The reason for suffering is desire, said the Buddha. What is desire? There can be little doubt that a lot of people walk this earth like pent-up knots of desire, frustration and confusion, glazed with fear. Desire which isn't realized creates fantasies, some times secret and dangerous fantasies, which rhymes in a backward chicken-and-egg kind of way with the Buddhistic tenet that the reason for desire is illusion. It is my belief that a lack of spiritual direction in people will create an abstract hole in the soul, it will turn them into a hungry ghost, filled with an insatiable desire for just about anything. Addiction. Food, drugs, religion, sex; anything that they can get their hands on. Of course, being the capitalist society that we are, this is called consumption and lies at the very bottom of the foundations for our economy. Consumers are what makes the world go round nowadays. 

When did your existence begin? What are you? A thing? I am of the mind that it is more accurate to describe a human being as a process which begins with conception and ends with death. But when did you come into the picture? Were you always there, somehow asleep before slowly waking up to find yourself alive in this world as a creature of body and mind? In order to not confront such issues, most people prefer to keep busy with various activities - and if that doesn't do the trick, with more heavy distractions such as drugs and religious hysteria. But at the end of the day, when you're alone and silent, the doubt and the fear comes creeping back. Who are you, really? What is going on out there? 

Of all the human desires, sexuality is by far the most interesting one. Many people, in fact I suspect a majority of all people, approach this dionysian energy in a fearsome manner. Any arena where the ego might lose its illusory sense of being on top of the world creates such a sense of dread. And, as we all know, the mind boggling mine field of potential emotional devastation that is human sexuality drives the frightened little monkeys to all sorts of twisted strategies. 

We like to classify things. It seems like the right thing to do to sort things into neat categories so that we can relate to them with our lazy auto pilot, rather than having to think anew at every new corner of our way. Let's take such a thing as homosexuality, which is probably the most common "deviation" out there. It's really hard for a lot of people to relate to that. Many men already have a troubled relation to their sexuality - in the sense that they are afraid of women and they feel clumsy and awkward around them - so they feel that the last thing they need is having to think of other men as sexual beings as well. And yet they have this ferocious drive inside them, so they seek alternative outlets.