Sexual Freedom is Primary Freedom and Ultimate Freedom

Xuefeng

November 19, 2019

“Give me liberty, or give me death”. “Liberty, love? For my love, I would sacrifice Life; these two I need, For liberty I will sacrifice my love”.

Life’s ultimate goal is its pursuit of freedom. Why are people afraid of hell? Because it has no freedom. Why do people yearn for heaven? Because it has total freedom.

What one longs for in jail is freedom; it is more precious than money, power, status, reputation, mansions, luxury cars, delicacies from land and sea, or top brand clothing. Why do people not want to be slaves? Because slaves have no freedom. Why do they want to become celestials and Buddhas, because those entities have more freedom. Can people ever get enough freedom? No; only Lives higher than ours can be fully free.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that “All human beings are born free” and “Everyone has the right to liberty”. So what is freedom? Freedom means that one’s will is fully exerted and displayed. We are members of societies, no more influential than drops of water in the oceans. It is impossible to “fully exert and display one’s own will” because the freedom of one person can easily conflict with that of another, so everyone must be restrained. Theoretically, the role and value of contracts, regulations, laws, constitutions, and so forth are to protect everyone’s freedoms to the maximum, so everyone must act within their scope. Beyond this scope, freedom would lead to chaos and war, so then absolute freedom would lead to absolute restraint.

Freedom is a high-level life state. People cannot have total freedom; for example, they cannot have the freedom to burn, kill, rob, deceive and swindle, humiliate, attack, slander or frame others, defecate in public places, hurt others, and so on.

Individuals cannot have complete freedom; they can only pursue freedoms that have little potential for conflict with others, society, and nature, such as those of migration, imagination, thought, their pursuit of life in heaven, freedom from death, of labor and creation, and sexual freedom.

Among all the freedoms, the first freedom that people should pursue is sexual freedom because without it, all the other freedoms are illusory and unreal, not ultimate, short-lived, and ineffective solutions. Sexual freedom is both primal and ultimate. In other words, sexual freedom is the core of all freedoms and the others are marginal. To pursue freedom, the first one to pursue is always sexual.

What is sexual freedom? When it comes to sex, we should not narrowly restrict it to male and female sexual intercourse. Master Bodhidharma clearly pointed out in his “Bloodstream Sermon” that “nature (same word as sex in Chinese) is Buddha”. When someone has sexual freedom, they are Buddha. Therefore, the meaning of sexual freedom is: “to be able to exist and live fully according to the creator’s intention”. According to Chanyuan values, it means having the ability to exist and live according to the way of nature. For example, to see with one’s eyes is a freedom of human nature. Eyes are for seeing, so if their function to do that were forbidden, that would be restricting and depriving one’s freedom of nature. If one is prohibited from singing when they want to, they would lose some of their freedom of nature. Another example is that everyone has reproductive organs with purposes. They are not only used for excretion and procreation, but also for enjoying sexual pleasure. Restricting one’s enjoyment of sexual pleasure is restricting their nature. If one fully enjoys sexual pleasure, it can be said that they have gained sexual freedom.

There will always be those who, whenever sexual freedom is mentioned, will immediately think of sexual openness, carnalism, debauchery, lewdness, promiscuity, pimps, sluts, adulterers, fornication, and the like. These are purely assumptions and imaginings of the savage and foolish or the expected understandings of men with brutish natures. Sexual freedom is the artistic blooming and enjoyment of the nature of the civilized, not the delicacy of scrambling barbarians. Some people attribute AIDS and other STDs, family breakdowns, and similar consequences to sexual freedom, but this is the same as attributing diseases to food, which makes no sense. If you compare sexual freedom to flying, you cannot deny air travel because planes have crashed.

It can be said that other freedoms can only exist after sexual freedom has been obtained; without sexual freedom, those others are empty talk. One’s degree of life quality is closely related to their level of freedom; the higher their quality of Life, the greater their freedom. When we look at nature, we find that animals are freer than plants, we are freer than animals, celestials and Buddha are freer than us, and gods are freer than celestials and Buddha.

To pursue freedom, we must first pursue sexual freedom; however, if one does not perfect their soul garden and does not possess the qualities of sincerity, kindness, beauty, love, faith, and honesty, then they absolutely cannot enjoy sexual freedom.

In short, people cannot enjoy sexual freedom fully. This is determined by the quality of our species. If anyone can truly enjoy sexual freedom; congratulations, you are no longer a human being, you have elevated yourself to the status of a celestial or beyond.