THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 The ...

THE DHAMMAPADA: THE WAY OF THE BUDDHA, VOL. 9-12 89
I am not against sex, but I would like you to go beyond it. Use it as a stepping-stone, use it as a ladder. It
is beautiful in itself, but it is not the end, only the beginning. Don’t stop at the first chapter of your life; it has
much more, much more hidden value that has to be discovered.
... AND LUST. Lust is even far below pleasure. Pleasure at least respects the other. If you love a woman, you
love her company, or a man... you respect the other. But in lust you don’t have any respect; you simply use the
other. Lust is even more degraded than pleasure; it is falling below humanity. You are simply using the other as
a means.
When you make love to a woman without any respect towards her, what you really are doing is nothing more
than masturbation. You are using the woman only to deceive yourself. There is no connection between you and
her. When you go to a prostitute, that is not pleasure; that is lust. You are paying. Love cannot be purchased;
only bodies can be purchased.
And remember, when you purchase a body it is a dead body; the soul is not there. The woman is somehow
tolerating you because she needs money. She hates you from her very guts; she would like to kill you. But she is
pretending to be very loving, very affectionate, because she is being paid for it. With her closed eyes she thinks of
other things; she simply tolerates you. You are using her as a means, and she is using you as a means. She wants
the money, you want the body; it is a mutual exploitation.
Lloyd went to visit his favorite lady of the evening. He rang the bell and found there was no answer. Then he
put on his glasses and read a note that was pinned to the door: ”On vacation. Do it yourself.”
It is not more than that. It is a mutual masturbatory practice ugly. It is not even pleasure.
Buddha says: All these streams are rushing towards you DESIRE AND PLEASURE AND LUST....
PLAY IN YOUR IMAGINATION WITH THEM AND THEY WILL SWEEP YOU AWAY.
And you are all full of imagination. Making love to your wife you are not making love to her; you may be
thinking of Sophia Loren or Lollobrigida, and she may be thinking of somebody else. Both are pretending. Their
imagination is somewhere else. If you could look into the minds of people who are making love you would be
surprised.... It is very rare to find only two persons in a single bed; you will find a crowd. At least four are
absolutely certain. It is always group sex, because their minds are fancying, fantasizing.
Even grown-up people so-called grown-up people are living in imagination. Not only children live in imagination;
even old people live in imagination. People go on playing with toys, they never wake up. Their imagination
continues to keep them asleep.
Once again we enter that handy vehicle, the time capsule, and journey back through the sexy sixties, the nifty
fifties, the fighting forties, the dirty thirties, and on into the roaring twenties where we stop, hat askew and
shirt-tails flying from that fast and breezy trip. We are at that point in time when the transplanting of monkey
glands and other such operations for the restoration of male vigor were in vogue.
Surgery for the restoration of youth had just been performed on a seventy-year-old man who had hoped that, as
a result, his chromosomes would henceforth be bouncing off the ceiling. As he came out from under the influence
of the ether he began to weep bitterly.
Mrs. Bernstein, the attending nurse, bent over him.
”Mister, it is not necessary for you to feel worried,” she said kindly. ”The operation was a big success. Take
my word, when you leave here you will feel twenty years younger. Maybe more, who knows?”
But the poor old man only continued to wail, the tears coursing down his cheeks and losing themselves in his
long white whiskers.
”Please don’t cry,” pleaded Mrs. Bernstein. ”The pain will soon go away.”
”Who is crying from pain?” sobbed the patient. ”I am afraid I will be late for school.”
Just look deep down inside yourself and you will find the child intact; it has not grown up. The ordinary mental
age of every human being is not more than twelve. Physiologically you may be eighty; psychologically you are
hanging around twelve. Hence, once in a while, you start behaving like a child in spite of yourself. If you are
pushed and pulled too much you forget that you are a grown-up person. The child is sitting there, covered by
many experiences, but those experiences have not been digested; covered by much knowledge, but that knowledge
has not become your wisdom because it has not been achieved through awareness. You have been collecting and
accumulating it in your sleep, so you have accumulated much rubbish alongside. Yes, once in a while you may
have picked up a diamond too, not knowing that it is a diamond just another colored stone.
PLAY IN YOUR IMAGINATION WITH THEM AND THEY WILL SWEEP YOU AWAY. If you allow desire
and pleasure and lust and greed and anger and jealousy and possessiveness and violence and all these rushing
streams towards you, they will sweep you away. Don’t play with them in your imagination; that is strengthening
them, that is getting under their sway.