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dianna
11th September 2013, 14:14
Eros Unredeemed

Daniel Pinchbeck

http://www.realitysandwich.com/sites/realitysandwich.civicactions.net/files/imagecache/large/love.jpg


I start to re-read Dieter Duhm's Eros Unredeemed again, and once again, it is like waking from sleep to recognize the true idiocy of our current situation when it comes to love, sex, and relationships. According to Duhm, our incapacity to bring our full consciousness and analytic intellect to this area imminently threatens our species and the biosphere with apocalyptic ruin -- and I agree with him. In New York City, full of so many incredibly brilliant and beautiful people, I feel like I am walking through a desert -- a wasteland of love, abandoned, forfeited, of puppets allowing themselves to be pulled on invisible strings... or as Duhm's title puts it so aptly, unredeemed Eros.

http://www.dieter-duhm.com/sites/default/files/3/ErosUnredeemed_CoverW.jpg


The "free love" or "sexual liberation" of the 60s was not a failure, but an experiment that remains incomplete. Just as humanity was not up to the task, in that epoch, of reckoning with the psychedelic experience and integrating the psychic and visionary aspects of our being into the repressive social structure -- the system we have inherited, which is now obviously breaking down -- we have not been capable of fully comprehending or integrating what the emancipation of Eros means in terms of new social forms and also a new living experience of the Divine. "The sexual revolution, which is necessary for creating a humane world, can only take place if it is linked to an equally indispensable spiritual revolution," Duhm writes. We are still sleepwalking: unable to confront or realize what is directly before us -- putting it off to a "later" or an "away" that remains vaguely on the periphery. Another hundred yoga sessions, another thousand therapy appointments, and perhaps we will be there...

Our cultural system spins like a hamster wheel, essentially devoid of new, original or incisive content. Artists, filmmakers, novelists pursue the same old rewards in a system based on establishing careers and making profit. The actual content that needs to be expressed is contained in the love, sexual and spiritual revolution that people still don't want to reckon with, because it threatens the structure and ideology they have been conditioned to maintain. Art and culture have been domesticated to serve the system of ego and profit -- in these arenas, also, a true realization and inner revolution is necessary for a regeneration of our world to take place.

Far more than another political revolution, which would end up with some new miasma of jealousy and power and frustration, we need, first of all, a love revolution, which is also the form of a revelation: A totally fresh and clear-eyed approach to love and Eros. "The historical double meaning of apocalypse is being fulfilled, step by step it is turning into a conscious experience of revelation. The 'Kingdom of God on Earth,' i.e. the sexual and spiritual power of love, can no longer be confined behind society's masks, dogmas, and institiutions," Duhm writes. The "revelation" comes when we bring into consciousness the patterns of the past, and then construct a new societal structure that accords with our deepest drives and impulses.

The same ideas that Duhm works through here are also discussed in another one of my favorite books, Pain, Sex, and Time by Gerald Heard -- though, writing in the 1940s, Heard was not able to fully perceive that the liberation of love, sexuality and Eros was also necessary for the evolutionary potential of humanity to be realized: He thought this energy needed to be channeled through new initiatory practices. "Modern man's incessant sexuality is not bestial: rather it is a psychic hemorrhage. He bleeds himself constantly because he fears mental apoplexy if he can find no way of releasing his huge store of nervous energy," Heard wrote. He noted that the tremendous force of the human sexual drive -- beyond anything we find in the animal kingdom -- suggested a surplus of extra evolutionary energy, which we will either consciously master, or it will destroy us.

We find our civilization has attained a tremendous mastery of techniques of war, while we have ignored love and sex, or treated it as something that we can't fully explore with our conscious minds or approach with forethought. Sex remains something private, secret, and shrouded in darkness. "Whereas the cerebrum is applied in war technology, in love man lives and thinks out of his spinal cord," writes Duhm. Even the everywhere evident fact that almost invariably (with very occasional exceptions) monogamous couples either break apart, or lose their spark, hasn't compelled us to deeply consider the possibility that it is not our natural instinct in love that is wrong, but the social framework and belief system we have inherited -- that we reify through our ongoing thoughts and actions -- that is deeply flawed and in error. As Duhm also notes, there is no contradiction between being in a couple -- finding a soul mate -- and freedom in love. The contradiction only exists in our own minds -- as the inheritance of patriarchy, of the "mind-forg'd manacles" which keep us from life and truth.

The lack of trust that we find throughout our "civil"-ization has its source in the failure of men and women to be truthful with each other. If your desires are in conflict with what society allows, you either express your desires and get exiled from society, or you make the best bargain you possibly can to attain some modicum of happiness and comfort, with the permanent acceptance of an underlying current of anger, bitterness, and resentment. Once you have allowed yourself to deceive yourself and the person who is theoretically closest to you, then you have created the intrinsic pattern for a society based on lies and delusion... You can then listen to the half-truths of our politicians and pundits without throwing up, because you are living in the same state of compromise. From that initial error, we collectively fail to safeguard or care for the environment as a logical consequence. After all, why would we want to protect a world that has betrayed us at its core?

"The liberation of Eros cannot succeed until we have wiped out every trace of the old idea of fidelity, which is based on the principle of the exclusion of others," Duhm writes. "Faithfulness has nothing to do with a ban, with a vow, or with a contract. It is a concrete love relationship between two human beings. I am faithful to him because I love him. My love cannot depend on the condition that he should not go to bed with anyone else. If my partner is an attractive human specimen, then it is normal that others should desire him and that he should desire others. Should we really be expected to show our loyalty and devotion by renouncing such pleasures for the sake of another? What sort of farcical, masochistic idea is that? Faithfulness is love, but love is not renunciation. If our devotion for one another falls apart as a result of other sexual contacts, then our love was built on sand."

The realization that the intrinsic paradigm for a planetary shift of consciousness is nothing "out there" but the internalization of a new mode of love that is shared, that flows like a river, that knows no fear, that has no need to possess or control: I believe that this is the next phase of the transformation of consciousness that needs to take place. Subconsciously I always knew this to be the case -- probably you did as well -- but I am grateful to Duhm (who founded the community Tamera in Portugal, which I recently visited) for bringing it out into the light of day.

He notes, "Humans will continue to butcher their environment, to destroy their fellow creatures, and vent their hatred on nature, as long as they do not achieve inner peace. And they will not find inner peace as long as they continue to rape love. ... This entire worldwide process of destruction and self-destruction contains one strange component, which I have never completely understood, but which I have encountered again and again: Individuals are not even interested in freeing themselves from the system that ravages them." Because an incredible force of historical repression and violence was exerted in this area (by the church, the colonialists, etc), our ancestors acquiesced, for purposes of survival and self-perpetuation. We have continued in the inertia of that internalized repression, because we didn't know better.

The mass media functions as an ideological battering ram, blasting us over and over again with idealized images and visions of the monogamous couple and the nuclear family: This unit still forms the basis of the capitalist system, as theorists from Friedrich Engels to Slavoj Zizek realized. The acceptance of intrinsic dissatisfaction is part of what the system perpetuates. As we learn to accept continual discomfort and dissatisfaction at the thwarting of our instinct for love and sex as somehow "normal," we then perpetuate this misery by accepting a world that we know is far beneath our true potential.

Nobody from outside of ourselves can integrate this realization and bring about this revolution of love, the liberation of Eros and redemption of instinct. Everything in our contemporary society continues to conspire against us: the complex of "Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll" is the mechanism used by the dominant system of patriarchal repression to distort our vitalizing impulses and channel them into areas that are easily commodified and controlled. The first step is to make what has been unmentionable and hidden into something we openly discuss and explore -- then we can embody it.



http://www.realitysandwich.com/eros_unredeemed

Team Zen
11th September 2013, 20:34
:amen:

This resonated with me so much! It has put so succinctly what I too think about sex and love. I will look for this book. Thank you for this awesome post!

:bump:

dianna
12th September 2013, 13:17
History of Sacred Sexuality

Ancient Practitioners of Sacred Sex

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_uHewhM43ujA/TGDQuhV_2rI/AAAAAAAAAes/kB0CrLVBVkU/s1600/waves-search.jpg


An Overview

Although humanity has often struggled with sexuality and similarly related issues, there have always been arts and sciences devoted to honoring the sacred, sexual self. In fact, the universe and its origins are steeped in a fusion (or intercourse) of creative forces in cosmic and human forms. All sacred thought systems contain concepts of male and female aspects of this Creative Force. Additionally, every major religion and philosophy has a sect devoted to mysticism. Each sect of mysticism has a faction devoted to understanding and exploring the deeper concepts behind sacred sexuality and the practical integration of spirituality and sexuality.

The practice of sacred sexuality dates back to an ancient culture known as the Lemurians. Although there are no known written records of their sexual practices, their methods were kept alive through their descendants, such as the people of the Hawaiian Islands. The Lemurians combined creativity, vibrational healing, aromatherapy, and spirituality. They lived in harmony with body and soul and honored the creative and feminine aspects of life. They were also the originators of the healing art known as Reiki, which was preserved by their descendents in Tibet and surrounding regions. All other ancient arts of sacred sexuality are remnants of those founded by this original race.

The oldest arts of sacred sexuality that have been preserved in a relatively complete form are those of Tantra and the Taoist arts of sexology, estimated to be several thousand years old. The western mystics who explored sacred sexuality in the concealed form of alchemy or energetic transmutation came much later. Nevertheless, whatever the name of the sacred art or the time in which it was practiced, the goals have always been the same. The arts of sacred sexuality have always been practiced with the intent of transforming mundane thoughts, feelings, and energy into a higher, spiritualized, personal experience of oneness, or union, with all that exists.

Tantra

Tantra is arguably the oldest known art of sacred sexuality practiced today. The true story of the origins of Tantra is obscure, to say the least. The various versions of its origins include Tantra as being a well-organized system from some factions of Hinduism. Others say it came from Buddhist sects. Still others say it gradually developed from communities within small East Indian villages.

Some people believe that Tantra evolved from the practice of yoga, which, like Tantra, is about liberation and joining. In fact, many of the physically challenging sexual positions of Tantric lovemaking are actually yoga postures used for personal awakening.

Tantra is a Sanskrit word of two parts. The prefix, tan, means “to expand, join or weave.” The latter part, tra, means “tool.” Therefore, the definition of the term Tantra has a two-fold meaning—“a tool to expand, liberate, and bring together.” What is known about Tantra is that the most common form is preserved through such writings as the Kama Sutra (probably written around the time of Christ) and the Ananga Ranga (a collection of erotic works from around 1100 A.D.) The purest form of Tantra was not passed down in writing, but only by way of initiations and personal instruction.

The Kama Sutra was written by a noble man who saw life as consisting of dharma (spiritual substance), artha (financial substance), and kama (sensual substance). Kama is said to be “the enjoyment of appropriate objects by the five senses…assisted by the mind, together with the soul.” Although Tantra might appear to be an art of sexual pleasuring and the Kama Sutra a manual of sexual positions, the real goal of kama is to cultivate love and reverence for the person with whom the Tantric pleasure.

Although most spiritual disciplines insist on evolving into higher states of consciousness by controlling or denying the senses and lower states of consciousness, Tantra teaches that you cannot experience complete personal and spiritual liberation while restricting a part of your being. Tantra is a profound form of active meditation that expands consciousness using the senses to take you beyond the realm of the senses. It teaches that sacred sexuality is a way of deepening intimacy and expanding consciousness, a way to achieve freedom from limitations and to join with the Divine.

Observing a Tantric experience, you might assume you are simply witnessing “great sex.” But if you could see the experience clairvoyantly, you would witness an amazing dance of energy and color, not unlike a fireworks display. Furthermore, if you could see into the hearts and souls of the participants, you would observe a consecrated joining of loving intent.

Valerie Brooks, author of Tantric Awakening, summarizes the stages of the Tantric lovemaking experience as follows:
1. Physical: total concentration on the physical pleasure in the moment.
2. Emotional: immersion in loving thoughts and worship of your partner’s divinity.
3. Spiritual: feeling yourself and your partner as a single unit that is connected to Spirit, or God.

