I don't know how many FFL readers are familiar with the late American
esoteric thinker Richard Rose. His best-known book was The Albigen
Papers. I always found his approach a little severe for my tastes -
along with Gurdjieff who insisted on calling his route "The Work! -
which is, no doubt, why Maharishi's "effortless" TM made such an appeal
to a lazybones like me.
One thing that made Rose stand out from other modern teachers was his
championing of celibacy. If being celibate is the way to enlightenment
then I know I'm never going to make it, so I guess I'm doomed to a life
of vice, crime and debauchery and all-round general ignorance.
One target for Rose was masturbation. He didn't hold with the current
attitude that masturbation is simply a harmless release of sexual
tension. On the contrary he believed it to be a serious problem for
today's men and women. I'm not saying he's wrong about that: sex is one
of those subjects about which you can't string together three
consecutive sentences without making a complete hypocrite of yourself.
Rose claimed that he could tell if someone was a (regular) masturbator
if they had a small arse (or "ass" as you Americans quaintly put it). I
swear I'm not making this up! For confirmation see The Sex Connection by
Alan Fitzpatrick. (Rose also thought that homosexuality was caused by a
virus transmitted from one male to another - but let's not go there.)
I've never had the nerve to follow strangers in the street, evaluate the
size of their backsides and then ask them if they were or were not
compulsive masturbators, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of Rose's
assessment.
The best part though is Rose's belief that when people masturbate,
although we (by which I mean you, of course) may fantasise about many
different scenarios during the reverie, each of us has one - and only
one - dominant fantasy that we close-in on when reaching the climax of
the operation. Sounds plausible!
But not only did Rose see a small "ass" as an indicator of a masturbator
he also claimed he could detect which dominant fantasy each person had.
Unfortunately, he didn't spell out what signs to look for in this case
but wouldn't it be cool to be at a dinner party and during one of those
embarrassing lulls in the conversation you could point to the chap
sitting opposite and say in an authoritative voice: "Nurse. PVC uniform.
Doggy style" and then just watch all the colour drain from his face!
