritual traditions?
-The emphasis on detachment is rooted in the belief that physical beauty and pleasures are transient and impermanent. By detaching from the body, one avoids suffering from the inevitable decay and loss that comes with attachment to the physical world.
How does the speaker critique the traditional religious notion of detachment from the physical world?
-The speaker criticizes the idea of detachment by questioning why a physical universe would exist at all if it were simply a snare or mistake. They suggest that the impermanence and transience of the physical world is what gives it vitality and beauty.
What does the speaker believe is the true essence of life and vitality?
-The speaker believes that life and vitality are tied to change and impermanence, and that the transitory nature of the physical world is what makes it dynamic and vibrant. Trying to preserve youth or beauty forever would lead to a plastic, lifeless existence.
Outlines
🌟 Western Preoccupation with Sex
The paragraph discusses the unique preoccupation Western society, particularly influenced by Christianity and Judaism, has with sex. It highlights that sex is considered a major sin and is often the only reason for excommunication from religious communities. The speaker points out that Christianity is the most sex-obsessed religion, focusing on sexual morality more than other religions or belief systems. The paragraph also notes the historical context of religious teachings on sex, emphasizing that while modern interpretations may be more lenient, traditional views see sex as inherently sinful and something to be avoided.
🌱 Spirituality and Sexuality
This paragraph explores the connection between spirituality and sexuality, suggesting that in many religious traditions, including Christianity and some Eastern religions, there is a belief that true spirituality requires the renunciation of sexual desires. The speaker argues that sexuality is an inescapable part of human existence, linked to our physicality and our creation through sexual reproduction. The paragraph discusses two perspectives on sexuality: one that views it as repressed spirituality and another that sees it as an expression of the divine. The speaker aligns with the latter view, suggesting that sexuality is a form of divine expression.
🚫 The Taboo of Sex and Its Allure
The paragraph examines the paradoxical nature of sexual taboos in Western culture. It suggests that the repression of sex has led to a peculiar form of eroticism, where the very act of repressing sexual thoughts and desires makes them more alluring. The speaker points out that this repression is not entirely negative, as it can heighten sexual interest. However, the paragraph also acknowledges the more profound issue of why pleasure, particularly sexual pleasure, is seen as problematic. It raises the question of why the transient and impermanent nature of the physical world, including the body, should be a cause for detachment from physical pleasures.
🧘 Detachment and the Physical World
The paragraph delves into the concept of detachment from the physical world as a spiritual practice. It contrasts the idea of identifying with an eternal, unchanging spiritual self versus being attached to the impermanent physical body. The speaker critiques the notion of detachment, questioning why a physical universe exists if it is merely a snare. It discusses the analogy of the body as an animal that the rational soul must control, whether through subjugation or indulgence. The paragraph also touches on the idea that the transience of the physical world is what gives it its splendor and vitality, suggesting that the impermanence of life is what makes it valuable.
🎭 The Transience of Life and Sexuality
This paragraph emphasizes the importance of timing in life, particularly in the context of sexuality and other physical pleasures. It uses the metaphor of an orchestra to illustrate the idea that there are precise moments when vitality is at its peak, and these moments should be seized. The speaker argues against the desire for physical permanence, suggesting that the very transience of the physical world is what makes it vibrant and alive. The paragraph concludes with a reflection on the importance of being present and engaged in the moment, rather than seeking to escape the impermanence of life.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Sexuality
💡Religious Background
💡Sin
💡Immorality
💡Sexual Regulation Societies
💡Pleasure
💡Materiality
💡Spirituality
💡Impermanence
💡Vitality
💡Repression
Highlights
Western man is uniquely preoccupied with sex, largely due to the influence of Christianity and Judaism.
In Christianity, sex is emphasized more than in other religions, including Tantric yoga and fertility cults.
The concept of 'living in sin' refers almost exclusively to irregular sexual partnerships.
Most churches function as 'sexual regulation societies,' focusing on sexual morality more than other moral issues.
Religious figures can live in envy and malice without consequence, but sexual irregularities often lead to expulsion.
Christian manuals of moral theology devote the majority of their content to sins related to sex.
Sexuality is problematic because it is both a supreme pleasure and deeply connected to materiality and attachment to the body.
The repression of sexuality in religious traditions paradoxically makes it more prurient and exciting.
Detachment from the body and physical world is a common teaching in various religious traditions, from Christianity to Hinduism.
Identifying too strongly with the body leads to attachment to the transient, impermanent nature of physical life.
Many religions view the physical universe as a temporary, flawed state of existence, to be transcended.
The idea of life being short and transient leads to a focus on spiritual values rather than physical pleasures.
There is tension between the impermanence of physical beauty and the desire to hold onto it.
The speaker suggests that the transient nature of the physical world is part of its splendor, not something to lament.
Vitality comes from change, decay, and the inevitable falling apart of physical life, which is contrasted with artificial attempts to achieve permanence.
Transcripts
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
[Music]
one of them is the problem of why
[Music]
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 uh 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 uh
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 the 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
uh 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 reef'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 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 uh group of say
violins
to come in at a certain moment and he's
conducting and he's gotta
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
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