"Just one. But if you had access to instinct, you might realize that each one, to the degree he is aware, is all men."
"A cold, distant, impersonal idea, I must say!"
"The hell it is! The idea I'm putting forward involves being and acting what instinct orders in us—and the constant sense of that process. It relates me to every man—to every king and statesman and politician and movie queen and carpenter and garbage man—to every creature that walks and flies and swims and crawls—and to the sea, the setting sun, the stars. I see them all and I find in them the response that rises from being related to them. I consider them in my cortex—but my God consists also in feeling them. I do not stumble about in schisms and dichotomies. An infinite number of aspects of life which seem antithetical to most people seem merely two manifestations of one awareness to me. You're the kind of fellow, reverend, I bet, who goes around saying, like Will Rogers, that you never met a man you didn't like. I can buy that—and still know, besides, I never met a man I did like altogether, including me. I can say, there was never a moment when I altogether liked myself, or disliked. Warm sentiments pervade my coldest thoughts. Heaven and hell are here in this one room.
"There—you see—we get back to the original sin, again: the static standards that must be maintained if the ego is to be kept intact. This is evil—that is good; he is saved—she is damned; my opinion is right—yours is wrong; my faith makes me perfect and whole—yours, meaning all the other faiths on earth, is imperfect and fragmentary at best. For why? Simply because my faith is mine. Me, me, me. I, I, I. That is what happens—that is the tragifarce—of taking instinct away from the brain and being entire, and investing the gigantic force of it in the little front lobes. From then on—'I have faith—and I, alone, am right. I, alone, am God.'
"Well, in my book, I am God, padre, and so are you, and so are all the people on the street down there, and so is the heat wave, and so are scorpions and rattlesnakes and botuli bacilli, and so are the intergalactic clouds. One thing. It is not necessary for me to elevate myself above these—to commit original sin by defining that unity in terms of my fatuous self-admiration. I do not have to give my days, my doings and my dreams to the establishment of the general illusion that I am no animal—whether by fasts or feasts, by fish on Friday or by Easter celebrations, by shutting the door when I tend my body, and especially, dominie, I do not have to pretend the procreative urge in me is superior to that same urge in cosmos—by delimiting it, stylizing it, codifying it, and hiding it wherever and whenever it must have expression. Chastity, celibacy, virginity, purity—these are the lowest terms of original sin. These condemn the animal to a vile psychological and social beastliness by forcing him to pretend he is not the unashamed pure animal that he is."
"You want free love—promiscuity—no moral ethic—"
"Nonsense! I want to build our sex behavior around what is learned to be true nature of man—to establish an aesthetic from instinct—not from the instinct-perverting demands of ego and superego.'
"And what would it be?"
"Loving, for a start."
He moved impatiently. "Spiritual love—"