THE BODY IN FLOW ■ 1 03enriching the relationship. Initially physical challenges alone are enough
to sustain flow, but unless romance and genuine care also develop, the
relationship will grow stale.
How to keep love fresh? The answer is the same as it is for any
other activity. To be enjoyable, a relationship must become more com
plex. To become more complex, the partners must discover new poten
tialities in themselves and in each other. To discover these, they must
invest attention in each other—so that they can learn what thoughts
and feelings, what dreams reside in their partner’s mind. This in itself
is a never-ending process, a lifetime’s task. After one begins to really
know another person, then many joint adventures become possible:
traveling together, reading the same books, raising children, making and
realizing plans all become more enjoyable and more meaningful. The
specific details are unimportant. Each person must find out which ones
are relevant to his or her own situation. What is important is the general
principle: that sexuality, like any other aspect of life, can be made
enjoyable if we are willing to take control of it, and cultivate it in the
direction of greater complexity.
The Ultimate Control: Yoga and the Martial Arts
When it comes to learning to control the body and its experiences, we
are as children compared to the great Eastern civilizations. In many
respects, what the West has accomplished in terms of harnessing mate
rial energy is matched by what India and the Far East have achieved in
terms of direct control of consciousness. That neither of these ap
proaches is, by itself, an ideal program for the conduct of life is shown
by the fact that the Indian fascination with advanced techniques for
self-control, at the expense of learning to cope with the material chal
lenges of the physical environment, has conspired to let impotence and
apathy spread over a great proportion of the population, defeated by
scarcity of resources and by overcrowding. The Western mastery over
material energy, on the other hand, runs the risk of turning everything
it touches into a resource to be consumed as rapidly as possible, thus
exhausting the environment. The perfect society would be able to strike
a healthy balance between the spiritual and material worlds, but short
of aiming for perfection, we can look toward Eastern religions for guid
ance in how to achieve control over consciousness.
Of the great Eastern methods for training the body, one of the
oldest and most diffuse is the set of practices known as Hatha Yoga. It