Thoughts of a fool
evolve to a sexless state. O what a picnic! What a fool God must have
been not to know in the first place that he had to wait for some people
he made to get wise so they would be able to tell him how to work the
game of evolution. But I think that he will not even consider that
sexless-state proposition which is being agitated by the wise men. I
think that now, like always, he agrees with Rosey, who declares that
sex and the use of it is most divine. If there is anything that should
be reverenced more than any other thing in the world it is sex. I do
not mean motherhood--even the wise have no objection to that. I do not
mean womanhood--I mean the organ of sex. The whole universal scheme is
sex--it is the holiest of holies.
The use of sex is evolution beginning with protoplasm and on and on
until we reach man. Nothing is great that does not contain sex. There
is no greatness in art unless sex be there. A painting is not great
without it. It is the harmony of music, and poems would be dull without
love of some kind. The plumage of the bird and its songs are all for
the pleasing of sex. It is the cause of the struggle and happiness of
the world.
The miner who spends his life in the mines does so to please a wife, a
sweetheart, or his progeny.
The man who goes to war, the man who toils in the shop, he who works
on the farm--all are moved by sex. It is divine and holy. Sex is the
motive power, from the tiniest amœba to the most complicated organism.
The urim and thummim was considered holy. With bare feet and bowed head
the high priest approached it. With fear, reverence, and a trembling
heart he consulted it, because through it God spake. Words or language
that would be adequate for expression there are none; it is only when
words fail us, it is only when language would blaspheme, and retard to
silence--it is then, and then only, that we can worship the most holy
of sanctuaries--sex. Through it God reveals himself.
The earth that possessed us before we were, and whither we shall all of
us in due time return, what is it unless it be the sex of the universe.
Mother earth we call her, on account of her birth-giving nature.
Minus everything attributed to womanhood, she does not nurse us nor
possess the breasts of a mother; she is like a mother only in sex. The
reception of the seed, the care of it, and the birth of an object is
what you see in the earth.
Look everywhere! What do you see? The planting of an acorn and
the birth of an oak; the planting of corn seed and the birth of a
corn-field. The whole operation is birth and getting ready for birth,
and seeing all of this, I feel that there is nothing diviner or more
miraculous than sex and the operation of sex. Think of it! A seed
planted and when rotten it takes root, and then the birth of a God!
The redemption of the world will be only when sex will be reverenced
and honored, and when men and women cease to make traffic of
themselves. Then we will not try to put asunder by intellectual rules
that which life has joined together by Love.
WHERE I FOUND HIM
God is where? What is He? And what are his schemes? Had I been wise I
would have gone about solutionizing wisdomatically, by consulting the
elders and the wise of the tribe. I would have sat at the feet of the
learned and absorbed wisdom. Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, President Roosevelt,
and Professor William R. Harper could have enlightened me.
But being as I am, I went about it like one hunting that which he
really expects to find. When I look for my lost garter I do not go
to the church or university to hear a lecture about it, neither do I
go to the public library to read up on the subject. Instinctively I
move chairs, bureaus, and dressing-cases. I light a match and look to
see if it did not roll into some corner. The same way I went about
finding God. I looked about! I found a world filled with entities. Some
resembled me, some different, some I know not what they were. A being
I discovered called “myself” separated from and struggling with the
world. It was myself that was the most important, because it was I that
felt, it was I that was impressed. It was I that had ambitions; like
Atlas, I carried the world with its problems on my shoulders, and was
afraid to move for fear that I would slip and the world would fall
and the problems would remain unsolved, for it was I that was to solve
them. It was I, I, I. A God could not be found anywhere. There was no
room for one. There was nothing that I saw that would indicate a God
anywhere. There was nothing but objects and space. The objects were
surely the objects and God could not be space.
My struggle with the world was great, and when I thought that I had
almost succeeded in mastering the world it crushed me into a oneness
with all-there-is.
Then I saw entities separated by space, united to each other by space
which separates them. Nothing lives by itself for itself. Everything
lives in the whole. To lose one’s self in the whole is to serve and
gain the service of the whole. This way God revealed himself and
expanded through me and absorbed the world. I saw the oneness of it
all. Then I understood the whole, felt the whole. I saw that problems
are not in life, but it is in the being that is out of harmony with
self yet in perfect harmony with nature. Like a pupil going to school
unwillingly, so is the inharmonious self, trotting along in perfect
harmony with the universal whole. God exists through the gratification
of the desires of the entities of which life consists, they being
charged with a nature that is impressed pleasantly and unpleasantly.
One disintegrates and the other recuperates. It seeks the one and
avoids the other. The sense nature is Life’s guide. Things that are
pleasant for it are absorbed, and things that are not are repulsed by
the vegetable. An animal will not eat anything that will injure his
health. By instinct danger is sensed by all with more accuracy than by
man with his psychic forces. And why not? Are they not a part of God,
even as you and I?
