A while later the President's party came through the same exhibit and the guide told him, "Sir, Mrs Coolidge said to be sure to tell you that the rooster there performs his services up to eight or nine times a day." Coolidge thought for a moment and asked, "Same chicken each time?" "No, Mr President, different chickens each time." "Then see to it that Mrs Coolidge is given that information!"

But what is the experience? Untellable. Only, we know something. We know that in the act of coition the blood of the individual man, acutely surcharged with intense vital electricity-we know no word, so say "electricity", by analogy-rises to a culmination, in a tremendous magnetic urge towards the magnetic blood of the female. The whole of the living blood in the two individuals forms a field of intense, polarised magnetic attraction. So, the two poles must be brought into contact.

In the act of coition, the two seas of blood in the two individuals, rocking and surging towards contact, as near as possible, clash into a oneness. A great flash of interchange occurs, like an electric spark when two currents meet or like lightning out of the densely surcharged clouds. There is a lightning flash which passes through the blood of both individuals, there is a thunder of sensation which rolls in diminishing crashes down the nerves of each-and then the tension passes. The two individuals are separate again. But are they as they were before? Is the air the same after a thunderstorm as before? No. The air is as it were new, fresh, tingling with newness.

What do we find at the basis of unhappy or strained sexual relationships? That one or other of the partners is having recourse to physical intimacy out of a feeling of frustration, or in order to forget, or to flee from a feeling of inadequacy or disappointment. Instead of being a celebration, the act becomes a means of escape or of forgetfulness, it proceeds not from health but from disease, not out of strength but out of weakness, not from joy and health but from exasperation or self-pity. And the result is that one of the partners feels that he or she is being used as a thing, a drug, a medicine or as a hot-water bottle, is being prostituted as a person.

As a young and happily married man said to me last night, "I love my wife, and at moments when we have achieved real fellowship in mind and spirit, when we have a good day together, I turn to her in complete happiness to fulfil and consummate that deep, rich joy we have had in each other. But I am unhappy and somewhat repelled when Elizabeth, having had a frustrated day, feeling disappointed with herself, or being self-distrustful about her career, turns to the physical act in order to forget it all, in order to compensate for the happiness she feels she has missed on another level."

This is not an isolated case. And what is really happening is that people are using the flesh in order to solve the problems of the spirit. They obtain in momentary relief from the tension of self. But the relief is only a semblance of the true atonement. What is experienced is not spiritual identity with the loved one, but a momentary escape from separateness in the darkness of the unconscious. And so, far from being permanently enriched and cleansed by this experience, the self returns to the daylight world fundamentally unchanged, if not indeed corrupted.

Somebody once said that two people have no chance of being successfully married to each other if they are not already married to themselves. Of course we are incomplete as we are, and marriage wonderfully fulfils and integrates our lives. But it is the total experience of being married that does this, not one isolated act. People expect from physical union what can only come from growth and discipline at other levels. And so sex becomes an attempt to redeem the self instead of a sharing of the redeemed self