It was the horniness that was the teacher.
I thought it was in the way of my teaching.
I was like, if I could only stop being horny,
I could meditate and I could find God.
Fuck that shit.
God is in the horniness.
The reason the book is called "Comedy Sex
God" is because God and sex were so closely
linked for me.
When I was a kid, I wasn't tempted to lie
or cheat or steal, or certainly not murder
anybody.
Those were all very easy ordinances from the
church to follow because I wasn't tempted
to do them.
But sex, it's a biological, pulsing, organically
occurring, fresh-batch-every-morning temptation
that all these 12, 13, 14-year-olds were being
told was the thing, the sin, that was keeping
God, basically, from loving us.
You know what I mean?
We were all good to go to heaven, but three,
sometimes four times a day, you're very tempted.
Or in my case, I would succumb succumb! to
temptation, and I felt terrible about it because
that was my understanding of God.
And one of the reasons I wrote the book was
to try and reform that understanding of God
as this like, basically a bully, as Nadia
Bolz-Weber says, with a killer surveillance
system who's watching you and who really hates
you.
He hates what you are and wishes that Richard
Rohr calls it willpower Christianity, it's
like we can just push these giant boulders
away and lean on them, and be at church and
be like, "Hey, brother!"
But really, you're as human as anybody, and
that is a cognitive and spiritual dissonance
that is a heavy, heavy weight.
So I joke that the book is called "Comedy
Sex God", but most of the sex is with myself
because it was so internalized and it was
so shameful and private.
So when I lost my faith because my wife here's
sex again: My wife had an affair.
So sex, again, betrayed me.
I was trying to be a good boy and I got married
almost so that I could have sex, so I was
playing by the rules.
And then she broke the rules.
But even worse, it felt like God, who was
almost like the mafia -- I paid him a fee
to watch my bakery, if that makes sense, and
then somebody threw a brick through my bakery
window.
And I was like, 'You didn't hold up your end
of the bargain.'
So I lost my faith, and then I really had
to redefine what sexuality was.
It was almost like coming out of the closet
as straight.
I'm not trying to minimize how serious and
how difficult it can be to come out of the
closet as gay, but I had to announce to myself
and to the world: "I like boobies."
And that was hard because you were waiting
for lightning to strike you down.
So the wonderful thing that I've discovered
about the universe we don't have to call it
God because I understand and sympathize that
that's a loaded word but I see a universe
that uses these wounds and these traumas and
these wrong programs in our favor, ultimately.
So I spent all this time, first, repressing
my sexuality.
Then I lost my faith.
Then I went through a period of embracing
it as best as I could.
I bought the Playboy that I hid in my bedroom
in a chair that used to belong to my grandmother.
I cut a slit in the lining of that chair and
I hid this Playboy that I had stolen with
my friend, Opie.
So that was two sins, really.
And then when I lost my faith, I bought that
Playboy on eBay and put it on my coffee table,
because I knew that my psyche needed symbols.
I was trying to outwardly manifest a world
where I wasn't ashamed of being a sexual person.
So like a swinger or like Burt Reynolds, I
just kept or a barbershop just open air pornography,
which was partially healing.
And then I tried having anonymous -- or casual
-- anonymous is not true; I knew their names
and they knew my name, so it wasn't anonymous.
And I didn't have sex with a group of renegade
hackers wearing scary masks.
I was just having sex with people that I had
no intention of marrying, which, if you can
believe it, was a huge undertaking for me.
So I thought that was healing myself.
But as I talk about in the book, there was
a third step, which was I had to learn to
irrationally love myself, and that that is
the sort of love that, I believe, is coming
from the universe or coming from God, whatever
image you'd like to use, as indiscriminately
as the light.
So I went on this retreat to see Ram Dass,
who's this spiritual teacher, he wrote "Be
Here Now".
And I went into I was on a private, basically,
a hermitage, living in his guesthouse.
But I was alone most of the time.
And it was wonderful.
I had this incredible transcendent experience
sitting with him.
I was hallucinating, which is fucking crazy
and awesome.
Even while it was happening, I was like, "It's
happening, I'm having a mystical experience!"
But then I would go back to the house, and
in the morning sometimes or at night, I would
get 10 out of 10 horny, hornier than I had
been since I had been 15.
And there I was, 39 or something, and I was
trying to be spiritual.
I was trying to meditate, I was burning seven
to 10 sticks of incense a day.
I was reading sacred texts.
And all the while, I'm thinking about jiggling
asses and stuff.
And I was embarrassed.
It was so obvious my Christian, my puritanical
shame psychology was still in there.
Playboys on the table and casual sex be damned,
I hadn't yet opened all the blinders in my
soul, for lack of a better word, and let the
light in.
So I thought it was in the way.
I was very tempted to just masturbate and
get it over with, which is how I saw sex.
I always saw it as not something to enjoy
or to respect or to honor or to just participate
with, I saw it as something that you wanted
to get out of the way so you could get back
to being good or being holy or being worthy
of love.
So there I was on a hermitage, fucking horny.
I don't know if people can even remember what
it's like to be 15, And you're just like,
everything is sex, everything is sex.
And I was really tempted to do something about
it.
I joke in the book, I couldn't look at pornography
on my laptop.
The password for the Wi-Fi was the name of
Ram Dass's guru.
So I couldn't type in the name of an other-worldly
guru, and then go to fucking, I don't know,
XVideos or whatever.
I just couldn't do it.
It was all coming in my face coming in my
face.
[LAUGHING] it was all being held right into
my face.
So I had this moment of surrender and break,
where I tried to do what I had been studying
and what I had been telling myself.
I tried to just love myself irrationally.
People give out this bullshit Kirkland purified
water love to each other.
It's conditional, it sucks, it's low grade.
It's well love, and I want that top shelf
premium love.
And that really is a thoughtless love.
It's a love without a reason.
It's not, oh, I'm horny, Pete, I love how
human you are or how conflicted you are or
how good you want to be or how carnal you
are and virile.
It wasn't that.
That's justifying why you feel the way you
feel.
I just tried loving it because love is a place,
it's like a state that you can enter into,
and you just go, everything, just like I said,
as indiscriminately as the light, I love this,
too.
It's not God is over here with the saying
frack instead of fuck, and not seeing R-rated
movies and being nice.
Richard Rohr points out, the word nice is
not in the New Testament doesn't exist.
We've lost the narrative.
We've turned it into a [HEARTY CHUCKLE] and
it was never about that.
And I wanted to get into that place.
You think think this is a mistake?
This, my body, sexuality, the world, the air
we breathe, the food we eat, the whole thing
is sex.
The universe is undulating eroticism, and
that's fucking beautiful.
It's not a mistake.
And spirituality, true connection and flow
with the divine, to me, is not a resistance,
it's not about looking good or telling people
that you didn't jerk off in Ram Dass's hermitage,
which I didn't.
But the reason I didn't was because I love
myself if I did or if I didn't, and it was
in that moment that I realized the pain and
that embarrassment and that shame wasn't in
the way of the teaching, it was the teaching.
And I had another just beautiful moment of
actually loving myself.
Because I realized I had been giving myself
that low-grade, bullshit, conditional love.
And I realized if you want to feel that from
the universe, it starts by giving it to yourself.
Not in the way I had intended, but I did give
it to myself.
