“This isn’t easy for you, is it?”

“No,” Lalita admitted.

“You have to be careful. You might not know it, but at this moment you wield extraordinary power, especially over men. But as we know, the world is balanced by duality. The other side of the coin is that you will have to give something from your heart.”

“Enthusiasm?”

“More than that,” the monk said, still feeling slightly depressed, for he was beginning to get serious signals concerning her future. “Look, I’ll give it to you straight. The man you are going to meet in the next few days is, well, someone who can help you much much more than you think, but the only way to really keep him is to give him something special.”

“What’s that?”

“You already know.”

The monk, divining with little effort that Lalita was one of those pure souls who tend to take sexual love far more seriously than is healthy, decided to tell her about an interesting recent event. Soon after his alms round a few mornings before, when he had been eating the food his flock had prepared for him, he saw the astral body of Old Tou, whom he knew to be on his deathbed. Old Tou had led an averagely debauched life, a great womanizer in his youth, an alcoholic as he grew older, just another lost, self-centered soul. Phra Tanatika had watched in fascination while Old Tou’s astral body entered the body of a puppy who had just been born to one of the temple dogs. The puppy didn’t have a name yet, so Phra Tanatika called him “Tou”. “We copulate because karma forces us to,” the Phra explained, with a smile. “Like Old Tou, everyone needs a body to inhabit - that’s all it amounts to. Human’s make love for exactly the same reason dogs do.”

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