Infatuation vs. Freedom
Sex vs. Love

No matter
  what you
  might think
love is a poor
  substitute
for freedom

Yes, undeniably, love as we know it can be wonderful. I’m not contesting that. This walking-on-clouds, sleepless bliss. The world finally making sense. Yet, so fragile.

Turn it over after a while and it might have a faint odor of jealousy, and jealousy is the vilest of afflictions, diseases, devastations, sufferings ever to infect our planet earth—at least according to the sufferers. Harrowing.

Let me say this though about suffering: it is relative and very much depends on point of view.

What is pleasurable for a man, say sex (or love), is suffering to an angel.

Or take crossing an ocean on a 40-foot cutter-rigged sailboat, wind in your sails and hair. Blue (white-capped here and there) ocean at 360 degrees as far as the eye can see (just under three miles to the nearest horizon at it happens). Life could not be better.

As an alien hovering in a spacecraft ten miles up, considering that little boat on that vast ocean and feeling sorry for it: so shackled to the earth by gravity, so lumbering across the water, so, yes, imprisoned. Painful.

Yes, point of view.

Yet, when you are in love, and especially in the early (yet fatal) stages of infatuation, life could not be better. Your body is flushed with just the right hormones in just the right mix and all you can see, feel, hear, think about is him or her. You can’t sleep. You can’t eat. It’s all too good. For a while.

If lucky, this cloud-walking lasts, say, a month or two, if unlucky, it only lasts until this relationship is consummated, as it were, after which your partner becomes just another sex-craving, lust-infected human being. This, however, usually only dawns on one of the partners, the other, still high on hormones, will soon have reason to become quite jealous, and if there is a hell on earth, as I implied above, it is carved out by jealousy.

According to the Vinaya, the code of conduct that regulates Buddhist monastic life, celibacy is mandatory. Masturbation is an expellable offense. Even wet dreams are viewed with suspicion and the wetly dreamer, if found out, will have some serious explaining to do before his elders.

The Buddha, nothing but incredibly practical, knew the havoc wreaked by sex and saw no other way around it than simply outlawing, forbidding the practice in any and all of its many disguises.

As an aside: other religions, other open eyes, have followed suit. For quite a few centuries Catholic priests had to be celibate—I’m not sure if that’s still the case somewhere.

Many—far too many—Buddhists these days are, in my view, far too relaxed on the subject, Zen abbots for one, can marry and lead a “normal” sexual life. My take is that any faction of Buddhism that allows or looks kindly on copulation has not understood the Founder’s (many refer to him as the Conqueror) intent: if you want to make it out of here, ditch sex.

And that means ditch love as humans normally view it—usually one form or another of infatuation, or need to propagate the race.

Freedom, on the other hand—the blissful silence that rests where sex used to scream and rage its must, must, must—is so far superior to what it has replaced as to seem like another galaxy altogether.

Those who have transcended love as lust, those who have let go of sex in all its shapes, are some of the happiest people on the planet. Though very concerned—they are like some with eyes wide open walking among millions of blind, hormone-controlled meat puppets.

Yes, I know, love can feel like heaven—I’ve been there a time or two or three—but when seen from an enlightened perspective, it’s poison.

Pure poison.

::

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