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Autobiography of Alice A. Bailey - Chapter V
One of the mysteries of human nature emerged most definitely into my consciousness at this time. I discovered that people were perfectly willing to talk about the most intimate affairs in their daily lives, revealing their sex relations with their husbands or their wives to me - a perfect stranger. I suppose my reaction against this was based upon my British background for we here in America have always talked more freely to strangers than has ever been the custom with the other half of the Anglo Saxon race. Candidly, I've never liked it. There is a certain reticence which is useful and right, and I have always realized that when people have been too frank with one and have given themselves away in intimate conversation they generally end by hating you - a type of hatred that is not warranted or merited by the person in whom they have confided. I've never been interested in the sex relations of people but I realize that it is a major factor in individual harmony. [200] This whole question of sex is today in a fluid condition. I am myself a conservative Britisher, with a horror of divorce, with a dislike of sex discussions but I do know, however, that the modern generation is not entirely wrong. I do know that the Victorian attitude was rotten and pernicious. Their secrecy and the mystery they aroused around the whole problem of sex was a dangerous thing in an innocent group of young people in creative natural living. The whispers, the secrets, the communications behind locked doors raised inquiries among young people and resulted in dirtiness in their thinking and is something difficult to forgive in the Victorian father and mother. Today we are suffering from the reaction to this. It is almost possible that young people know too much, but I personally believe it to be a far safer condition than the one in which I was raised. Just what is the solution of the sex problem of the races I do not know. I do know that under British law in foreign countries and presumably Dutch and any other laws, a man who is a Mohammedan may have a plurality of wives. Men of every nation, American, British or any other nation have always had plurality of contacts. Out of all this promiscuity and out of all this searching for an answer some true solution will eventually emerge. The French haven't got it, for with the French nation there is the demonstration that "the mind is the slayer of the real." They are such realists that the beautiful, spiritual, subjective thing is often forgotten and this indicates a great lack in the French equipment. Their Senate assembles without any recognition of Deity; their Masonic orders are outlawed by the Grand Lodges of other countries because they recognize no Grand Architect of the Universe and their planned sex relationships are based upon a purely utilitarian [201] concept which is basically sound provided there is nothing in the world but material living. Today, in 1947, the world is sex mad. Great Britain, the U.S., and all other countries are riddled by divorce procedures; young people marry on the basis that if the union is not a happy one it can be dissolved, and who shall say they are wrong? Illegitimate children as a result of the war psychosis in every country are almost the rule and not the exception. Wherever marching armies march hundreds of thousands of illegitimate children are the result. The church fulminates against the modern view of marriage and its disillusion but offers no solution, and both the Catholic and Episcopal churches of the U.S. and Great Britain hold the view that if a divorce is procured any later marriage is adultery. I remember so well in this connection wishing to attend a communion service in the early mornings at a little church at Tunbridge Wells which was close to our headquarters in that town. I went to the rector and asked permission because England is a very small country and my people are very well known. The rector said he would have to get permission of the Bishop and this permission was refused and the rector came and told me I could not go to communion. I looked at the rector for a few minutes and then I said, "I could have come to this town from America and be the cocktail drinking, card-playing woman, fast and with half a dozen lovers and I could have gone to communion because I had had no divorce. Twenty years ago I got a divorce with the full approval of the Bishop and clergy in the diocese because they knew the facts, but I cannot attend communion - I, who have sought to serve the Christ since I was fifteen." There is something fundamentally wrong with the Church of England. There is something equally wrong with the Episcopal Church here because a bishop of this [202] church said to me once, "Don't ever tell me that a person is divorced because what I do not know hurts nobody, but if I know then I shall have to refuse communion." No comment. We are on our way towards the solution of the sex problem. What it will be I do not know, but I trust in the inherent soundness of humanity and the unfolding purpose of God. Maybe the solution will come through right education in our schools and the right attitude of the parents in the world towards their adolescent boys and girls. The present attitude is based on fear, ignorance and reticence. The time must come when educators and parents talk out the facts of life and the regulation of the sexes openly and directly with the young people, and I see that time most rapidly approaching. The young people are very sound but their ignorance frequently gets them into difficulties. If they know the facts - the brutal, unadorned facts - they will know what to do. All this silly talk about little flowers and seed-pods and babies coming via the stork and similar approaches to the sex problem, and they are many, are an insult to the human intelligence and our young people are most highly intelligent.
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