Just as some of the world’s greatest spiritual teachers have said that Heaven cannot be accurately described in words, the essence of Tantra cannot be captured in either oral or written words. To truly understand Tantra, it has to be experienced.

In addition to cosmic, mystical experiences, Tantric masters are also interested in having deeply personal experiences with other people and the world in which they live. When a deep interconnection is established, the formerly perceived space between any two people or objects becomes filled with the light of Spirit. This spiritual presence activates and excites the etheric energy within and between the two, joining them as one. That which was contracted and separate is now free to expand and unite. This is Tantra!

True Tantra is a spiritual path and is practiced with an air of sacredness. Since Tantra is practiced as a spiritual ceremony, as with all forms of spiritual worship, there is an acknowledging and honoring (worshiping) of a Divine Being. However, in Tantra, this deity is reflected and honored in your partner, rather than in an intellectual concept or vague image. Therefore, Tantra is not an abstract form of spiritual practice, but a practical one, wherein the experience with the Divine is brought down to the very realm of the senses. Of course, this is not to say that the tantrika (practitioner of Tanta) cannot choose to practice other forms of spirituality and worship. It’s just that Tantra challenges lovers to see the Divine Presence of God in and through each other.

Tantra has two distinct paths of training, a left-hand path (vama-marga) and a right-hand path (dakshina-marga). The left-hand path practices a more literal form of Tantra that usually involves intercourse. The right-hand path, on the other hand, practices a symbolic form of Tantra that views intercourse as an allegory. The left-hand path of Tantra practices the maithuna ritual known as “The Five Makaras.” During an evening gathering, several practitioners join to partake of the five symbols of pleasure, which are madya (wine), matsya (fish), mamsa (meat), mudra (parched grain), and maithuna (sacred sex).

In Tantric writings, a woman’s sexual and spiritual energies are often referred to as shakti. In Hindu traditions the goddess Shakti represents the female principle or energy. Although the female force, or shakti, exists in both women and men, women are seen as the “guardians” of the shakti energy. According to ancient Tantric writings, the power of the shakti is limitless. Once awakened, this spiritual, energetic, and sexual force can be channeled creatively.

Upon awakening, Shakti rises up the spine to meet Shiva, her male counterpart. Together their merged energies create an alchemical fusion of bliss. Thus in Tantra, the coupling of a man and woman serves to represent this greater, universal creative process, as the intercourse between a couple simulates the creation dance of Shakti and Shiva.

Tantra is not to be confused with other arts of sacred sexuality, including Taoist sexual practices. Tantra (from India) and Taoism (from China) are similar, but are also quite different. Both involve balancing the male and female energies. What Tantra calls the dance of Shakti and Shiva, Taoists call the balancing of yin and yang. Both systems have a goal of total physical and spiritual union. Tantra and Taoism are each an ancient form of sacred sexuality. Also, in both traditions, sexuality is practiced in a spiritual context.
Nevertheless, the differences are very distinct. For example, Tantra uses more ceremony and ritual, while Taoism is more scientific and focuses on the body, its meridians, and energy systems. Tantra is an art, while Taoist sexology is a science. In Tantra there is less emphasis on “controlling orgasms” by “constricting specific muscles.” Instead, in the art of Tantra there is emphasis on relaxing into the orgasmic sensations, rather than tensing in any form. On the other hand, in the Taoist sexual systems, control and muscle constriction are at the very heart of the techniques and principles. Tantrikas may not agree with all Taoist concepts of ejaculation control. Taoists have developed their principles of sexuality into a science that has worked for thousands of years. Taoist masters, who are commonly known to live in vibrant health for well over a hundred years, attribute their semi-immortality to their sexual practices of ejaculation control and in-jaculation.

Because of the differences between Tantric and Taoist sexual practices, most practitioners of any ancient system of sexuality follow only one of these two paths. Few practitioners have learned to reconcile, synthesize, and integrate the two. Nevertheless, the key to successfully practicing sacred sexuality is to use both techniques at precisely the right moment.

Taoist Sexology

Although Taoism (pronounced Dow-ism), as a philosophy or religion in China, developed later than the Hindu religion of India, both traditions embraced some form of sacred sexuality. The Chinese sexual arts were developed by the Yellow Emperor (Huang-Ti) and his “three immortal ladies” long before Taoism, which means that although Hinduism is older than Taoism, the Chinese sexual arts are still as ancient as Tantra.

Like Tantra, Taoism has many facets, sex being only one of eight “spokes to their wheel.” Royalty often consulted the wise and respected Taoist masters on issues related to philosophy, health, life, and sex. Some of these teachings were preserved and are known as “Canons of Wisdom.” The most common set of ancient writings on Taoist lovemaking is called the “pillow books.”

The primary purpose behind Taoist lovemaking is the transformation of sexual energy into healing energy and vitality, resulting in better health and potential immortality. The primary Taoist technique to achieve these healing effects is called the inward orgasm (in-jaculation), whereby the orgasmic energy rises up the spine, stimulating the endocrine glands, energy systems, nervous system, and organs. Taoists teach that an inner orgasm (in-jaculation) stimulates life and vitality, while the outer orgasm (e-jaculation) brings death or loss of health and vitality. An in-jaculation is the most effective tool for transforming a physical orgasm into an energetic orgasm. Of course, there are even higher levels of orgasm as well, including a soul-level, total-being orgasm.

Taoist self-transformation exercises are designed to bring the practitioner to a state of immortality by cultivating what they refer to as the three energies, or “Three Treasures.” The first is ching (sexual and physical energy), the second is qi (etheric and breath energy), and the third is shen (mental and spiritual energy). Only with sufficient ching can the body produce sufficient qi. Then, with sufficient qi, a balance of shen is restored. These three essences must be restored and refined to their optimum level and balance to attain the gifts of the “Three Treasures,” or the “Elixir of Immortality.” Practitioners of Taoist sexuality believe that sexual energy is the most powerful human energy and that the use of sexual rejuvenation and in-jaculation techniques are the most effective and efficient way to revitalize and develop these “Three Treasures.”

Taoists use imaginative, and sometimes humorous, metaphors to illustrate their concepts about sexuality. For example, they regard man as fire and woman as water. Fire, once started, burns fast and can burn out, when, on the other hand, the woman (or water) is just beginning to boil (or get hot). Therefore, the man must control his fire to prolong his climax (and erection). Then he can help the woman reach her natural stages of warming up toward orgasm, thus enhancing the experience for both partners.

Again, Taoists say that the male is like fire and the woman is like water. The man’s fire (penis or lingam) boils the woman’s water (her womb or yoni). If the man is not trained in the art of lovemaking, her water will extinguish his fire. Thus, the soft and yielding (yin) can conquer the hard (yang), just as the proverbial flowing river conquers the hardest of rocks.

Taoists do not merely teach exercises to enhance the pleasure of partnership. They also encourage self-mastery and self-awareness for improved health and vitality. They clearly teach the importance of drawing in the sexual energy and experience, rather than focusing on sexual organs and external stimuli. Any focus on the sexual organs is used only to introduce the practitioner to more advanced concepts. Taoist master Mantak Chia says that the goal of Taoist sexual practices is like that of making chicken broth: If you boil a chicken in water and extract the vital essence into the water, which is more valuable, the chicken or the broth? Clearly, the Taoists believe the valuable energy generated during lovemaking is more vital to one’s well-being than the stimulation to the organs.

In the Taoist tradition, sexual energy is nurtured and valued for its role in the overall well-being of the body, mind, and spirit. It is the water of life, or life-giving essence, for all that exists in the material world. Taoists see sexual energy as the fuel behind the body’s chi (energy, vital essence or life-force). Stimulation of the sexual organs and sex glands enhances this life-force and thereby encourages the secretion of hormones from the other major endocrine glands (adrenal, thymus, thyroid, pituitary, and pineal). Therefore, Taoist sexual exercises assist in the production of potent hormones and stimulate the healthy function of the endocrine glands, the master controls of the body.

Taoists are emphatic about the value of semen retention, or in-jaculation. The ancient Taoist masters referred to a ten-day process that procured the invaluable results of ejaculation retention. In one ancient text they wrote:

“If a man has intercourse once without spilling his seed, his vital essence is strengthened. If he does this twice, his vision and hearing are made clearer. If three times, his physical illnesses will begin to disappear. The fourth time he will begin to feel inner peace. The fifth time his blood will circulate powerfully. The sixth time his genitals will gain new prowess. By the seventh his thighs and buttock (muscles and meridians) will become firm. The eighth time his entire body will radiate good health. The ninth time his life-span will be increased.”
–Canon of Taoist Wisdom




Sexuality of the Western Mystics

The art of sacred sexuality (during the Middle Ages) was known as alchemy, meaning “All-Chemistry” or “God’s Chemistry.” This lost science was said to have been the art of transmuting base metals into gold. It’s now understood that the western mystics were actually using metaphor to discuss their art of sacred sexuality. They were describing the transmutation of base, sexual energy into valuable, ecstatic, soul-level orgasms.

The only transformer and alchemist that turns everything into gold is love.
–Anais Nin

Common tools of the alchemist include the pestle and mortar, which are symbols of a lingam (penis) and yoni (vagina). Here, the grinding activity between the two represents sexual union. Other tools of the alchemist are the wand and cistern or knife and bowl. Again these symbolize the creative activity between the male and female principles, or the lingam and yoni. Furthermore, these symbols of sexual union represent the creative mind piercing and activating the receptive void, just as “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the deep.”

Unfortunately, some practitioners of what is commonly referred to as sex magic or alchemical sex have a different focus. Their goal is ego self-gratification, not joining in oneness. While all practitioners of sex magic may not be ego-centered, many of them are known to maintain a detachment from their lovers and use them as mere tools to ignite their own energetic systems. Lacking true intimacy and spiritual depth, however, their sexual encounters can never be confused with anything sacred–particularly sacred sexuality.

Tales of Sacred Sexuality

The following are myths, legends, and stories of sacred sexuality from numerous cultures throughout history. Each legend possesses valuable insights into the meaning of sacred sexuality.

Actaeon and Diana
When Actaeon, (a respected hunter who symbolizes the physical self) happened upon the great goddess Diana, naked and washing herself, he failed to fall down and worship her. Instead, he chose to make a sexual advance. Because he failed to see and honor her divinity, she turned him into a stag (symbolizing his out-of-control horniness). Afterwards, Actaeon’s own hunting dogs devoured him. This story suggests that when our sexual desires are out of control and we fail to recognize the sacred spirit within that which we desire, our actions will inevitably destroy us.

Cupid and Psyche
The story of Cupid and Psyche offers deep insights into the connection between eroticism and spirituality. Cupid, who is also known as Eros, or Amour, is the god of erotic love, and Psyche represents the beauty of the soul.

When the goddess Venus becomes jealous of Psyche’s beauty, Venus asks Eros to cause Psyche to fall in love with some unworthy man. Instead, Eros takes Psyche away to his own secret place, where he protects and visits her under the cloak of darkness, so she never sees his face. Eros explains to Psyche that although he is a god, he doesn’t want her to fear or revere him, but to love him as an equal. Herein, the story reveals the importance of mutuality and equality in a relationship of love.

Eventually, Psyche is coaxed (by her envious sisters) to break her vow to Eros and to attempt to see her lover in the light. So while he is sleeping, she takes a candle to bed to see his face. But the hot wax drips on his shoulder and awakens him. Sadly, Eros flies away on his white wings after telling Psyche, “Love cannot dwell with suspicion.” This story conveys the invaluable lesson that trust is necessary if lovers are to remain united. In breaking their agreement to honor the mystery, Psyche attempted to know her lover through her eyes and mind, instead of allowing the knowing of her heart to be sufficient. Hence, in her attempt to limit and control Eros, she sacrificed everything.

Later, after Psyche is put through some seemingly impossible initiations by the goddess Venus (tests which Eros secretly helps her pass), the goddess is satisfied and allows Psyche to drink the sacred ambrosia and become immortal. Thus, Psyche is reunited with Eros, and they begin an eternal union.

