Body, Sex and the Disgusting

 The body is disgusting. If someone spits at you it is nasty. If someone urinates on you, or you get faeces on your hands it is nasty. You shake hands with someone who uses their right hand in the loo and doesn't wash it properly it is yucky. A chef sneezes on your food. Someone has a nose bleed and you get some on you. On a busy train someone hasn't washed in a while, and you have the odour. Or their greasy hair rubs on your face in the crush. Someone lets off a smelly fart in the cinema. A spot explodes releasing all the puss. Someone has an accident and their belly is split so their guts begin to show. Or a compound fracture pushes the bone through the skin.

Yup the body is disgusting.

But I noticed something as a child. When you are sexually aroused it seems to turn off disgust. This must be an evolutionary necessity. Disgust is good. It keeps us away from close contact, disease and danger. But if we never had physical contact with people then how could we breed. So it seems a switch exists as part of sexual arousal to turn off disgust. This then enables us to do lots of disgusting things with our partner, that normally we wouldn't even think of. It's disgusting for a stranger to drink from our glass, or to find the cutlery isn't washed properly and we are putting things in our mouth that have been in other people's mouths. But we never stop to think when we are kissing or sucking in sex.

Now disgust is a critical part of religious practice. In order to diminish attachment to mortal worldly pursuits and concerns, a lot of time is taken getting clear on the exact nature of the body. Yes it is disgusting. There are no two ways about it. There is in fact nothing attractive about it. This is a part of a human body:

Now its a slightly flawed argument because we don't get people to think about the egg, flour and butter as separate parts that go into a cake. A cake is attractive, the separate parts by themselves not so much (else why bother baking, just eat the raw ingredients). So we say that the delicious nature of the cake is an illusion, or an emergent property because it is added on top of the ingredients. And so in a way this is true of the body. The attractive nature of the body is most definitely added on top of all the parts. She definitely looks very different from just skin and bone added together. 

And yet at the same time we do know that a cake is nothing more than the ingredients. We can watch them all go together and transform in the heat of the oven. Nothing comes out of the oven that didn't go in. And likewise the beauty of a face is literally nothing other than the skin and bones.

And so we have a dilemma. We can view the human body as disgusting, or the cake as disgusting. Or we can be seduced by the illusion.

This was put into the Matrix as the blue and red pills.

Its a critical part of the religious experience. To get beyond the seductions of the skin deep, superficial illusions we need to see the reality dispassionately and see the disgusting.

And writing that, there is the coolness that comes from the dissipating of ego. It would seem that the illusions are very much liked by the ego. The ego prefers illusion, perhaps because at root so is it.

Anyway something else to consider.