Roy Masters
Don’t get married! Paul put it very nicely. He said, “It’s better to marry than to burn,” but only if you can’t make it, if you can’t stay single. It’s very simple.
I’d like to discuss it with you one day, but here’s a clue: If a man has found wholeness within himself, if he has found virtue and strength and courage, he has found control over his mind, over his feelings, over his body—and he can’t be turned on by stimulation or temptation, because virtue and reason and morals, the perception of the moment, takes precedence.
Now, a wild man, who has not found correction from within, an inner stability, is easily turned on by women, and he just has to get married. It’s very simple. He just has to get married.
But such a marriage, and the sexual relationship he has with his wife, always proves unsatisfactory, because he marries the woman who is able to turn him on and rob him of his manhood.
He’s always struggling to regain it in various ways. Instead of seeking virtue within himself, he is always trying to compensate for his fall from virtue by being a man in other ways.
But a man is not a man until he is turned on and governed by an overriding Reason, an inner Principle. Once a man has found himself completely, has learned the art of control, and can govern himself, then he is no longer turned on from the outside.
He no longer has sexual feelings so unbearable that he is driven to find a legal way to express them. He can get married, of course, but he can always function in due season. If it’s not right to do this, he just doesn’t do it, and he doesn’t feel frustrated in his abstinence.
But every human being who doesn’t function from Reason feels frustration. No matter what it is: sex, ambition, everything! Because he is outwardly motivated, he feels the need to express at the moment of stimulation.
And he might find expression difficult in the absence of stimulation.
Haven’t you noticed that if you want to speak up, you have to get angry? And that when you’re angry, you invariably say the wrong thing? So you figure, “Well, I’ll keep it to myself next time,” and you bottle it up, only to destroy yourself. You throw all your body chemistry out of whack, don’t you?
It’s because you have no control. You have merely repressed what was stimulated into you by reason of your having no control. Had you had control, you could not have been turned on in the first place.
Surely you must be discovering that many of your emotions are turned on by other people, and that you have to express them in relation to the people who turn them on.
If you are tempted by a woman, you have to get the woman; if a nice dinner turns you on, you have to eat the dinner; if a glass of whisky turns you on, you have to drink the whisky.
And as long as the door to your emotions hangs open, you will be having a continuous relationship with everything that comes through it to turn you on. You will need to gratify and express your nature in relationship with these intruders.
If someone attacks you, you have to fight back—you just have to. Because of your weakness you are often caught in traps of intrigue. People know that when they turn you on, you will get upset and you will reply in a certain way, and that you must reply in that certain way, and that if you don’t you’ll suffer terrible frustration and get sick and die anyway.
"Every emotion that is turned on by the outside makes you into a beast, subject to the control and the mood of the outside, with less and less control within your own self. "
You must realize that being upset, and then saying or doing something, or being sexually stimulated and doing something, is wrong.
Every emotion that is turned on by the outside makes you into a beast, subject to the control and the mood of the outside, with less and less control within your own self. To express it is simply to accept the pattern prepared for you by the other person.
To repress it is to invite frustration and confusion. And as long as the stimulations are there, the pressure is so unbearable that you have to express it, and then you make an excuse or justification for it—and that will be your “truth” and your “way of life,” and you’ll have to be turning on other people, tempting them in the same way, to minimize your own faults.
Even as you yourself were tempted, you will have to become a tempter. Then they will react—oh, they might resist for awhile—but as long as the door to their mind is open, and no one has taught them self-control, discipline, love, and understanding, they will go through the same training cycle.
Eventually, it becomes so unbearable that they have to give in to it and express their animal lusts and desires, and make excuses for this expression—call it the “truth” (it’s only “natural”)—you see?
And there you have a whole generation growing up that way: animals, beasts—without love and understanding in their relationships with one another, losing control of themselves, no longer developing into something “human,” but into something that is sub-human, robots, mindless beings, full of confusion and fears and guilts, hurting and being hurt, turning on and being turned on—always in the wrong way.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, you need to be turned on in a different way. And that’s from within yourself. You must find the overriding Reason to govern your thoughts and feelings and actions, so that you can function in due season.
And if something isn’t feasible, you just don’t get “turned on.” If you happen not to be married, it just doesn’t bother you—a pretty girl can do a wiggle in front of you, and it doesn’t bother you a bit—you don’t turn a hair.
And the same goes for the ladies in the audience. You’ll not suffer the temptation of a man who is not right for you. His appeal simply won’t be a temptation to you. When you are right within yourself, you will find his charm odious.
But when you are not right within yourself, you are attracted by a man who is weak—or haven’t you noticed it?
Ladies and gentlemen, when you are right within yourself, the fascination is for the beautiful, the right; but if you are ugly and without virtue yourself, egocentric, what is beautiful to you is the ugly.
The ugly that is attractive, and the beautiful that is repulsive.
And all your life you will be drawn into wrong relationships with other people—business associates, marriage partners, just name it—and you draw to yourself all kinds of trouble, because the egocentric nature cannot by its own nature (being egocentric) bear anything that is truly right and beautiful, because it would reveal its ugliness and its failings.