Bodies

Has it ever happened to you that you are driving down the street and you see an attractive 'body' down the street and all you see is a body, without a face and without a soul. Sure, if you really stopped the car and would bother to look, you would see a face and you would discover the soul and the entire gestalt would change in the process. 

I remember once a college student observing in my favorite chat room 'Personal Development Forum for Smart People' that he suffers from sexual addiction. He complained that he masturbates excessively and watches way too many pornographic movies and that consequently whenever he interacts with a girl he can only think of her as a sexual object. 

I think our friend is onto something important. You literally have a choice when you connect with the sex of your attraction whether you want to see him or her as a sexual object - a body - or a soul. We are what we are and we certainly shouldn't repress our sexual desires in the name of spirituality, but every step you take toward sexual fantasies, the more fuel you will add to your hormonic and psychological fire and you will end up seeing people as nothing but bodies. My advice to him was to have more real sex, while trying to avoid having the sexual fantasies as much as possible, as did many others in the community.

Sex is an expression of life. A spiritual path  doesn't have to be a monk, at least in my experience. Yet, the mind has to become 100 percent pure, that's the path of healing along the Way. I cannot help seeing bodies sometimes. Yet, to come back to the driving example from the beginning, what I can and will do is to try to see the face of the woman who passes by. I have yet to experience a case when after that brief spiritual imprint that I receive, we don't manage to completely overwrite the initial sexual impression. Life is here to heal you and the Tao will bend backwards to propel you along the Way. If you always put your best foot forward, your spiritual soul sisters and brothers will always deliver.