{"id":11211,"date":"2010-10-18T13:36:05","date_gmt":"2010-10-18T13:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2010\/10\/18\/divine-light-sex-alcohol-and-kerouac-4\/"},"modified":"2010-10-18T13:36:05","modified_gmt":"2010-10-18T13:36:05","slug":"divine-light-sex-alcohol-and-kerouac-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2010\/10\/18\/divine-light-sex-alcohol-and-kerouac-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in.&#0160; Herein lies the best argument for continence.&#0160; The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he may be even more destructive of the spirit.&#0160; You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying that there is any divine light or by denying that sexual&#0160;indulgence impedes its influx, or both.&#0160; But if you are in the grip of either monkey I will dismiss your dismissal.&#0160; Why should I listen to a man with a monkey on his back?&#0160; How do I know it is the man speaking and not the monkey?<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">Poor Kerouac got the holy hell beaten out of him by the simian tag-team.&#0160;&#0160; The Ellis Amburn biography goes into the greatest detail regarding Kerouac&#39;s homo- and hetero-erotic sexual excesses.&#0160; His fatal fondness for the sauce, for the devil in liquid form, is documented in all the biographies.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">It is not that the lovable dharma lush did not struggle mightily in his jihad against his lower self.&#0160; He did, in his Buddhist phase in the mid-fifties,&#0160;before the 1957 success of <em>On the Road<\/em> and the blandishments of fame did him in.&#0160; (Worldly $ucce$$\/Suckcess is an ambiguous good.) I&#39;ve already pulled some quotations from <em>Some of the Dharma <\/em>which&#0160; offers the best documentation of Jack&#39;s attempt to tread the straight path to the narrow gate.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia,palatino;\">One lesson, perhaps, is that we cannot be lamps unto ourselves even if the Tathagata succeeded in pulling himself up into Nirvana by his samsaric sandalstraps.&#0160; To the vast run of us ordinary<a href=\"http:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/maverick_philosopher\/2010\/10\/kerouac-to-whalen-on-buddhism.html\" target=\"_self\"> &quot;poor suffering fucks&quot;<\/a> a religion of self-help is no help at all.&#0160; The help we need, if help there be, must come from Elsewhere.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in.&#0160; Herein lies the best argument for continence.&#0160; The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he may be even more destructive of the spirit.&#0160; You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2010\/10\/18\/divine-light-sex-alcohol-and-kerouac-4\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112,269,202,139,42,543],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alcohol-tobacco-and-firearms","category-buddhism","category-kerouac-and-friends","category-religion","category-sex-love-lust","category-soteriology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}