Human beings all know that they are going to die, and so human cultures go to great lengths to construct systems of meaning that dignify life and convince people that their lives have more meaning than those of the animals that die all around them. The extensive regulation of sex in many cultures, the attempt to link love to God and then to cut away the sex, is part of an elaborate defense against the gnawing fear of mortality.51 If this is true, if the sages have a variety of unstated reasons for warning us away from passionate love and attachments of many kinds, perhaps we should be
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