That Nature put the hunger instinct into man and animal alike primarily to preserve the life of the physical body and not to satisfy the palate, nobody could rightly deny. The enjoyment of food is subordinate to, and intended to make more inescapable, the instinct required for this highly important necessity of sustenance. Yet man, blinded by his desires and passions, fails to see that the same situation prevails to explain part (not all) of the sexual instinct. Nature is not interested in his individual pleasure so much as in the continuance of his species. She has given him the one for the sake of the latter. Man has in thought, belief, and practice today reversed this order of importance. The result is a totally wrong view about the possibility and value of continence. From this view stems a host of moral, nervous, and physical maladies which are plunging his life into confusion and disaster. Diderot, the French thinker and encyclopaedist of the eighteenth century, in his anti-religious writing drew attention to the harm caused by emotional repression to nuns; what he particularly had in mind was sexual repression. The mystic has sometimes used erotic images when describing his experience. In the case of nuns this has been interpreted by modern sceptics, and especially by psychoanalysts, to indicate frustrated sexual desire. Such a condition must have been true of some nuns but cannot possibly have been true of the more advanced ones. For a certain part of the mystic experience during deep meditation does correspond in several details to the sexual experience. There is, in these moments, a surrender of the attitude of being in control of oneself, a conscious recognition and acceptance of another entity which is allowed to take possession and work on oneself. In consummated sexual love, the feeling of union is an intense one, but it is a union of two unlike entities. In realized mystical experience, the longing for union between the ego and what is beyond it is equally intense, and there is likewise here a marriage of two unlike entities--the passive willing ego giving itself up in ecstasy to the mysterious and impersonal higher power.
Nature has her rights, it is true, but before we can justly grant them we need to inquire as to what they really are. Her instincts in us are often perverted.
We have to enquire why it is that most religions severely judged and deprecated the sexual instinct, and why they recommended its subjugation to their elite of priests and monks. It is the strongest of bodily instincts, the supreme expression of physical life, and therefore the possible gateway to a complete surrender to materialism. Materialism achieves its greatest triumph in the inflamed and total self-identification of man and woman with their material bodies. In this absolute ecstasy of interlocked flesh there is no thought or place for the spirit, no care for memory of its existence. The infatuated man, who finds his beloved immeasurably desirable, will be restless or even tormented until he can achieve union with her. Absolute asceticism and rigid monasticism were set up as preventives against such a surrender. Only by sheer flight from temptation, it was believed, could there be any possibility of successful subjugation.
Gandhi demonstrated in his own person the foolishness of the belief that absolute continence leads to mental disorder. He was sane enough to lead his countrymen to freedom. He also demonstrated the falsity of the belief that it was impossible. For forty years he practised it successfully. He said: "The ability properly to conserve, assimilate, and transmute the vital fluid comes with long training. It strengthens the body and the mind." His spiritual career further indicated that mastery of sex by those who have experienced it is more likely to be real and lasting than in the case of those who have starved it.
-- Notebooks Category 5: The Body > Chapter 7 : Sex > # 2