Eventually, the union of Eros and Psyche (sexuality and spirituality) produces a daughter, whose name is Pleasure, suggesting that true pleasure can be attained only through the proper, healthy union of the loving soul (Psyche) with the passionate body (Eros). Furthermore, for this union to survive, it must be revered as sacred and maintain the elements of spontaneity and mystery.

Dionysus–The God of Abandon
Although the story of Dionysus might seem unfamiliar, elements of his legend are firmly embedded in modern history, religion, and psychology. Dionysus is the personification of divine ecstasy, which, in human hands, can bring either transcendent joy or madness–spiritual liberation or physical addiction. The word ecstasy comes from the root ex stasis, meaning “to stand outside oneself” (which is what happens when we have an experience that is too powerful for the body to contain).

Dionysus is often referred to as the god of abandon, the god of ecstasy or the god of the vine, meaning “wine,” but not “drunkenness,” as often portrayed. In fact, drunkenness was not permitted at ancient Dionysian gatherings, since it was believed that one had to maintain conscious awareness to avoid being possessed by negative spirits while in such a vulnerable and open state.

Greek god Dionysis and consorts Dionysus represents the ecstasy of the senses and the sensuous world and is therefore the antithesis of the intellectual thought processes. Ancient civilizations honored Dionysus by many names and in diverse forms. In fact, the practice of the orgy was originally a ritual honoring the god Dionysus–the god of liberation and abandon. The theatre is said to also have originated as one of the Dionysian rituals.

Since he represented the awakening of the earth, the Christians turned the youthful, androgynous, and beautiful Dionysus into a goat image, depicted with what they perceived as the face of the devil. Yet, paradoxically, many churches still practice Dionysian rituals. In fact, there are numerous parallels between Dionysus and Jesus–making Jesus a living embodiment of Dionysus. Both are sons of Divine Fathers and mortal, virgin mothers. The mothers of both are said to have ascended to Heaven. The father of Dionysus is Zeus (sometimes called Dias-Pitar, meaning “God, the father”), while that of Jesus is referred to as “the Father, God.” Both beings are said to have visited hell, or the underworld, and both Dionysus and Jesus were hailed as “King of Kings.” Additionally, Dionysus and Jesus both die and are reborn, becoming symbols of transformation. Afterwards, Dionysus ascends to Olympus and Jesus, to Heaven, while both sit at the right hand of God. The name Dionysus means “son of God,” while Jesus was called the “son of God.”

Dionysus and Jesus both suffered at the hands of local authorities and were said to have mingled with men and women of questionable character and low repute. Also, both show a disregard for the established modes of worship.

Given all the similarities between Dionysus and Jesus, it becomes clear that both beings personify the living Christ, one as a mythological archetype and the other as a living incarnation. Dionysus is the male archetype of Christ consciousness expressed in sensual form just as Mary Magdalene is for the female.

Paradise Lost
The English poet John Milton reveals incredible insights into the role and higher purpose of sexual encounters. In Paradise Lost, he depicts a conversation between Adam and the Archangel Raphael. Here, Adam shares his perplexing attraction for Eve as follows:
“To love thou blam’st me not, for love thou say’st
Leads up to heav’n, is both the way and guide;
Bear with me then, if lawful what I ask:
Love not the heav’nly spirits, and how their love
Express they, by looks only, or do they mix
Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?”
To whom the Angel, with a smile that glowed
Celestial rosy red, love’s proper hue,
Answered: “Let it suffice thee that thou know’st
Us happy, and without love no happiness.
Whatever pure thou in the body enjoy’st
(And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
In eminence, and obstacle find none
Of membrane, joint, or limb…”

In this poem, Milton touches upon some of the themes of Genesis I and II. He implies that it is possible for human partnerships to be blessed with love; that the body was created pure; that sexual intercourse is pure and undefiled as long as the soul and body are properly connected to their Divine Source; and that human sexual love is a reflection of a greater Love Divine. Milton also implies that although the angels have a higher vibrational presence, they still enjoy some form of passionate expression. He further indicates that despite the higher form of angelic interaction, the angels themselves do not hold a judgment for the seemingly more limited human expressions through “membranes, joints, or limbs.”

The Return of the Goddess
There is a legend telling of a time when the gods were troubled by the appearance of a giant stone phallus (penis or lingam) that was destroying paradise. This black stone lingam was demolishing forests, homes, lakes, and mountains. The gods sent their armies to stop him but to no avail. In a moment of insight, the helpless gods remembered a great goddess whom they had formerly ignored. They humbly went to her, acknowledged her value, and said they would continue such an acknowledgement if she ended the destruction imposed by the lingam. So the goddess descended from the sky, took hold of the giant stone phallus, and slipped him deep inside of her. This act brought him such incredible pleasure that his aggression was completely dissolved.

Shakti and Shiva
Shakti and Shiva are female and male Tantric deities representing the masculine and feminine aspects of a greater deity. Although these beings are deified, they are both found within all men and women. The whole universe is said to be created from the union of Shakti and Shiva.

In Hindu mythology, Shiva (man) needs Shakti (woman) to give him form, and Shakti (woman) needs Shiva (man) to give her consciousness. He can teach her wonderful things, but she can always humble him by reminding him of his limits. In this sense, the two are necessary to achieve the perfect universal dance of life.



(Excerpt from: Sacred Sexuality–A Manual for Living Bliss by: Michael Mirdad)
http://www.spiritualtantra.net/history-of-sacred-sexuality

dianna
13th September 2013, 17:12
Love Shack


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leohcvmf8kM

dianna
14th September 2013, 22:30
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbpMpRq6DV4

wegge
17th September 2013, 15:18
thank you so much for posting this book it unraveld so many knots in my mind

dianna
17th September 2013, 15:38
thank you so much for posting this book it unraveld so many knots in my mind

You're so welcome Wegge (what part of Germany are you in?)

wegge
17th September 2013, 17:44
from bavaria

dianna
22nd September 2013, 14:32
Dr. STEPHAN A. HOELLER

http://www.plotinus.com/images/eros1.jpg


Human beings are not only the funniest monkeys: they are the sexiest ones as well. In many ways we are a species singularly devoted to sex. We talk, write, read, joke and argue about it; we dress and undress for it, and, given favourable circumstances, we perform it regularly. More importantly, and sometimes lamentably, we have innumerable laws and commandments to organise, punish, curb, repress and otherwise influence sexual actions and feelings and have devised psychological penances of guilt and shame which we come to attach to our sexuality.
Because of these and related circumstances, most people are confused and bewildered about sex much of the time, and those who profess not to be thus flummoxed tend to take umbrage under clichés and half truths which they have consciously accepted, but which are not in harmony with either their instinctual or their spiritual natures.

It goes without saying that if the Gnostic worldview is any kind of a worldview at all, it must be able to address itself meaningfully to this predicament and thus to suggest spiritually sound ways in which men and women might successfully extricate themselves from the same. The present essay is an attempt to suggest some Gnostic ways of viewing and dealing with sexuality, and in offering it to the reader, the author is not unmindful of certain hazards.

Psychoanalyst Edward Glover once suggested that writing on psychologically charged subjects should be classified as a dangerous occupation. When in the course of such writing one happens to expose the unconscious motives of some persons, pandemonium is certain to follow. The psychologically exposed individuals frequently relieve their anxiety by attacking the writer who has presumed to disturb their precarious and cherished peace of mind. Martyrdom is surely not an uncommon experience to the Gnostic, and if some form of it befall the author, the risk will hopefully have been worth taking!

The ancient term “Gnosis” has two very useful modern analogues; they are the words “consciousness” and “meaning.” Both of these are vitally important to any useful consideration of sexuality. Without consciousness, in the psychological sense, sexuality is a mere expression of instinct: Useful in its domain, but unrelated to the enhancement of life, to the experience of the fullness of being. With the coming of consciousness, all experiences, including the sexual ones, acquire meaning. As consciousness adds a greatly needed component to experience, so meaning brings us the experience of totality, of the fullness (Pleroma) extolled by the Gnostics.
Between the reality of our lives lived in time and the quality of life’s timelessness, between our personal and mundane experiences and the realm which transcends the tangible world, there exists a creative tensional relationship of opposites. The Apostle Thomas, reporting the words of Jesus, reminds us that the saving, or Christ principle, always comes to us to make the two into one, to unite the above and the below, the left and the right, the inner and the outer, and the male and the female into a single one.

The reconciling agent of all such opposites is meaning. When, on the other hand, the tension between the poles of existence is lacking, then, as C.G. Jung has expressed it, human beings “have the feeling that they are haphazard creatures without meaning, and it is this feeling that prevents them from living their lives with the intensity it demands if it is to be enjoyed to the full. Life becomes stale and is no longer the exponent of the complete human being.” (Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung).

Sexuality is one of the most important tensional relationships of the opposites in life. It is therefore evident that it must have, it does have, great meaning. To leave such a rich mine of meaning, of Gnosis, unexplored would be a grave omission indeed. Let us then proceed with our exploration. As it is useful in such cases, we shall proceed from the ground upwards, as it were, and begin ...

Article continues here:
http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/eros-gnosis-a-gnostic-study-of-human-sexuality

Also interesting

Erotognosis

http://cinyf.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/issue-thirtyone.jpg


"Erotognosis" is the attainment of a modification of consciousness by sensory stimulation of a sexual nature.

Among present day occult practitioners (and not just Chaos Magicians) there is some consensus that the inducement of a state of gnosis is an essential prerequisite for any useful magical activity, be it divination, enchantment, evocation, invocation or illumination. A number of techniques have been described by which such a modified state of consciousness may be induced, and these have been divided into two broad categories of ‘Inhibitory Gnosis’ and ‘Excitatory Gnosis’ by Peter Carroll. The classification is not absolute, and occult practitioners usually find on a personal level that some techniques work better than others, or that particular techniques for inducing gnosis are more effective than others when applied to specific intent.

Excitatory techniques, in contrast, depend on hyper-stimulation as a means of modifying consciousness. Extremes of pain or fear or persistence with some energetic physical activity (such as a whirling dervish dance) to the point of exhaustion can be effective, but sexual climax as the ultimate expression of life represents the pinnacle of excitatory gnosis - Eros.



Full article here (Frater Choronzon 999):
http://www.philhine.org.uk/writings/flsh_erotg.html

wegge
23rd September 2013, 13:20
currently reading Henry Millers "Sexus", he´s soo blunt :)

blunt as frank, don´t know what the first typical association of an native speaker is^^

yes you´re excerpts are great I also see him as inspirational, he also seems to be a lucid dreamer

dianna
23rd September 2013, 13:39
“Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything”
― Henry Miller, Sexus


To be able to give oneself wholly and completely is the greatest luxury that life affords. Real love only begins at this point of dissolution. The personal life is altogether based on dependence, mutual dependence. Society is the aggregate of persons all interdependent. There is another richer life beyond the pale of society, beyond the personal, but there is no knowing it, no attainment possible, without firs traveling the heights and depths of the personal jungle. To become the great lover, the magnetiser and catalyzer, the blinding focus and inspiration of the world, one has to first experience the profound wisdom of being an utter fool. The man whose greatness of heart leads him to folly and ruin is to a woman irresistible. To the woman who loves, that is to say. As to those who ask merely to be loved, who seek only their own reflection in the mirror, no love however great, will ever satisfy them. In a world so hungry for love it is no wonder that men and women are blinded by the glamour and glitter of their own reflected egos. No wonder that the revolver shot is the last summons. No wonder that the grinding wheels of the subway express, though they cut the body to pieces, fail to precipitate the elixir of love. In the egocentric prism the helpless victim is walled in by the very light which he refracts. The ego dies in its own glass cage…”
― Henry Miller, Sexus

Many people shy away from Henry Miller dismissing it as pornographic, unfortunate ... People do that to the writings of Marque de Sade as well, who I personally feel has gotten a bad rap (mis understood in his ideology and social commentary)

dianna
25th September 2013, 12:04
“There are many different types of paths. Some touch you like a gentle spring rain. Tantra is the wild summer thunder storm, churning with creation, destruction, bliss and emptiness.” -Tantric Master, Prem Pranama


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldBWjsDmCvM


Tantra is the path of waking up to the truth of who we are through the unification of opposites. It is a journey of becoming fully present with ourselves, with our life, in each moment. This process of becoming present is deeply connected to the body. Whereas the mind tends to wander in the past and future, the body is rooted in this moment, here and now.
In Tantra, the body is considered a sacred temple and a gateway into divine consciousness. Sexual energy is revered as the potent life force energy to be cultivated as a vehicle to reach higher states of consciousness and ultimate awakening. Known as the non-dual path, this ancient mystery school embraces the entirety of our being. Both our fears and desires hold precious keys from which we can emerge into wholeness.