Man also began with these sure and unfailing guides. They led him
through the different periods of development from the protoplasm till
he became man. By seeking pleasurable associations and avoiding the
painful ones he reached the highest pinnacle. It was God evoluting
himself by following his heart’s desires. At this stage it was that man
fell. He ate from the tree of knowledge and was driven out of Eden. He
became wise and was going to do something for himself; his intellect
made him deaf to the callings of his heart. He became ambitious to
look for himself. His scheme was to work out his own evolution and
leave behind the whole that sacrificed and contributed to his making.
He was to build for himself mansions in the sky, put on wings and
fly away, and like the fox in the fable he was rewarded. (A fox once
crossed a creek with a piece of stolen cheese in his mouth; he saw his
reflection in the water, and he opened his mouth to catch the shadow,
thereby losing the morsel he had.) So by grasping with the intellect
man’s sense nature becomes perverted. And he has contracted abnormal
desires. He overeats, overdrinks, overindulges in sex, and that works
for his destruction. Abnormal desires are those you cannot gratify by
gratifying them. The more you indulge them the more your appetite for
them is. He became subject to diseases unknown to any other being,
and no sign of his repentance as yet. He still refuses to confess. He
sees that a mistake has been made, but he is going to redeem himself.
Were he less intellectually wise he would say to himself, “My troubles
came because I listened to the clamors of my intellect. As they are
faulty they guided me wrong. Henceforth I will hearken to Life, which
guided me till now.” But instead of that he reasons that his troubles
came upon him because he did not heed his intellect enough. His ideals
were not sufficiently high, he argued. He will make himself better
by making laws to keep himself in check. He will fine himself for
the gratification of his desires. He will put a license on drink and
establish marriage as a preventive.
But “stolen fruits are sweet”--desires increase by prohibition and
condemnation, and by restriction he became totally depraved. What he
condemns in daytime he indulges in at night. So of all the beings in
life, man, with his high ideals is the only prostitute. His hands,
feet, brain, eyes, nose, mouth, stomach, liver, and sex he uses not for
the purpose to which evolution dedicates them, but for traffic.
In going downtown, I noticed a crowd looking in at a window. I stepped
up and saw a beautiful girl blowing soap bubbles. That would have been
all right if it had been play. Her body would have been nourished by
the exercise, for she would have enjoyed it; but there she was in an
illy ventilated space behind plate glass advertising a soap, that she
might secure money wherewith to buy the things she wanted. It was
degrading her body, and she was a prostitute accordingly.
Life created the brain to overcome difficulties, and the pleasure of
overcoming difficulties is its joy; but to use it in designing the
manufacture of adulterated food, embalmed beef, shoddy clothing, is
prostitution.
And just as the whole person is affected when only one member of his
body is used improperly, so when life has one specie that degrades
itself, God as a whole is thus affected. So, if not for your sake,
then let it be for the sake of the little collie dog I love, I implore
you to cease prostituting yourself, as it hurt’s Fido’s dignity. A
friend of mine, in deploring conditions, hoped that we would revise our
statutes to make it harder to get a divorce. My remark that if I had my
way I would give a divorce to any one who asked for it, was countered
by the inquiry, “Do you want us to be like animals?” In her statement
I found the keynote of the reasonings, also the root of the tragedy of
the human family. Man acts according to what he believes himself to be
and is not, therefore his actions are unnatural. The sense nature is
God himself guiding himself through all that God is.
But man believes that he is not animal; he means that he is not subject
to the universal law, that he can violate the principle of life
and thrive. He thinks he may blaspheme God and avoid the penalty,
consequently he refuses to be guided by Life’s guide. He prefers to
plan, scheme, and to do everything contrary to nature’s promptings, and
if possible repudiate sense nature altogether.
Rent, interest, parasitism, governments, jails, churches, marriage,
abortions, contracepts, doctors, lawyers, preachers, universities,
sheriffs, elections, misery, trouble, and business are all institutions
of the intellectual man. Animals have not got them and have no use
for them. The only reason for their being is it give us an air of
refinement, you know, to have such things.
Marriage does not prevent cohabitation; marriage gives an opportunity
for degradation.
Theoretically marriage curbs passion; in reality it degrades
womanhood--it licenses prostitution.
The father’s and mother’s desire that their daughter marry well is
to make successful commerce of herself so that she will have an easy
life. The girl in school, in the store, in shop, or in the kitchen, is
ambitious to marry so she will not have to work.
“You have married me and have to support me. If you don’t, I will put
you where the dogs won’t get you”--have you heard that? What is that
except to get some one’s support by selling yourself? He is called
a clever young man who marries a rich wife. The dukes, princes, and
barons who flock to our shore are all looking for easy snaps by making
commerce of themselves--selling their titles and throwing themselves