Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/406

I may have a clue to the lack of sexual drive in the three-quarter saint. As I have gone through my self-analysis, perversions which once gave me great excitement now give less. They seem less dirty, more natural. Along with my general exaltation goes less sexual heat and less depression. It is the thing which has been worrying me. My sexual urge now seems to come out in the flow of ideas and the release of emotions. I don’t believe this is totally natural nor totally healthy, but it may be that all of us who were born under the weight of a society which denied sex except as the dirty, can feel saintly emotions—as occasionally I do—only when we have purged ourselves of sexual guilt. But we bear the scar.

Sexual guilt was the catalyst which opened sex to us. In other words, in the process of growing up, the dirt-sex identification became so engraved upon us that to wash away the connotations of dirt was to wash away much of sex. Perhaps that is the answer to the three-quarter saints. They could accept the whore, they could accept the dirt, and so sexual urge diminished, perhaps even vanished. But the real saint, the saint-who-has-not-yet-appeared, would not even bear the scar. His sexual urge would be joyous, and how joyous. Once in my life I had a taste of full orgasm. It was my first, and it was incredibly lovely.