Non-dual consciousness is the ultimate realization in Tantra: the fundamental unity of all that exists.

Origins

The roots of Tantra reach back to the Indus valley approximately 5,000 years ago as a mystical path that simply yet profoundly embraced the totality of human experience. Desire, fear, passion, love and even suffering were considered direct paths, rather than obstacles, to awakening. This was an extremely radical departure from the formal and puritanical dogma of the Hindu and Buddhist religions of the time where women were forbidden to partake in many rites and the holiest of men were living in solitude seeking liberation through denial of the body. Not only were Tantrikas using their bodies as vehicles for awakening, many of the most enlightened adepts and teachers were women.

The Great Mystery

Many spiritual paths, both ancient and modern, eastern and western have incorporated aspects of Tantra. Many of them even call themselves Tantra and all are extremely different from each other. Which one is the real deal?

This is a path riddled with paradox, requiring immersion into experience rather than intellectual tinkering and for this reason it is impossible to define in a linear context. Like all mystical paths, it is mysterious by nature.

“There are many different types of paths. Some touch you like a gentle spring rain. Tantra is the wild summer thunder storm, churning with creation, destruction, bliss and emptiness.” -Tantric Master, Prem Pranama

Essential Aspects of Tantra
: : :
Non-Duality

The ultimate truth of our reality is one of unity, interconnection and wholeness. The presence of this truth is hidden by the perceived duality which permeates every aspect of reality. At the core of all duality is the polarized frequency of negative and positive which forms the basis of our experience of reality and of ourselves. By embracing one thing, we reject the opposite and the split creates a separation from unity consciousness. Integrating polarity work is the process of illuminating the fundamental wholeness of existence by bringing unconscious material into awareness and balancing the opposing polarities that form the structure of reality. Enlightenment is often described as the experience of non-dual awareness. Awakening to this awareness can happen suddenly or gradually but is ultimately beyond intellectual comprehension alone. Supreme realization is said to occur on the level of the body, releasing a bliss that vibrates within every cell. In Tantra, every experience and encounter is ripe to catalyze awakening and no aspect of existence is more valuable than another. This is why Tantra is sometimes called the path of Yes. This non-dual openness to all of existence is the ultimate embrace of the totality of life.

Savoring

In Tantra it is said that “the path is the result, the result is the path“. Rather than clinging to a future goal of awakening, the Tantric path teaches the full immersion of consciousness into this moment here and now as the gateway into the heart of reality. Instead of denying the senses by way of asceticism or compulsively indulging in sensory consumption by way of hedonism, the Tantric approach seeks to cultivate deep connection and present awareness within the dance of the senses, savoring each moment as it flows into the next. In this way, even mundane tasks can become an exquisite meditation. Even painful feelings can be savored as a delicate play of sensations.

This subtle dimension of reality is laced with the sublime and dwells within every aspect of existence.

Desire

Desire is the force from which all movement of consciousness originates. To exist is to desire. Desire has been a spiritual predicament for centuries because of its connection to the inherent suffering of existence. We desire, we crave, we grasp for the object of our desire, whatever it may be. If we do obtain the object of our desire, the satisfaction is only momentary before a new focus of want takes the reins of our consciousness. In this tireless cycle we are never truly satisfied as we are constantly bound to the objects we desire. To rid oneself of desire, as some spiritual paths have attempted, is itself a desire. The desire for enlightenment is also a desire. Because desire is so fundamental to existence, Tantrikas practice sadhana, which means to see the world as your desire. To immerse deeply into the state of desiring, rather than projecting it outward onto objects, one can experience the pure intensity, aliveness and incandescence of this endless desire, letting it flow out onto every place which our consciousness touches.

Sexuality

As humans, we are uniquely both animal and spirit. Sexuality exists as the bridge between the two and is fundamental to our nature. Sex is the single defining characteristic that distinguishes Men from Women. We are mammals programmed and prone to biological instincts. Among the incredible technologies of the body, perhaps the most astounding is the creation of a new human life!

Our bodies can also be the conduits for extremely potent states of pleasure and ecstasy. The deep bond and intimacy we experience while making love is unlike any other. It is a direct, physical manifestation of non-dual union. This precious life force energy exists within all of us and is the reason why every single one of us came into existence.

Tantra recognizes the sacredness of sexual energy as the source of creation and as a catalyst to bring us into a state of deep presence as well as union with another and with ourselves.

In Tantric practice, sexual energy is used as a vehicle for awakening. This movement of energy can happen with or without a partner. Once we release the habitual agendas and patterns around sexual expression, such as the goal of orgasm, we can begin to dance this potent and powerful energy up the Sushumna channel where it is transformed into awakened consciousness.

Sushumna

Deep inside the center of the body, there is a vertical channel called the Sushumna that reaches from the base of the spine to the top of the head. This channel is the foundation of our consciousness and the location of our seven energy centers, the chakras. Accessing this channel brings us into direct contact with our subtle core. When we are living from this core, we are living in connection to the depths of our essential self, the consciousness that resonates beyond the personality. The awakened experiences of infinite Love, Wisdom and Serenity all occur when our consciousness is present from within this inner core. In Tantra, the life force energy- Kundalini- is awakened first as sexual energy and then travels up the Sushumna into the higher chakras becoming a spiritual force for awakening. In my experience, this inner energetic core can be tangibly experienced and, with practice, played like an incredibly potent instrument for accessing my essential self as well as intimately connecting to the core of another.

Chester
26th September 2013, 02:45
Great Thread - Thanks

The talk given in the video above emulates how I have come to approach life.

It feels good not to be alone.

dianna
26th September 2013, 15:53
Honoring Spirit: The Art of Consecrating Our Lives as Love

Oscar Miro-Quesada


http://www.matthewsplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/love-life.jpg


The following is excerpted from Lessons in Courage: Peruvian Shamanic Wisdom for Everyday Life.


The Challenge of Honoring Spirit: How Can We Know Oneness? How Can We Cultivate a Relationship with That Knowing?

Angry Muslims burn American flags as a blasphemous YouTube video circulates. An American ambassador dies. Halfway around the world, a Florida pastor declares Islam and its teachings “of the Devil” while an effigy of Muhammad hangs limp. What makes religion spawn such hatred? When will the fanaticism end?

The realm of spirit has no dogma. Its only doctrine is an invitation to become conscious of our essential nature. We are at one with the Great Originating Mystery which is within and beyond us. It is our re-membering this experience of union that returns us to wholeness. When we acknowledge the perfection within us even as we consecrate ourselves to that which is beyond, we are well aligned. Our willingness to embrace this paradox of free will and surrender is how we honor spirit in our lives.

But, if spirit is an awareness of wholeness, and a birth- right to which we all have equal access, why do messages of judgment, or disdain, or intolerance seem to pervade the very air that we breathe? Western religions tell us our salvation comes as we fill ourselves up with what we lack. But they also teach that there is only one God, only one way, only one truth. Eastern religions take a different approach. We are already too full, these tell us. The trick is to empty ourselves out, give up who we are, surrender. In both cases, we are somehow deficient. In the midst of these messages, is it any wonder we lose sight of our transcendent or divine nature?

After years of apprenticeship with my beloved teachers of both physical and non-physical realms, I live with this heartfelt conviction: the earth-honoring traditions of our planet’s original peoples provide a welcome alternative to all dogma. These traditions show us the way back to our spiritual roots as they offer us an intimate, reverent relationship with Pachamama, who is our beloved Earth mother. As we marvel at the patterns and the beauty of the natural world, we learn to walk in gratitude for the gift of our lives. And as we pay close attention to how her cycles, pulses, and rhythms are mirrored in ourselves, we gain a very clear understanding that we are not separate. Through this practice, we recognize ourselves as luminous strands in the great web of life.


Article continues here:
http://www.realitysandwich.com/honoring_spirit

wegge
28th September 2013, 08:03
I recommended the eros unredeemed to a friend of mine. He´s a male homosexual about 60 years old. He´s actually living in a marriage with a man and his man has an ongoing relationship with another man whos even visiting their house. Even he said he could get something out of the book and it made concepts clearer to him, like the true fidelity described in the book.

dianna
6th October 2013, 12:09
Love Without Expectation

http://www.wakingtimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Flickr-love-SaraiRachel.jpg


A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” ~ Lao Tzu

On our paths we often encounter friends, lovers, even enemies that we want to offer affection or tenderness, but is it true love we really give them? Is it true compassion, acceptance of who they are in this moment without the desire to change them? Without expectation for what they ‘should’ be, or who they ‘ought’ to be for us? Do we give them a rope just long enough to hang themselves or a laundry list of secret requirements they must meet in order to be our friend, our lover, our mentor, or fellow human being? Love without expectation is true love. It is rare, and complex, just like the path into one’s own inner nature.

There are those who will climb mountains, forage in jungles and camp in forests looking for the thrill of the unknown. Others look inside themselves for the same heart-pounding discovery of the hidden facets of our consciousness. When we are truly awakened through this deep inner journey, we realize that there is no other. In the famous lines from John Donne:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thy own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for me.



Similarly the Chandogya Upanishad speaks a single word – advaita – meaning ‘not two’ and Tat tvam asi – Thou Art That. We are what we love, so when we have expectations for another, if they somehow fail us, then we have only failed ourselves.

“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you are not in this world to live up to mine.” ~ Bruce Lee

How often do we make the bar too high to reach? Or the mountain too high to climb? And then use this as an excuse not to love completely? These are the tricks of an egoic mind keeping what is ‘out there’ separate from the overarching Love that connects us all. When we expect something from others, we don’t allow the true genius of the Universe to surprise us, or drop our jaws in awe with the infinitely more appropriate and beautiful ways it can work out ‘problems’ when we get out of our own way – and drop our expectations.

We all have our little fantasies about how things should be. How others should behave, what exactly our lives should look like. But this is all just a play – just maya – the physical only, the material circus of an infinitely greater Universe.

Once we let go of our expectations, we stop trying to force people into boxes, smash them into take-out containers that cannot contain even their fractional vastness, as representative of the Whole, we start to experience the world as it more truly exists.

It also means we don’t have to be frustrated or angry anymore. We can just allow. This doesn’t mean that we become spineless, but it does mean that we don’t consent to the actions of others – which are really just our own projections anyhow – disturbing the equanimity of our minds.

We can notice when we start to wish things were different – when we start to fantasize about some outcome. Instead, we can do good things, be kind to people, and have no expectation for any particular outcome. The Dalai Lama once said, “I am open to the guidance of synchronicity, and do not let expectations hinder my path.”

“A wonderful gift may not be wrapped as you expect.” ~ Jonathan Lockwood Huie



People just might surprise us when we let go of our expectations and just love them – as they are – right now.



