Customer Reviews

The Alchemy of Love and Sex

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This is not your usual New Age Tantric sex manual of self satisfaction. It's an intiguing exploration of the profound possibility of communion. Sex is only one channel for intimacy. The author says you can tune in on the emotional and the mental channels as well. And then you can really knock your socks off, in and out of bed.

What I appreciate about this book is Lee's refusual to sugar coat his convictions. With crazy-wise eccentric humor, and a few expletives to boot...; Lee calls it as he see's it. A close reading will reveal that this man could care less about signing up a bunch of feel good New Ager's desiring to avoid the dirt and crap that also are a BIG part of the spiritual path. "The Alchemy of Love and Sex" elucidates, with not a little humor, the dynamics that obscure men and women from living in a harmonious relationship, what creates dissonance and what creates resonance. The book will prove to be immensely unpopular as it offers no easy answers, except the obvious, that relationship is hard work. Just try treating your mate with the respect, awe, and supersensitive conscience that you would your Spiritual Master, or your favorite movie star, or anyone else you want to serve and impress. Try this for the rest of both of your lives. This book offers none of the usual rhetoric. It was Umberto Eco who said: "Common sense, even when true is always vague." In this book Mr. Lee exhibits a startling knack for bringing the vaguaries of common sense to the forefront. John Gray's "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" is rated G for commonsense Compared to Lee's "Alchemy" which is rated X for explicit common sense. It is perhaps Lee's unique contribution that he has retrieved spirituality from all the "All is One" or "There is nothing to attain, you already are Buddha or Jesus, and instead replaced it with an overall context of common sense. If you spill the milk, clean it up! This is more revelatory than many of us seem to want to admit. Then again there's alot we don't want to admit. This book admits alot, and to the extent that you will also, then this book will admit you to it's "secrets."

....And, in conjunction with that statement, "straight talk" does not necessarily indicate the revelation of some Great Truths.

Of course, I realize that the rebuttal to my statements is that I did not read with an open mind or heart, or even soul, when, in fact, I was more than willing to discover something outside myself that I could accept as Truth. More than that, I am generally considered so openminded that sometimes my brains leak out my ears.

That said, I did find this book helpful in a way that I did not expect - it gave me pause, and forced me to contemplate what I really believed about the way the Universe works, and about how I really felt about Love and all the other assorted relationships I have with others.

There was a lot of hidden, backhanded misogyny in this book, coated in the usual talk of "duality" and "worship of the archetypal Woman," but recommending "service," a "culture of women," and various other outmoded ideas. Funny, how I heard about all these same things in church as I was growing up, and in almost exactly the same terminology....

In the end, I would suggest that anyone seeking to find a deeper way of loving, or of living life, to look within him/herself, because, ultimately, that's where the real answers tend to rest.

This book is wonderful. It really wakes up your senses and gets you thinking about the simplest of things that have been right in front of you your whole life! Like the basic implications of what it means to be male or female, and how this relates to the mind. Never dogmatic, but often challenging and even confrontational, you will learn something from this book.
And like some of the people reviewing this book here, you may not like it! But then just because our ego doesnt like something doesnt mean it isn't true.
Speaking of truth I have to say this book has the fewest errors of any spiritual book I've read. It really cuts to the heart of the matter and drops all the nonsense and Eastern verbage that put me to sleep in Buddhist books.
Heartily recommended!