Detachment should not mean that you must remove yourself from participation. Complete participation but still detached...this is where Watts comes to the point he does in every lecture and one that presents a conundrum, signifies the limitations of language for most others. Usually it as this point where he demonstrates his skill in providing some clarity to certain concepts.

Not a blasé, mien of nonchalance, with your thoughts elsewhere while you are furiously hammering away...not a way of being anxious about physical pleasure, so afraid that some there is a certain way it's supposed to be that can never quite be attained. Empty, desperate machinations, so you want it again and again (kind of like the phenomenon whereby someone eats bland food and keeps cramming it in because they are never satisfied). When you're grasping for something you cannot fully experience it. Holding on too hard takes the life out of something transient. This, says Watts, is the danger in becoming too attached to the physical world.

In the second part of the lecture, Watts delivers an amusing anecdote on the initiation ritual of confirmation he experienced as a young lad. Not some wise passing on of special knowledge from the reverend in his church where he grew up but a stern warning on...the evils of masturbation. Nothing more that a standard spiel on jacking off, replete with the assortment of ailments that were sure to befall every young boy who couldn't resist.

He also provides a brief history on the rising and falling tides of morality within the church. Marriage was initially a social institution to strengthen the alliance between families. Politics, eugenics, and the bargaining process that was part of the union meant that inevitably perfect matches rarely occurred and getting a little bit on the side was not uncommon. Idealization of women as goddesses in the Middle Ages changed things somewhat and coincided with the growing cult of romantic love. The institution of marriage became intertwined with such notions. What also flowed from this was that such sentiments started to infuse the laws of the day. The person you married was the person you should love and the only relationship where sex should have been allowed to occur was marriage.

Periods where prudism toward sexuality were in ascendancy were contrasted by the presence of lasciviousness during those same times, such as the Victorian Era, and here again Watts comes back to the theme of interdependence, the fact that one cannot exist without the other.

Watts also argues that according to a defender of the faith, the church could be held up as symbolically nothing but sex as opposed to repressed sex while those who make sex their god are the ones repressing religion. Sexual biology in turn reveals the mystery of the universe, and is not obscured but evident in the paintings, interior design and architecture of many of the great churches of the world.