Christina Sarich,
Waking Times
http://www.wakingtimes.com/2013/07/16/love-without-expectation/

dianna
25th October 2013, 22:40
Sexual Desire: Some Philosophical Reflections

Christopher Hamilton



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q3fBK6LbCc


Compared with many issues, philosophers have not written a great deal on the nature of sexual desire, and what they have written on it is has not always been very enlightening. One reason for this is that philosophical discussions of sexual desire have often been fairly heavily moralised. That is to say, philosophers and others have often presented a particular moral conception of sexual desire as if it were an understanding of sexual desire as such, thus distorting our understanding of this phenomenon (or series of phenomena) of human life. Certainly, it must be granted, I think, that it is doubtful that one can arrive at an account of sexual desire which is wholly free of moral concern, but this just means that if we are aiming to give an account of sexual desire that is honest and realistic we should aim to be very sensitive to the moral notions that we employ in doing so. In what follows, I discuss some key philosophical theories of sexual desire, in which theories moral concerns are present in differing ways, and then add some thoughts of my own.
In my view, the most profound philosophical account of sexual desire is that provided by Jean-Paul Sartre in L’Être et le néant .

Sartre begins his discussion of sexual desire by dismissing the view that sexual desire is a desire for pleasure. He does so since he claims that, if such desire were a desire for pleasure, then it would be impossible to make sense of how it is that such desire could come to ‘attach’ itself to an object, that is, to another human being. Crudely put, if desire were desire for pleasure, why would masturbation not be enough?1 What, then, according to Sartre, does one want in experiencing sexual desire? We can approach his discussion by considering his reflections on the nature of the caress. Such a caress - it may be a caress of the hand or the eye - constitutes, says Sartre, an attempt to incarnate the other.

The other, he says, is born as flesh under my caress, whence the idea that I want him or her to be overwhelmed by his or her body: ‘Desire is the attempt to strip the body of its movements as of its clothing and to make it exist as pure flesh’.2 If the other responds to my caress then this person will experience his or her arousal as ‘troubling’, as ‘clogging’ consciousness. Yet, at the same time, my experiencing my own desire is felt by me in the same way, and I, too, in responding to the caress of the other, am born as flesh for him or her.

We can put Sartre’s account in this way. If I desire you, I do not desire your flesh. Rather, I desire you in your flesh. It is you I want to exist as flesh for me. I want to possess you, not as mere flesh, but through and as revealed in your flesh. For Sartre, this ‘you’ is your freedom, for Sartre identifies the self and freedom. But one does not have to accept that identification to see the power of Sartre’s account. We are embodied creatures, and our consciousness of that is crucial to our life. When we share a meal, or walk together, or talk together, we can only do so in the way we do because we are embodied. But if we share a meal with each other, we are not interested in one another as embodied.

However, if I desire you sexually, then I am interested in you as embodied. This is why being the object of sexual desire can be so compromising: suddenly to be aware that another desires one fills one with a consciousness of one’s being an embodied creature. One is aware of one’s flesh as revealing who one is, and as being the focus of the other’s interest in one.

For Sartre, the fact that sexual desire has this kind of structure, i.e., that it is a desire for a person in his or her flesh, means that it is doomed to failure. Remember that, for Sartre, in desire I want to capture your freedom in your flesh. But if I manage to possess your freedom on the surface of your flesh, then you are, of course, no longer free. For if I possess your freedom, then I hold it captive, and, in holding it captive, it is clearly no longer free. Thus, if I achieve what I want in my sexual desire for you, namely, possessing your freedom, then I have thereby thwarted or frustrated my own desire. But you, too, are caught in the same process in your desire for me: if you capture me in my freedom, then I am no longer free, and you have failed to achieve what you want to achieve. This means that in our desire for each other, we are experiencing a conflict with ourselves and with each other. We can neither of us get what we want, and yet in our desire we struggle to do so. This is why Sartre claims that orgasm cannot be the aim of desire. Rather, orgasm signals the frustration of desire, since it is, so to speak, the point at which the failure to capture the other in his or her flesh becomes manifest.

Sartre’s account, only the bare bones of which I have provided here, clearly captures something central about the nature of sexual desire. For even if we do not accept his identification of the self and freedom, there is, it seems to me, something right about the idea that sexual desire is doomed to a peculiar kind of frustration. Of course, all of our pleasures can fail to bring satisfaction: nothing is more common than to satisfy a desire and remain unsatisfied oneself. But the point about sexual desire goes deeper than this: sexual desire seems in a special or peculiar way doomed to frustration. But if that is not, as Sartre in his account proposes, because of the identification of self and freedom, why is it? Here is a suggestion. Sexual desire seems to be a deeply unstable desire. On the one hand, it is roving, largely undiscriminating about the individuals to whom it attaches itself, restless: one wants ‘woman’ or ‘man’. On the other, it can be especially excited by, and become fixated upon, a specific individual. This lends sexual desire a strange fragility: for, in desiring a given individual, one also desires him or her as man or woman, as a representative of the male or the female sex. There accordingly seems to be a way in which what one wants in the sexual act is two things that one cannot have: one wants this individual man or woman and one wants all men or all women. That is, one wants all men or all women in and through this one individual. But this is impossible. And this is perhaps part of the explanation for the fact that sexual desire can be so imperious and desperate. It may also be the reason why one of the most recurrent sexual fantasies is that of not knowing who one’s sexual partner is.

But Sartre’s account seems weak in one crucial way. He starts, as we have seen, from the idea that sexual desire could not be desire for pleasure since if that were so then we could not explain how desire attaches itself to another. But this seems mistaken. The reason for this is that the pleasure that comes from sex with another might simply be more intense or more varied than the pleasure that comes from masturbation. We could thus explain how desire attaches itself to another by saying that it is this intense or multifaceted form of pleasure that is wanted in desire, and that this can only be satisfied by actually having sex with another, whence desire attaches itself to another. Roger Scruton would disagree with the last point. He has argued that any instance of sexual desire possesses an individualising intentionality. By this he means that sexual desire is founded upon the thought of the other as the specific individual he or she is.3 That is, there can be no sexual desire which exists and then ‘attaches’ itself to a specific individual. Hence, according to this account, if a man desires two women at the same time, he will be experiencing two different desires, each of which will be a desire for one of the two women. From this account it also follows that there cannot be any such sexual desire as an unfocused desire for no particular man or woman. Scruton considers the case of the sailor storming ashore with the thought ‘woman’ in his mind: he might be thought to desire a woman, but no particular woman. Scruton claims that this is not so: until the sailor actually meets a specific woman he desires, he desired no woman; he was rather in the condition of desiring to desire.

Such a view of sexual desire has to find an adequate response to such phenomena as that of Casanova, described by Stefan Zweig:

His passion, flowing away at the purely erotic level, knows nothing of the ecstasy of uniqueness. We need have no anxiety, therefore, when he seems reduced to despair because Henriette or the beautiful Portuguese lady has left him. We know that he will not blow out his brains; nor are we surprised to find him, a day or two later, amusing himself in the first convenient brothel. If the nun C.C. is unable to come over from Murano, and the lay-sister M.M. arrives in her place, Casanova is speedily consoled. After all, one woman is as good as another!

Scruton writes: ‘If John is frustrated in his pursuit of Mary, there is something inapposite in the advice “Take Elizabeth, she will do just as well.”’

Not, apparently, if one is Casanova! It seems, then, that Scruton has two options. Either he could insist that he has provided a true account of sexual desire, in which case Zweig has totally misunderstood and misdescribed the case of someone like Casanova, and, indeed, that a lot of what looks like sexual desire where what is desired is someone or other is not really sexual desire after all since it does not display an individualising intentionality; or he could say that such cases display sexual desire all right, but in a perverted or otherwise morally unacceptable form. In fact, Scruton seems to waver between the two, for, although, as we have seen, he claims that in cases such as that of the sailor the man in question experiences no sexual desire until he comes into contact with the woman he desires, he also grants, at the end of his book, and looking over his argument as a whole, that ‘my analysis has included a large prescriptive component’.

In other words, he seems to concede that his analysis is not an analysis of sexual desire as such but a moral view about the best form that sexual desire can take. It is, in other words, a moralised account of sexual desire.

I do not think, then, that Scruton’s account is wholly plausible as it stands. However, it seems to me clear that what Scruton is trying to do is to give an account of sexual desire that does justice to the fact that there can be deeper and shallower expressions of such desire. Indeed, it seems to be the case that many people long for their sexual desire to be provided with deeper forms of expression. But some accounts of sexual desire do not seem to be able to make sense of this. One such is that provided by Igor Primoratz, who has argued that sexual desire ‘is sufficiently defined as the desire for certain bodily pleasures, period’.

The reason that such an account of sexual desire makes it hard to see how such desire is capable of finding deeper forms of expression in human life is that it assimilates sexual desire to something like the desire to scratch an itch, and the possibilities of a deepened understanding of itch-scratching are severely limited, to say the least. This is not to say that only deepened forms of expression of sexual desire are morally legitimate, or anything like that: it is merely to say that any account of sexual desire must be able to make sense of the possibility of those deeper forms of expression.

In any case, Primoratz’ account of sexual desire has some odd consequences. It leads, he argues, to the conclusion that any putative sexual act which is devoid of pleasure for the person engaged in that act is not, after all, a sexual act at all. Thus he claims that a prostitute who gains no pleasure from intercourse with a customer is not engaged in a sexual act (whereas the customer is).

Further:

As for the couple who have lost sexual interest in each other but still engage in routine coitus, the less pleasurable it gets, the less valuable it is as sex. If, at some point, it becomes utterly bereft of sexual pleasure, would it be so odd to say that they were performing acts that for most people ordinarily involve at least a modicum of sexual pleasure, but that they were merely going through the motions, that for them there was no sex in it any longer?

One might suspect that Primoratz is not, after all, just trying to tell us what sex is, but prescribing a particular form of it, that is, one through which one experiences as much pleasure as possible. For he clearly believes that the less pleasurable sex is, the less valuable it is. Still, leaving that aside, it does, surely, seem odd to suppose that the bored couple in Primoratz’ example are not actually engaged in a sexual act. One might as well say that what it is to feel hunger is to have a desire for certain bodily pleasures so that if one eats something utterly bland which fails to fill the stomach (modern mass-produced strawberries, for example) one is not really eating at all.

In fact, I do not think that Primoratz need deny on his account that the prostitute or the bored couple are engaged in sex even if they get no pleasure from such acts. His view expresses a confusion between sexual desire and sexual acts. One is, after all, still eating if there is no pleasure in doing so. The prostitute might not, indeed, possess any sexual desire for her clients, but it does not follow from that that she is not engaged in sexual acts with them. The same may be the case for the bored couple. In the same way, I might for some reason have no hunger, no desire for food, yet still be eating.

So far, then, we have seen that three key philosophical theories of sexual desire have weaknesses, though I certainly would not deny that they each capture some part of the truth about some individuals’ experience of sexual desire. But if we were to try to find some fundamental reason why they are not complete as accounts of sexual desire, why they do not do enough to open up a deepened understanding of sexual desire, then I think that we would have to note that central here is that none of them makes anything of the connection between sexual desire and procreation. And we can see that this connection is crucial by the simple reflection that a species of creature which had all our experiences of sexual desires but in whom sexual desire had no connection with procreation would have a profoundly different understanding of sexual desire from the one we have. As so often in philosophy, the real problem is to find a helpful way of expressing this point.

[B]At one point D. H. Lawrence writes:

Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the new repulsion, always different, always new. The long neuter spell of Lent, when the blood is low, and the delight of the Easter kiss, the sexual revel of the spring, the passion of mid-summer, the slow recoil, revolt, and grief of autumn, greyness again, then the sharp stimulus of long winter nights. Sex goes through the rhythm of the year, in man and woman, ceaselessly changing: the rhythm of the sun in his relation to the earth.


