What book or website do you recommend me to learn sex morals?

There are many books on sex morals, but I don’t read them as I know that the Church forbids everything and the majority of Catholic faithful permits everything (so long as nobody is hurt, or course). That is the situation. I’ll quote you what the editor of the prestigious weekly ‘America’ of the American Jesuits, Fr Thomas J. Reese, SJ, wrote on this point:

‘In the Catholic Church the battle on sex is over. In matters like birth control, masturbation, premarital sex, second weddings…, the hierarchy has lost the majority of the faithful. The battle of sex is over, and there are no winners. The Church has not won because people don’t listen to her, and the faithful have not won because they still get a guilt complex even if in theory they see no sin in what they do.’ (Selecciones de Teología, nº 150, p. 96)

This is a sad summary. Painful but true. Without any solution in sight. The ‘heroic resistance the Church is putting up in the matter of sex’, in Andrés Torres Queiruga’s phrase, is hurting her, and we all feel it. The best you can now do in the matter you are asking me about is to go to a Catholic bookshop, see books on sex by yourself, and ask the booksellers to recommend you some book written with an open mind on this topic. The great commandment is not to harm anybody, and the normal sex practices as enumerated by the editor of the magazine do not harm anybody. And do not worry about it.

Om, mani padme Om

Several of you have asked me about the meaning of the Buddhist prayer I quoted in my last Web. This is precisely what a Buddhist would never do, asking about its meaning. We are worried about the ‘meaning’, the logic, the intellectual content, and that is exactly what has to be discouraged. By the way, it means, ‘the ruby is in the lotus’. As you can see, that does not explain anything. Or it does explain everything. It is the Buddhist tactics that seek to take us out and away from the intellectual logic that enslaves all of us here in the West, and to free the mind from its usual conditionings. We all in the West are children of Aristotle, Descartes, and Newton, and those gentlemen are fine, no doubt, but their iron logic is depriving us of the spontaneity of the senses and the freedom to talk nonsense, to laugh belly laughs, and to waste our time if we are pleased to do so. Descartes held that animals were mere machines because they could not say ‘I think, therefore I exist’, Aristotle thought in syllogisms, and Newton could not see an apple falling without starting to write down equations on the law of gravity. It’s about time we change, for heaven’s sake, it’s about time! About time we free ourselves from such slavery. The ruby is in the lotus. Let’s laugh together a good laugh.