And if you want to condemn nature you have to start by condemning sex, because the whole of nature arises out of it. The whole of nature is an overflowing of sex energy, of love. The birds sing, the trees flower – this is all sexual energy exploding. Flowers are sex symbols, the singing of the birds is sexual, the whole of Tao is nothing but sex energy – the whole of nature propagates itself, loves itself, moves into deeper ecstasies of love and existence.
If you want to destroy nature, condemn sex, condemn love, create moral concepts around life. Those moral concepts, howsoever beautiful they look, will be like marble graves, and you will be there inside them. Some drunkard may think that you know what life is, that you know how to live, but anyone who is in his state of awareness cannot even call you alive. Your morality is a sort of death; before death kills you, the society kills you.
That is why Chuang Tzu’s message is one of the most dangerous, the most revolutionary, the most rebellious – because he says: Allow nature! And don’t give any goal to nature. Who are you to create goals and purposes? You are just a tiny part, an atomic cell. Who are you to force the whole to move according to you? This is most dangerous for people who are religious; for people who are moralistic puritans, this is a most dangerous message. This means: break all the barriers, allow nature to erupt. It is dangerous.
I have heard that a head nurse was introducing a new nurse, who had just come from college, to the hospital. She was taking her around the hospital to show it to her. She introduced the various wards: a cancer ward, a tuberculosis ward, and so on. Then she came to a big hall, and she said, “Look, and remember well, this is the most dangerous ward of all…this is the dangerous ward.”
The new nurse looked, but she couldn’t see what the danger was. So she asked, “What is the matter? Why is this the most dangerous ward? Even in the cancer ward you didn’t say that it was dangerous.”
The head nurse laughed and said, “These people are almost healthy. That’s why this is the most dangerous ward. So be alert – health is always dangerous.”
Priests are afraid of health because health is immoral in their eyes. You may or may not have heard of one of the thinkers of this century, a German thinker, very famous in his day – Count Keyserling. He was thought to be a religious philosopher and he wrote in his diary, “Health is the most immoral thing” – because health is energy, and energy is delight, energy is enjoyment, energy is love, energy is sex, energy is everything that is natural. Destroy the energy, make it feeble and dim. Hence so many fasts – just to destroy the energy, just to prevent so much energy from arising that it starts overflowing.
Religious people have always thought that health is dangerous. Then to be unhealthy becomes a spiritual goal.