It goes without saying that many, if not most, do not share this view of sex, wonderful though it is. And there are lots of ways in which one might pursue or develop or respond to the thoughts Lawrence articulates. For our purposes what is important is that Lawrence connects sex to the natural cycle of life, and does so in such a way as to express a sense of the wonder and mystery of sex. But if we ask ourselves how it is possible to see sex in this way, then I think that we shall not be able long to resist the thought that it is the fact that sex is related to conception and procreation that allows us to do this. For it is this fact about it which most immediately and forcefully connects it to the notions of corruption and regeneration and hence allows it to be brought into contact with our sense of the natural cycle of the seasons. And if, as we do, we can wonder at that cycle, at its utter familiarity together with the strangeness that each spring green shoots sprout from what looks like dead wood, we can also see why it is that we can wonder at sex, at the strangeness of a force at once so familiar and yet unheimlich - this incomparable German word, which means ‘uncanny’ or ‘spooky’ or ‘frightening’, captures the sense of something’s not being like that which one meets with at home [Heim], that which is unfamiliar or upsets one’s ingrained and habitual ways of dealing with things.
We could perhaps get at the significance of procreation for an understanding of sexual desire in another way. Many people experience a sense of wonder and mystery at the birth of a child. And this very sense can cast in a certain light the sexual act which directly led to this birth, can remind us of the strangeness and mystery of sex. But to speak here of a reminder is not to suggest that anyone might actually have forgotten anything, for we are all familiar with the fact that sexual desire has its own demands and needs which well up and grip us in ways we cannot fully fathom, and that it attaches us to people in ways we cannot properly comprehend. We all know that sex, where what is craved is so clear and yet weirdly elusive, seems at once completely natural and an intrusion from another world into our daily activities.

The issue is rather that of such knowledge becoming deeper and more alive as an object of wonder in a person, much as, say, suffering but surviving a dreadful accident might be said to remind one of one’s mortality. Thus the connection with sex of reproduction and all it involves casts its shadow over sex in the kind of way that mortality casts its shadow over human life. And this is so even if a given person never thinks of procreation (except, perhaps, to prevent his or her sexual acts leading to conception), just as it is so even if a person never thinks of his own mortality (except to suppress or ridicule the thought). For the kinds of thoughts I have said people have about the birth of a child and those that people have who have survived death form part of the collective experience of mankind, of the wisdom concerning what it is to be a human being and thus of our sense of who and what we are.

I am not claiming, of course, that reflection on the connection of sex with reproduction is the only way in which it is possible for one to come to a deepened understanding of human sexuality. I am just saying that it is a central or permanent way in which this can happen for creatures such as we are, and thus that any account of sexual desire which leaves it out must be inadequate.

As I have already said, however, it does not follow from the fact that sexual desire is capable of deeper forms of expression that only such expression of sexual desire is morally legitimate. Moreover, it is often extremely unclear just which kinds of expression of sexual desire are shallow and which deep. Thus Stefan Zweig, from whose essay on Casanova I have already quoted, manages in that essay to celebrate the very shallowness of Casanova’s erotic life, finding in it much to envy in its freedom from moral concerns and in its full-blooded impulsiveness. Yet Zweig would certainly not have supposed it to be good that all behave as Casanova did. It is possible to celebrate the sheer variety of forms of expression of human sexual desire whilst being glad that they remain that, a variety, and that none establishes a hegemony over the others.

Sexual desire, then, I am arguing, is interestingly balanced between depth and shallowness. There is, perhaps, a reason for this in that located close to the centre of our experience of sexual desire is, oddly enough, that of disgust.
In a valuable essay, David Pole has analysed the concept of disgust.

He argues, as have others, that disgust always carries a charge of attraction: those things we find disgusting we find both repellent and attractive. Pole also suggests that we get our central notion of disgust from organic matter that is decomposing in some way, which would help explain why such things as slugs - to take one of Pole’s examples - are experienced as disgusting: for the slug’s slimy body, which it appears to be losing as it crawls along, seems to be caught in a process of decay and corruption. One of the most disgusting things I have ever seen was the neck of an otherwise healthy horse, gashed wide open by barbed wire, into which had buried themselves thousands of maggots which were feeding on the blood oozing in clots from the wound. A friend told me of his disgust on seeing a frog which has a loose back like a string vest into which the young flee to seek shelter and are carried for safety. Organic decay, then, or what looks like it, or smells of it, is perhaps the core of disgust.

Consider now the sexual act. In this act the bodies of those involved undergo profound changes: the flushing of the face, the erection of the penis, the tumescence of the nipples, the secretions of the vagina. One is overwhelmed in desire by one’s body, as Sartre puts it: one’s will is here in abeyance. All of these things can, of course, be received as an expression of excitement. But there is no doubt that they can be seen as disgusting, and often have been so seen: I should imagine that Christianity has been particularly good at finding them disgusting. For, by their very nature, and in their triumph over the will, they are redolent of a body in decay. This is why desire for the other in his or her flesh can so easily, in certain persons, tip over into disgust with his or her flesh. And in sexual jealousy such disgust is to the fore: for the sexually exciting transformations of the beloved’s body resemble nothing so much as the disgusting decay of that body when they are provoked by, and express desire for, a rival. Yet the transformations of one’s beloved’s body, even when they are connected with one’s rival, remain exciting, and they do so even partly because they disgust, for that which is disgusting is appealing, as we have already noted. Disgust, one might say, adapting a Sartrean idiom from another context, lies coiled like a worm at the heart of desire, and it is brought to the light of day by betrayal. Sexual jealousy may begin in the recognition of one’s dispensability as a sexual partner, but once it has been evoked it feeds upon the primordial disgust which lies hidden in all sexual acts. It might be said that the idea that disgust lies at the heart of sexual desire is absurd. And it is, of course, true that not everyone will be susceptible to the sense that the transformations of the body in sexual excitement are redolent of a body in decay, however latent this might be. But there are other reasons for supposing that disgust is inherent in sexual desire. For example, it just seems to be the case that sexual desire (especially male desire?) is often ignited and intensified by a sense of doing something which involves disgust. This is connected with the fact that in sex we suspend or overcome our normal sense of disgust. As William Ian Miller says:

[S]exual desire depends on the idea of a prohibited domain of the disgusting. A person’s tongue in your mouth could be experienced as a pleasure or as a most repulsive and nauseating intrusion depending on the state of relations that exist or are being negotiated between you and the person. But someone else’s tongue in your mouth can be a sign of intimacy because it can also be a disgusting assault.12
But can it be right to say that modern sexual desire, whose expression is so free in comparison with that of previous ages, carries a sense of disgust at its core? Perhaps the idea is not as absurd as it might seem, for A. Béjin has argued that
present day [sexual] norms tend to provoke a conflict between immediate surrender to the demands of the senses, and an increased conscious mastery of the organic processes... One must... abandon oneself to sensation, without ceasing to submit one’s actions to a rational calculation of ‘sexual expedience’.


The claim is that we have done a great deal to subsume our sexual practices under the same kind of cost-benefit calculus that applies in so many other areas of our life. If this is right, then modern sexual desire, for all its seeming liberation from older forms of control, may be thought to express a powerful asceticism which itself testifies to a sense of disgust with sex. Indeed, the fact that modern people seem obsessed with a kind of highly stylised, more or less ‘pornographized’ sex is itself perhaps a sign of a kind of unacknowledged disgust for sex, a disgust for sex that cannot be packaged and presented in a highly sanitized form.

I have spoken, then, of the possibility of a deepened understanding of sex and of the disgust which is implicit in sex. These two ways of thinking can certainly pull us in different directions, making us think of sex as now something full of grace and light, now as something mean and shabby. But they can pull in the same direction. For the experience of sex can be deeply consoling. If we ask why this is so, then a key part of the answer is surely that, given the wretchedness of the human heart and its potential to fill one with disgust, it can seem little short of a miracle that one person should consent to the intimacy with another that making love involves. In other words, in some moods it can seem that when two people make love this act will depend upon, and involve, mutual forgiveness. Responding to such a thought, some have seen in sex the possibility of a quasi-religious act, as John Berryman suggests in one of his poems: ‘Our Sunday morning when dawn-priests were applying/Wafer and wine to the human wound, we laid/Ourselves to cure ourselves down...’. Such an idea is certainly blasphemous, but it helps us see that, in an age of decay of religious belief, there may lie secretly in the modern obsession with sex something more than I have already suggested: a kind of longing for a redemption no longer available in traditional terms.

There is, for some people, something melancholy in the fact that sex can be both a source of the kind of consolation I have mentioned, as well as being imperious and desperate in the way I have also mentioned. We often long for it to express only the most tender of feelings. Yet one can also be glad of this discrepancy in our experience of what sex is, since it makes of sex one of those mysteries of the human condition which help us hold on to the sense that life is worth living because what it offers us is inexhaustibly rich and varied.

Christopher Hamilton


http://www.richmond-philosophy.net/rjp/back_issues/rjp7_hamilton.pdf

dianna
2nd November 2013, 22:29
Joan Baez - I Never Will Marry



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoqiQkibtZY

How Romance Wrecked Traditional Marriage


“Love was considered a reason not to get married. It was seen as lust, as something that would dissipate.”



Despite the fondness among certain politicians and pundits for “traditional marriage,” a nostalgic-sounding concept that conjures a soft-focus Polaroid of grandma and grandpa, few consider the actual roots of our marital traditions, when matrimony was little more than a business deal among unequals. Even today, legal marriage isn’t measured by the affection between two people, but by the ability of a couple to share Social Security and tax benefits. In reality, it’s the idea of marrying for love that’s untraditional.

...

http://indianapublicmedia.org/harmonia/files/2009/08/wedding_eyck_edi.jpg

For most of recorded human history, marriage was an arrangement designed to maximize financial stability. Elizabeth Abbott, the author of “A History of Marriage” explains that in ancient times, marriage was intended to unite various parts of a community, cementing beneficial economic relationships. “Because it was a financial arrangement, it was conceived of and operated as such. It was a contract between families. For example, let’s say I’m a printer and you make paper, we might want a marriage between our children because that will improve our businesses.” Even the honeymoon, often called the “bridal tour,” was a communal affair, with parents, siblings, and other close relatives traveling together to reinforce their new familial relationships.

By the Middle Ages, gender inequality was not only enshrined in social customs, but also common law. In most European countries, married women were forced to give up control over any personal wealth and property rights to their husbands. Eventually, the system became known as “coverture” (taken from “couverture,” which literally means “coverage” in French), whereby married couples became a single legal entity in which the husband had all power. The American practice of wives adopting their husbands’ surnames originated in England as a way to enforce patrilineal heritage, signifying that a woman belonged to her husband, thereby suspending any individual rights when she took her marital vows.


Under such laws, children were generally viewed as assets, in part because they were expected to work for the family business. “People saw their kids as pawns, literally,” says Abbott. “They might love them, but even if they did, their children had a function to further the family’s economic interests, which was thought to be good for the whole family.”




Abbott outlines a typical example of an arranged marriage in 15th century England, where the father of the intended bride had several daughters and didn’t choose which one would be betrothed until the morning of the wedding. Since husbands had all legal power, when a marriage ended in annulment, divorce, or separation, women almost never received custody of their children.

The idea of marriage as an economic necessity was also reinforced by social restrictions on personal independence. “Under the guild system in Europe during the Middle Ages, even if you’d passed all the apprenticeship and journeyman stages, you couldn’t become a master of your trade if you weren’t married,” says Abbott. “It was an essential part of adulthood. Marriage was the core of societies, and married people were always given more rights and seen as more responsible.” In no uncertain terms, being married conferred the rights of full citizenship, at least for men.

Despite their second-class status, women were still expected to bring their own assets to a marriage through their dowry, which could include money, land, and physical property. But above all else, a woman’s financial value was linked to her sexual purity. Before decent birth control or paternity tests, a bride’s virginity became the essential method for protecting the male bloodline. Women were undoubtedly related to the children they birthed, but fathers could guarantee lineage only if they were the sole male sex partner. Female infidelity became taboo because of its potential to affect inheritance, instituting a double standard we’re still grappling with today.




While female chastity was revered, male infidelity was entirely acceptable, though it was most common among men wealthy enough to support various wives, mistresses, or male “companions.” Stephanie Coontz, the author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage,” says that even while the spread of Christianity worked to eliminate polygamy, there was little social reinforcement. “For centuries, monogamy was more theoretical than real, especially for men. Men were expected to have affairs. We have letters and diaries from the late 18th century of men bragging to their male in-laws about their sexual adventures in ways they could never do today.”

