Sexuality alan watts

 ALAN W. WATTS 

Nature, Man 
and Woman 

A NEW APPROACH TO SEXUAL 
EXPERIENCE 

There is a. correlation between man’s attitude to nature and man’s attitude to woman. 

However fanciful this symbolism may sometimes be, it has in fact had an enormous influence upon sexual love in both Eastern and Western cultures. 

sexual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man’s separation from nature, especially when the realm of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil. 

Needless to say, the Christian, and particularly the Anglo-Saxon, cultures are preoccupied with sexuality in ways that strike outsiders as peculiarly odd, and we ourselves are well aware that we have ‘ sex on the brain ’ to an extraordinary degree.

sexual love is the most intense and dramatic of the common ways in which a human being comes into union and conscious relationship with something outside himself. It is, furthermore, the most vivid of man’s customary expressions of his organic spontaneity, the most positive and creative occasion of his being transported by something beyond his conscious will. 

cultures in which the individual feels isolated from nature are also cultures wherein men feel squeamish about the sexual relationship, often regarding it as degrading and evil — especially for those dedicated to the life of the spirit.(church orthodox hindu)

The disordered sexuality of the Western (and some other) cultures is surely due to the fact that the sexual relationship has never been seriously integrated with and illumined by a philosophy of life. It has had no effective contact with the realm of spiritual experience. 

It has never even achieved the dignity of an art, as in the Indian Kama Sutra, and would thus seem to rank in our estimation far below cookery. 

We have dubbed the relationship ‘ animal and animal we have for the most part let it remain. Matrimony has not so much ennobled it as fenced it in, trusting naively that ‘ true love ’ would somehow find a way to make the relationship whole and holy. And this might indeed have come to pass, without introducing any studied techniques, given the presence of certain other conditions. It might have come to pass of itself, spontaneously, if the culture had known anything of real spontaneity. But this was, and is, impossible when human personality is centred exclusively in the ego, which in its turn is set over against nature as the dissociated soul or mind. Generally speaking, the style of philosophy which we have followed and the type of spiritual experience which we have cultivated have not lent themselves to a constructive application to sexuality.