The faculties of intelligence express themselves through physical channels, which they have created for the purpose of their expression. The faculty of sight has created the eyes; that of smell has created the nose; each organ in fact has been developed by a certain faculty, in order to express its particular purpose.

Whichever channel activity works through, it effects some purpose. If rightly directed it achieves the intended purpose; if wrongly directed that intended purpose is not accomplished, but some other result is brought about. The ingenuity of science enables the nose to be used as a passage to convey food to the stomach; but science cannot do this without risk of dangerous consequences; and it is a thing quite beyond the unskilled to effect without inflicting injury. To take a railway ticket to Southampton, wishing to go there, and then to get into a train for Brighton, is called a mistake or going astray; but those who are in the train for Brighton, wishing to go to Brighton, cannot be said to be going astray. The tracks of the railway line are made for the smooth running of the train; if the train slips off the track, it not only has difficulty in proceeding but it also causes damage, ploughing up the land and creating destruction in its path.

The generative organs have been developed by the generative faculty, and when used for any other purpose they are misused; and other use directs energy to a wrong channel and creates disorder.

Under a mantle of beauty there may be hidden something desperately evil, while a revolting mask sometimes covers a gem of pure loveliness. The difficulty of touching upon the hideous aspects of life lies in the fact that different social classes are so cut off from one another as to be quite ignorant of each other. Each has its virtues, covering the vices due to its own conventions of life; and to each the vice it does not know appears more intolerable and more unnatural than the vice it is acquainted with.

There is perversion that follows over-indulgence in the beauty that life offers; and equally perversion follows the too rigid observance of hard and fast moral, social, or religious ideas of order. However beneficial any method of life may appear, it inevitably leads, if carried to excess, to something disastrous or unwholesome which may be called perversion. And so it is that these unwholesome results are usually logical developments of causes of which the individual is the hapless victim; it is not always possible to blame him with justice for his condition.

A vast section of civilized society almost ignores the inborn impulses towards beauty and interest; and its unimaginative conception of life weighs not only upon its younger, but grinds also upon its older members. Wherever the natural channels of life are choked and stopped up, other outlets are forced; some of these may seem to be productive of beauty, but most are proved to be eventually productive of innumerable forms of ugliness or cruelty.

Thus the restrictions which some classes place, by their social and religious conventions, upon the liberty of the individual, with the laudable motive of preserving standards of order, bring about pitiable situations of life; pitiable as the ruin caused by the lawlessness of those other classes which are too powerful, or too obscure, to submit to restraint.

Vol. 3, Life's Creative Forces: Rasa Shastra

17. Perversion

i.

Vol. 3, Life's Creative Forces: Rasa Shastra

17. Perversion

i.