Despite the church’s staunch position on monogamy, in the late Middle Ages, a legal marriage was quite easy to obtain. However, as more couples attempted to elope or marry without consent, the old guard upped its game. To combat the spread of “clandestine” marriages, or those unapproved by parents, state officials began wresting the legal process of marriage from the church. “Aristocrats and patricians put pressure on the state to make sure that the family could control whom their children married,” says Abbott, ensuring that their wealth wouldn’t be mishandled.

France enacted its first marital edict in 1557, raising the age of majority to 25 for women and 30 for men, and requiring both parents’ consent for marriage before this age. Those who disobeyed could now be legally disinherited. It took another two centuries for Great Britain to raise the bar by passing the Marriage Act of 1753, which made certain marital procedures mandatory, including public “banns” or notices of impending nuptials, proof of age, and the explicit consent of family members.

“It’s contrary to all of our preconceptions, but a man could afford to give into his emotions more than a woman could. She paid a price when she did.”
But during the 18th century, increased globalization and the first Industrial Revolution were changing the world in ways even that the most affluent parents couldn’t control. “With the development of wage labor, young people started making more decisions independently from their parents,” says Coontz. “If I were a young woman, I could then go out and earn my own dowry, instead of waiting for my parents to bestow it on me after I married someone they approved of. Or, if I was a young man, I didn’t have to wait to inherit the farm; I could move somewhere else if I wanted to. This was greatly accelerated by the rise of the Enlightenment with its greater sense of personal freedom and, of course, the French and American revolutions of the 18th century, with the idea that people are entitled to the ‘pursuit of happiness.’”

As this philosophical support for individual choice spread, more young people wanted some say regarding their future spouses. “Demands for consent from the people actually getting married were thought to be quite radical,” says Abbott. Even more radical was the idea that marriage might be entered into for emotional, rather than financial, reasons.




Though the murky concept known as “love” has been recorded for all of human history, it was almost never a justification for marriage. “Love was considered a reason not to get married,” says Abbott. “It was seen as lust, as something that would dissipate. You could have love or lust for your mistress, if you’re a man, but if you’re a woman, you had to suppress it. It was condemned as a factor in marriage.”


In fact, for thousands of years, love was mostly seen as a hindrance to marriage, something that would inevitably cause problems. “Most societies have had romantic love, this combination of sexual passion, infatuation, and the romanticization of the partner,” says Coontz. “But very often, those things were seen as inappropriate when attached to marriage. The southern French aristocracy believed that true romantic love was only possible in an adulterous relationship, because marriage was a political, economic, and mercenary event. True love could only exist without it.”

By the 19th century, the friction between love and money had come to a head. As the Western world advanced towards a more modern, industrialized society built on wage labor, emotional bonds became more private, focused more on immediate family and friends than communal celebrations. Simultaneously, mass media helped make sentimental inclinations a larger part of popular culture, with the flourishing of holidays like Valentine’s Day and nostalgic hobbies like scrapbooking.

Culturally speaking, love was in the air, and the union of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1840 only served to seal the deal. Though Victoria and Albert’s marriage was sanctioned by their royal families, it was also hailed as a true “love match,” cementing the new ideal of romantic partnership. Their nuptials also coincided with the proliferation of early print media, making the event visible to readers all across Europe and North America.

“With Victoria’s wedding, you had endless reporting and tons of illustrations,” Abbott says. “Between two and four weeks after Victoria was married, magazines reproduced every last aspect of her wedding. Queen Victoria chose orange blossoms for her wreath, and an elaborate, white dress with this ridiculous train in the back, and every detail was sent across the ocean and read voraciously by women in ladies’ magazines. Her wedding became the model because everyone knew about it.” To this day, many stereotypical elements of American weddings are still drawn from Victoria’s, particularly the tradition of wearing a white dress.




However, outside of the insular world of nobility, women still had to view romance through a logical lens. “Women tried very hard to love the right person, to test their love, in the sense that many of them were quite rational about it,” says Coontz. “You have women writing in their diaries, ‘Well, my heart inclines to so and so, but I’m not sure that he’s worthy of my love,’ really trying to force themselves to love the right person.

“Men had less trouble with that because men were more powerful. A man could actually afford to fall in love, and once he was married, he wasn’t at the mercy of her whims the way a woman was at the mercy of a man’s. It’s contrary to all of our preconceptions about women’s more emotional nature, but a man could afford to give into his emotions more than a woman could. She paid a price when she did.”

Meanwhile, the surge in steel production during the 1860s, and the subsequent spread of railways, was permanently altering the landscape of the Western world. Twenty years later, this transformation was intensified with the birth of electric light. As America became increasingly industrialized and urban areas exploded in growth, men and women had more opportunities to live and work on their own, and to interact outside the protected familial environment.




While the search for a love match gave women a modicum of control during the courtship stage of a relationship, married women were still subject to their husbands’ legal authority. “In many loving marriages, husbands’ treatment of their wives improved, but on the other hand, it also made women more dependent on love and on ‘earning’ or sustaining that love,” says Coontz.

Just how did a wife earn her husband’s love? She became the perfect homemaker. Abbott refers to the period’s housewife-mania as the “cult of the domestic,” centering on a stereotype that desexualized women and made child-rearing their primary goal. In her role as a domestic angel, the perfect wife was completely pure in body and mind, submitting to her husband’s erotic advances, but never desiring or initiating sex herself. “This was the new take on women, the new hype,” says Abbott.

Politicians, scientists, and intellectuals began declaring women the “purer” gender, supposedly innately uninterested in sex. “People were very nervous about the potentially destabilizing impact of the love match and the increase in youthful independence, and I think that romantic sentimentalism helped to defuse the worry and paper over the contradictions and danger points,” explains Coontz. “There was a fear that love would, in fact, lead not only to divorce but to out-of-wedlock sex and childbirth. And the response was this idea of female purity. Real love wasn’t about sex primarily—sex was something that only bad girls like.” Many modern cliches about married women’s roles evolved from the Victorian homemaking trend and the new reliance on romance to find a suitable mate.


In Marion Harland’s 1889 book entitled “House and Home: A Complete Housewife’s Guide,” she writes: “A loveless marriage is legalized crime. Marriage entered upon without just appreciation of mutual relations and obligations is folly so grave as to approximate sin.” Though Harland asserts the supreme importance of love, at the time, this feeling implied respect and appreciation, rather than emotional infatuation. Harland also emphasized that the most problematic issue among married couples was the division of finances and firmly recommended splitting the husband’s income equitably. She recognized that romance could actually undermine the perception of women as contributors to a family’s financial well-being. “… consider that you two constitute a business firm, and pay over her share of equitable profits. The act is a just partition, not a gift.”

When Harland’s book was published, the change from smaller household production and barter systems to factory labor and wage-earning jobs had thoroughly divided the economic roles of husbands and wives. This split became embodied in the ideology of “separate spheres,” which created biological justifications for men to dominate the public realm and women the private world of domesticity. As the home became dissociated from the family income, women’s roles were no longer viewed as integral for economic survival. “It wasn’t called ‘working,’ but many women had paying boarders, raised chickens and sold their eggs, and made pies or jams and sold them,” says Abbott.




As Coontz explains, in “Marriage, A History,” these myriad tasks were no longer viewed as crucial economic activities. “In the older definition of housekeeping, women’s labor was recognized as a vital contribution to the family’s economic survival. Wives were regularly referred to as ‘helps-meet’ and ‘yoke mates.’ But as housekeeping became ‘homemaking,’ it came to be seen as an act of love rather than a contribution to survival.”

Gradually, as women achieved more freedom to find educational and professional opportunities outside the home, love became a more viable option for them, too. “Women became less likely to tolerate horrible relationships than in the past, where even abused spouses were supposed to grin and bear it,” says Abbott. Political movements of the 19th century, like abolition and women’s suffrage, brought the seeds of gender equality to the intellectual forefront, and the subservient status of women began to shift.


After thousands of years, the traditional goals of marriage were changing, from making ends meet to finding fulfillment—a much more elusive target. “The personal satisfaction that marriage brought to the spouses became very important,” Abbott continues. “Spouses expected their mates to be their primary source of emotional support. The marital home became the locus of romantic love, passion, emotional sustenance, and sexual satisfaction. Egalitarianism was still far off, but women increasingly demanded and slowly won more rights.” By the time that women’s suffrage passed in 1920, love had become inseparable from the concept of marriage, effectively stealing the spotlight from its patriarchal economic motives.

Since then, we’ve been steadily socialized to ignore this unpleasant history, even while retaining the system’s financial incentives. Much as we want to believe that marriage is a heartfelt validation of loving commitment, the legal definition of marriage still centers on income, inheritance, and other monetary rights. Nowhere is its economic value more clear than the debate over gay marriage, in which both sides often justify their position by touting the long list of federal benefits provided by a legal marriage license.

“I don’t think we’re headed toward the death of marriage,” says Coontz, “especially in the United States, where marriage remains the highest expression of commitment most people can imagine. But I do think that we’re moving toward more acceptance of a multiplicity of marital and non-marital models.”



http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/how-romance-wrecked-traditional-marriage/

Flash
2nd November 2013, 22:54
Whatever you think about eros, no problem arise about what you do or don't, until there is children. Open sexuality has a tendency to let the children be raised by the mothers while the father have open sexuality (no time anymore for the mothers who have to raise and feed the children, having to bring money home too).

If children were either raised by society as a whole or the one raising them having a revenue to live on, eros would be quite better lived by all parties. Right now, women got the bad side of it.


By the Middle Ages, gender inequality was not only enshrined in social customs, but also common law. In most European countries, married women were forced to give up control over any personal wealth and property rights to their husbands. Eventually, the system became known as “coverture” (taken from “couverture,” which literally means “coverage” in French), whereby married couples became a single legal entity in which the husband had all power

Who wants the worst of all world, how can we talk of eros in such condition as above?


While female chastity was revered, male infidelity was entirely acceptable, though it was most common among men wealthy enough to support various wives, mistresses, or male “companions.”

this is often still the case, not because of law or tradition, but because women are left to work as professonnals, bring money in, make a career, raise the children, prepare the food, do the homeworks with them, go to sport event/school evenings/etc, and clean the house, basically alone. When eros makes its call, very little energy and taste for it is left. All the while mister does find misses more ininteresting, and start going out. Nothing has change truly.

Until we have true equality in terms of workload and benefits from it, nothing will truly change.

wegge
14th November 2013, 17:11
Confessions

called out from the dark
choked off and buried
rising to live again
speaking about my interest and longing
to you and everything you represent
something that permeates us
despite the fear of rejection
[and the seeming unbearableness of joy]
albeit even that is feeling good
gives you another input
to rebalance
the unicycle
as long as you freely sing
win win

dianna
21st November 2013, 00:05
Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, & Other Writings


http://img.dooyoo.co.uk/GB_EN/orig/0/5/7/8/8/578865.jpg


The Marquis de Sade, his journals burned, his skull exhumed for phrenological study, continues to write!



The life of this incontestably “free” man was spent for the most part shackled and locked away. The French monarchy threw Sade in prison for his personal indiscretions. The subsequent revolutionary government initially pardoned and freed the marquis, yet proceeded to sentence him to prison cell once again, which was where he spent the remainder of life, and completed the majority of immense, difficult and important body of work. Sade’s life can be called one of imprisonment, yet this is only the case in the grossest physical sense of the word. Sade expounds the imagination as the realm of empowerment –it is in the province of imagination where he engenders an ecstatic freedom divorced from value and divinity. Within the expansiveness of the mind, Sade exclaims “How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination!... [where] the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us, we devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate.” His work, indeed, his life, is one of mirrors and doubles, and though Sade remains an unparalleled free spirit, he was consumed to the point of enthrallment by that inflammatory art, by writing – which “enslaved” him to a much greater extent than any prison sentence. What value does one assign?

