PETE HOLMES: It was the horniness that was the teacher. I thought it was in the way of my teaching. I was like, if I could only stop being horny, I could meditate and I could find God. Fuck that shit. God is in the horniness.

The reason the book is called "Comedy Sex God" is because God and sex were so closely linked for me. When I was a kid, I wasn't tempted to lie or cheat or steal, or certainly not murder anybody. Those were all very easy ordinances from the church to follow because I wasn't tempted to do them. But sex, it's a biological, pulsing, organically occurring, fresh-batch-every-morning temptation that all these 12, 13, 14-year-olds were being told was the thing, the sin, that was keeping God, basically, from loving us. You know what I mean? We were all good to go to heaven, but three, sometimes four times a day, you're very tempted. Or in my case, I would succumb succumb! to temptation, and I felt terrible about it because that was my understanding of God.

And one of the reasons I wrote the book was to try and reform that understanding of God as this like, basically a bully, as Nadia Bolz-Weber says, with a killer surveillance system who's watching you and who really hates you. He hates what you are and wishes that Richard Rohr calls it willpower Christianity, it's like we can just push these giant boulders away and lean on them, and be at church and be like, "Hey, brother!" But really, you're as human as anybody, and that is a cognitive and spiritual dissonance that is a heavy, heavy weight. So I joke that the book is called "Comedy Sex God", but most of the sex is with myself because it was so internalized and it was so shameful and private. So when I lost my faith because my wife here's sex again: My wife had an affair. So sex, again, betrayed me. I was trying to be a good boy and I got married almost so that I could have sex, so I was playing by the rules. And then she broke the rules. But even worse, it felt like God, who was almost like the mafia -- I paid him a fee to watch my bakery, if that makes sense, and then somebody threw a brick through my bakery window. And I was like, 'You didn't hold up your end of the bargain.' So I lost my faith, and then I really had to redefine what sexuality was. It was almost like coming out of the closet as straight. I'm not trying to minimize how serious and how difficult it can be to come out of the closet as gay, but I had to announce to myself and to the world: "I like boobies." And that was hard because you were waiting for lightning to strike you down.

So the wonderful thing that I've discovered about the universe we don't have to call it God because I understand and sympathize that that's a loaded word but I see a universe that uses these wounds and these traumas and these wrong programs in our favor, ultimately. So I spent all this time, first, repressing my sexuality. Then I lost my faith. Then I went through a period of embracing it as best as I could. I bought the Playboy that I hid in my bedroom in a chair that used to belong to my grandmother. I cut a slit in the lining of that chair and I hid this Playboy that I had stolen with my friend, Opie. So that was two sins, really. And then when I lost my faith, I bought that Playboy on eBay and put it on my coffee table, because I knew that my psyche needed symbols. I was trying to outwardly manifest a world where I wasn't ashamed of being a sexual person. So like a swinger or like Burt Reynolds, I just kept or a barbershop just open air pornography, which was partially healing.

And then I tried having anonymous -- or casual -- anonymous is not true; I knew their names and they knew my name, so it wasn't anonymous. And I didn't have sex with a group of renegade hackers wearing scary masks. I was just having sex with people that I had no intention of marrying, which, if you can believe it, was a huge undertaking for me. So I thought that was healing myself.

But as I talk about in the book, there was a third step, which was I had to learn to irrationally love myself, and that that is the sort of love that, I believe, is coming from the universe or coming from God, whatever image you'd like to use, as indiscriminately as the light. So I went on this retreat to see Ram Dass, who's this spiritual teacher, he wrote "Be Here Now". And I went into I was on a private, basically, a hermitage, living in his guesthouse. But I was alone most of the time. And it was wonderful. I had this incredible transcendent experience sitting with him. I was hallucinating, which is fucking crazy and awesome. Even while it was happening, I was like, "It's happening, I'm having a mystical experience!" But then I would go back to the house, and in the morning sometimes or at night, I would get 10 out of 10 horny, hornier than I had been since I had been 15. And there I was, 39 or something, and I was trying to be spiritual. I was trying to meditate, I was burning seven to 10 sticks of incense a day. I was reading sacred texts. And all the while, I'm thinking about jiggling asses and stuff. And I was embarrassed. It was so obvious my Christian, my puritanical shame psychology was still in there. Playboys on the table and casual sex be damned, I hadn't yet opened all the blinders in my soul, for lack of a better word, and let the light in. So I thought it was in the way. I was very tempted to just masturbate and get it over with, which is how I saw sex. I always saw it as not something to enjoy or to respect or to honor or to just participate with, I saw it as something that you wanted to get out of the way so you could get back to being good or being holy or being worthy of love. So there I was on a hermitage, fucking horny. I don't know if people can even remember what it's like to be 15, And you're just like, everything is sex, everything is sex. And I was really tempted to do something about it. I joke in the book, I couldn't look at pornography on my laptop. The password for the Wi-Fi was the name of Ram Dass's guru. So I couldn't type in the name of an other-worldly guru, and then go to fucking, I don't know, XVideos or whatever. I just couldn't do it. It was all coming in my face coming in my face. [LAUGHING] it was all being held right into my face. So I had this moment of surrender and break, where I tried to do what I had been studying and what I had been telling myself. I tried to just love myself irrationally.

People give out this bullshit Kirkland purified water love to each other. It's conditional, it sucks, it's low grade. It's well love, and I want that top shelf premium love. And that really is a thoughtless love. It's a love without a reason. It's not, oh, I'm horny, Pete, I love how human you are or how conflicted you are or how good you want to be or how carnal you are and virile. It wasn't that. That's justifying why you feel the way you feel. I just tried loving it because love is a place, it's like a state that you can enter into, and you just go, everything, just like I said, as indiscriminately as the light, I love this, too. It's not God is over here with the saying frack instead of fuck, and not seeing R-rated movies and being nice. Richard Rohr points out, the word nice is not in the New Testament doesn't exist. We've lost the narrative. We've turned it into a [HEARTY CHUCKLE] and it was never about that. And I wanted to get into that place.

You think think this is a mistake? This, my body, sexuality, the world, the air we breathe, the food we eat, the whole thing is sex. The universe is undulating eroticism, and that's fucking beautiful. It's not a mistake. And spirituality, true connection and flow with the divine, to me, is not a resistance, it's not about looking good or telling people that you didn't jerk off in Ram Dass's hermitage, which I didn't. But the reason I didn't was because I love myself if I did or if I didn't, and it was in that moment that I realized the pain and that embarrassment and that shame wasn't in the way of the teaching, it was the teaching. And I had another just beautiful moment of actually loving myself. Because I realized I had been giving myself that low-grade, bullshit, conditional love. And I realized if you want to feel that from the universe, it starts by giving it to yourself. Not in the way I had intended, but I did give it to myself.