A Smile in the Mind's Eye Read Online Free Page A

of Christianity – with its cult of the ego, of original sin, of the wrathful God, and so on. How pure and kindly the simple Chinese ordinances seemed when one thought of our plight in the West. It was most instructive to me to see ourselves through his Chinese eyes. The aesthete in Chang was disgusted and terrified when he thought of the sexual atmosphere of cruelty and ugliness which he found in the arts; but he was just as shocked when he thought of the bulging dustbins of Los Angeles and London, the reckless improvidence which led us to pollute and devastate our natural inheritance upon earth in a perverse almost deliberate search for unhappiness. The question of sexual deviation led him on his side to question me about such matters. Was there much homosexuality in Tibet? No, but plenty in Mount Athos and the Vatican! Could it be that the element of narcissism which is at the base of it in the Freudian analysis is vastly strengthened by the Christian code, the cult of the Luciferian will to power? He laughed, and admitted that it could be true.
    â€˜People want to have done with sex because it has brought them nothing but shame and disappointment; and its misuse has brought them to a premature old age. They lack desire themselves and because of the fearful things they eat they smell so awful that nobody feels like caressing them. Old age is a dreadful thing in the West. No wonder it is feared, no wonder the old are put away in remote flats or old-age communities and left to die. They have no further function, and they have forfeited the joy which should be theirs.’ (I thought to myself: Why has the Dalai Lama got no Oedipus Complex? Answer: Because he has no mother and no father. The buck stops there!) But meanwhile what of the lovers – the Taoist lovers caught up in their eternal embrace, gathered into the spiral momentum of the All, the cosmic rhythm as it ripples slowly along its trajectory of yang and yin, back and forth, the pendulum of mother nature? What about Jack loves Jill? Chang grew irritated. ‘The lovers in the books are simply the representatives of a natural process. Of course Jack can love Jill and write love poems to her, not to mention to recite acrostics with rather questionable meanings, in order to make her laugh. But that aspect of things concerns their personalities, it is in the domain of the novel. This treatise presumes them to be The Perfect Couple, perfectly slotted into the science of the love-yoga: The Tao. It is beyond the man-eat-dog stage in human affairs. My lovers are the Nonpareil, the Peerless Lovers of the Taoist scheme. We shouldn’t address silly questions to people about them. Theirs is a condition to be aspired to, even if we never reach it.’ Simple as the sap travelling through the veins of a tree. Sadism, masochism, why be bothered with them except to regret that with them nature went out of true, and it was our fault? You become what you believe. The Taoist lovers, then, were ego-less; they were human embodiments of cosmic process; one was silly even to want to call them Jack and Jill when in reality they were sleepwalking yangs and yins … At this moment there was a power-cut and I thought of Chang’s pleasure and wonder every time he switched on the electric light with its ‘filaments of gratified if disembodied desire’. The gratification of the lovers lay on a different plane; by dint of mastering the orgasm one raised love to a higher frequency. One prolonged life, the immortal life which one was in honour bound to try and realize upon earth … How difficult it was to express all this in a way which might make good sense to someone brought up in the West, by the canons of a culture whose language was based on dichotomy. But perhaps more important even than this was that the ancient Taoist view of sexuality suggested that they considered it to be the basic mechanism upon which the happy and healthy functioning of the whole