So powerful an urge as sex assumes, in the eyes and minds of young men, so dominant a place that it is often futile to advise all of them to renounce it entirely in favour of lifelong chastity. Most of them will be both unwilling and unable to follow such lofty counsel. They have little power to control what is happening to them here, for a universal force is behind it. Is it not more prudent to suggest a graduated discipline to them? Most people can move only from one level of thought and character to a higher one by slow degrees; very few by sudden jumps which miss those degrees. The case of a non-sectarian American monastery founded by a well-known religio-mystical writer and lecturer only a few years ago proves this point. He gathered more than a score of young men and put them under his direct personal supervision in this monastery. All practised meditation and asceticism strenuously. Within a comparatively short time, some of them took to homosexuality, others went mad, still others had nervous breakdowns, and a couple gave up mysticism altogether. The founder had to close down the monastery and he himself became a physically sick person. I do not assert that it was only his harsh unbending attitude toward sex which was responsible for all this. I say that it certainly was a powerful contributing cause, along with other causes, especially his anti-philosophical stand. "I will let no student of Brunton's teachings come here," he informed one candidate for monastic virtue. He also naïvely believed--and told the world in his books--that humanity could be saved by organizing similar groups. This is in direct disregard of Emerson's warning that "souls are not saved in bundles." Only an inspired master has ever saved anyone else in past history. The mere pooling of ignorance or multiplication of helplessness cannot save anyone.
-- Notebooks Category 16: The Sensitives > Chapter 11 : Fanaticism, Money, Powers, Drugs > # 107