Values shift when discussing Sade, his work and his art; rather, values diffuse and the reader must navigate the terrain of the imagination, wherein value may be flaunted, neglected and reassigned. Perhaps the value sign of a prison term may here be seen as a freedom - expanding and narrowing simultaneously. Prison allowed Sade to write unencumbered by any other responsibilities. Writing itself may become “…worse than a vice or a drug. It has simultaneously to do with passion and with duty.” Consider the years Sade spent writing, rewriting, expanding works such as “Juliette,” exploding them to an almost exponential degree. Consider, then, writing as a fire. Life may be incinerated by its practice, but the act continues even after the hand ceases to move. And wasn’t it Sade’s very imprisonment which afforded him the leisure from a prison cell? A prison cell, remember, also being the place Thomas Mallory wrote his expansive “More d’Arthur.”

The Marquis de Sade’s body may be long since obliterated, yet he continues to stand at the head of “…those perverse writers whose corruption is so dangerous, so active, that their single aim is, by causing their appalling doctrines to be printed, to immortalize the sum of their crimes after their own lives are at an end…” In the way that the great Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima’s ritual seppuku may be seen as the writing of a totalizing final “line” of poetry, one continuing indefinitely, so does Sade’s imprisonment and his censure explode the silence into a tremulous echo of the negative state. Jean Paulhaun calls Sade’s school of thought a philosophy of negation, but strangely enough it is in Sade’s ecstatic deletions that we find writing’s irritated actualization – the art itself in an enflamed and most assuredly active state.

Art and act become complicit in the Marquis de Sade. That is, the reader begins to rethink the borderlands that constitute the division of theory and practice. Jacques Rousseau, wrote in reference to “Justine,” an emblematic text of Sade’s, that “any girl who reads but a single page of this book will be lost…” Rousseau’s warning optimistically bestows a great honor onto the act of writing; he awards it the distinction of action. If a piece of writing may do more than “instruct” its reader, possibly even “corrupt” them, than writing (and by “writing” I mean both writing and reading) moves into the province of practice. Practice is aggravated action. Sade was penalized by the French state for his acts, but he was also imprisoned for his writings –Girouard, the publisher of his novel “Justine,” fared worse and was executed along with countless others during the French Revolution, in part due to his clandestine publishing history. And while Sade was punished for both act and writing, distinction blurs, and the myth of Sade ambiguously arises from a conglomeration of life and text, mirrored to each other as a fierce double.

http://www.rugusavay.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Marquis-de-Sade-Quotes-2.jpg

The Grove Press compendium I am here discussing is an indispensable resource for any reader seeking an understanding of the vastly important writer and thinker whom Apollinaire called “The freest spirit who has ever lived.” In addition to Sade’s seminal novel, “Justine,” seven personal letters of the Marquis’, and excellent critical essays by scholars Jean Paulhan and Maurice Blanchot, Grove Press includes the entirety of Sade’s “Philosophy in the Bedroom.” This text, like the earlier “Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man,” benefits from its presentation as a dialogue. This format allows a much greater lubricity and clarity than the pretense of traditional narrative seen in “Justine.” Sade, a man of his times as much a man ahead of his time, was an Enlightenment-era encyclopedist. It is in his vast cataloging and listing that Sade’s most cogent, incendiary thinking shines – think of his “120 Days of Sodom” as it spirals towards its conclusion becomes simply a list of horrifying upon horrifying acts.

“Philosophy in the Bedroom’s” conceit is that of a libertine education enacted within a boudoir. The sixteen-year-old Eugenie is liberated from conventional mores through the work of a gang of freethinkers lead by Dolmance, one of Sade’s many empowered “unique” beings. This education proceeds through both philosophy and practice. Dolmance asks his fellow libertine, Madame de Saint-Ange, “…but the better to convince Eugenie of all we are going to relate concerning pleasure, would it be in any way prejudicial to Eugenie’s instruction if, for instance, you were to frig her in front of me?” This sentiment is voiced throughout Sade, as in “Justine” the libertine Rodin asks “But by what means, I repeat, could I join a little practice to the morality?” Philosophy always follows practice, or rather, the two are both emanations of Nature, which to Sade remains the only deciding factor in man’s deeds. The sexual act and the philosophical act cannot be separated.

Nature supersedes the arrogances of man and civilization. Sade rallies against the manner in which “…man stupidly confuse[s] social institutions for Nature’s divine ordinations.” Nature does not assign value, for indeed, “…every form is of equal worth in Nature’s view…” That is, since everything is accorded the same value, the same uniqueness, then everything is worthless and inevitably subsumed to the vast totality – called by Sade “Nature,” though it amounts to an ultimate and unknowable “Is” that lies beyond comprehension or communication. As an absolute being or truth is, Sade argues, impossible, then what we are left with is an extravagance of appearances – a fertile coral surface without depth. How does this relate to virtue or more expressly qualitative value? Sade asks, “… it is very surely virtue, or might it not be the appearance of virtue, which really becomes necessary to social man? Let’s not doubt that the appearance alone is quite sufficient to him: he has got that, and he possess all he needs.” As the universe is valueless and Nature is beyond our understanding, then only our self-fabricated signs, their appearances, remain as foci.

This negation, this nihilism, leads on through to an unmitigated and unsentimental humanism, one quite remarkable for a time period where secular humanism was still undergoing birth pangs. At a late point in “Justine,” one of Sade’s numerous avatars, another “unique” being like the earlier Dolmance, implores “…Virtue, like vice, is nothing beyond a scheme of getting along in the world…,” value is therefore a simple matter of survival.

This devastation of value so apparent throughout Sade allows man to stand, for once, outside the boundaries of religion and state, which together form a despotic entrenchment, wrenching power and individual identity away from man. Sade does not propose a utopia, in that he is incredibly honest. He refuses to admit ease or comfort in any way factors into Nature or its “plan.” Cruelty, though, is a foundational element of survival, and man is better serviced by acknowledging so. The incomprehensibility of the world beyond the extent of our senses suggests that “…because there is no possible comparison between what others experience and what we sense…” The world is an arena of the senses. The imagination, Sade’s great cause, is intrinsically sensual. The sensual reality of the world, therefore, is the world.

Irony is utilized throughout Sade’s work to refute any predilection for sentimentality. The artifice of empathy is twisted throughout “Justine,” as the eponymous character’s continued misfortunes are essentially portrayed as a result of her refusal to adapt to her environment and adopt the required tactics of survival. Justine’s final incineration by a lightning bolt is the supreme irony, as Nature itself acts upon her, instead of Nature’s human acolytes. The irony also arises from the supreme artifice of such an event – the act of Nature itself is actually the contrivance of an ordering author, of D.A.F. Sade himself. The surface is acknowledged – here, as elsewhere, Sade does not create a representational picture of reality; he plays with appearance. Remember the opening of the short piece, “Eugenie de Franval,” also included in this collection. Sade writes that “To instruct man and correct his morals: such is the sole goal we set for ourselves in this story.” This is, of course, true, but Sade doesn’t go out and say that what he really intends to do is decimate conventional morality and then replace it with his own humanism of cruelty. Irony is therefore, a device through which Sade escalates his philosophy of negation and reduces values to a series of surfaces. These surfaces are without vice or virtue and entirely sensual, which, Sade argues, is enough.
[/QUOTE]

dianna
22nd November 2013, 13:46
Cause the sweetest kiss I ever got is the one I've never tasted (Sixto Rodriguez)



Philosophy of Kissing


http://files.myopera.com/sathor/albums/499257/kiss%20me(8).jpg


Dear Flummoxed,

[N]owadays most sex education courses focus on secondary and tertiary sources, so much so that few people really get exposed to the classics in this field any more. I'll try to make a brief but clear summary of some of these important types of kisses:

Aristotelian kiss
a kiss performed using techniques gained solely from theoretical speculation untainted by any experiential data by one who feels that the latter is irrelevant anyway.

Hegelian kiss
dialiptical technique in which the kiss incorporates its own antithikiss, forming a synthekiss.

Wittgensteinian kiss
the important thing about this type of kiss is that it refers only to the symbol (our internal mental representation we associate with the experience of the kiss--which must necessarilly also be differentiated from the act itself for obvious reasons and which need not be by any means the same or even similar for the different people experiencing the act) rather than the act itself and, as such, one must be careful not to make unwarranted generalizations about the act itself or the experience thereof based merely on our manipulation of the symbology therefor.

Godelian kiss
a kiss that takes an extraordinarilly long time, yet leaves you unable to decide whether you've been kissed or not.

This is by no means an exhaustive list--here are some more of the classic kisses:


Socratic kiss
really a Platonic kiss, but it's claimed to be the Socratic technique so it'll sound more authoritative; however, compared to most strictly Platonic kisses, Socratic kisses wander around a lot more and cover more ground.

Kantian kiss
a kiss that, eschewing inferior "phenomenal" contact, is performed entirely on the superior "noumenal" plane; though you don't actually feel it at all, you are, nonetheless, free to declare it the best kiss you've ever given or received.

Kafkaesque kiss
a kiss that starts out feeling like it's about to transform you but ends up just bugging you.

Sartrean kiss
a kiss that you worry yourself to death about even though it really doesn't matter anyway.

Russell-Whiteheadian kiss
a formal kiss in which each lip and tongue movement is rigorously and completely defined, even though it ends up seeming incomplete somehow.

Hertzsprung-Russellian kiss
Oh, Be A Fine Girl/Guy, Kiss Me.

Pythagorean kiss
a kiss given by someone who has developed some new and wonderful techniques but refuses to use them on anyone for fear that others would find out about them and copy them.

Cartesian kiss
a particularly well-planned and coordinated movement: "I think, therefore, I aim." In general, a kiss does not count as Cartesian unless it is applied with enough force to remove all doubt that one has been kissed. (cf. Polar kiss, a more well-rounded movement involving greater nose-to-nose contact, but colder overall.)

Heisenbergian kiss
a hard-to-define kiss--the more it moves you, the less sure you are of where the kiss was; the more energy it has, the more trouble you have figuring out how long it lasted. Extreme versions of this type of kiss are known as "virtual kisses" because the level of uncertainty is so high that you're not quite sure if you were kissed or not. Virtual kisses have the advantage, however, that you need not have anyone else in the room with you to enjoy them.

Nietzscheian kiss
"she/he who does not kiss you, makes your lust stronger."

Epimenidian kiss
a kiss given by someone who does not kiss.

Grouchoic kiss
a kiss given by someone who will only kiss those who would not kiss him or her.

Harpoic kiss
shut up and kiss me.

Zenoian kiss
your lips approach, closer and closer, but never actually touch.

Procrustean kiss
suffice it to say that it is a technique that, once you've experienced it, you'll never forget it, especially when applied to areas of the anatomy other than the lips.

dianna
11th December 2013, 23:34
http://stonergirlsguide.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/1.jpg

dianna
12th December 2013, 18:51
Evoking Eros

http://designdipp.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/sleeping-beauty.png?w=497&h=331


We need help. We need a miracle. In fact, we need divine intervention. We need to ask the spirits to help us … and there is no one better god or spirit that I can think of to ask for assistance than Eros.


Eros, just like everyone and everything else in Greek mythology, has been much misunderstood in the last two thousand years. Once the cosmological model of the triumvirate of Truth, Beauty and Goodness had been discarded for a dualistic model, so his role as one of the original Four Immortals representing All-Compelling Beauty was also quickly forgotten ~ apart from in our dreams. You might say that Eros is the original Sleeping Beauty ~ who needs to be awoken by a kiss.

For Hesiod, Eros was the creative life principle of the world. It was Eros who formed a world space through the gap of Chaos (Tartarus, the Abyss, Night) out of which Gaia created Heaven and Day. Without the All-Encompassing Beauty of Eros, nothing can live, nothing can thrive; our lives are barren and meaningless.

The desire to return to our true state, to our birthright of True Goodness, like the Prodigal Son, is the desire represented by the All-Beautiful Eros.

This desire, though, has been misunderstood over the millennia and has become simply compelling desire, divorced from what the desire is actually for. So the compelling desire of Eros has been reduced and relegated to being primarily related to sex, to erotic desire. And then the final nail in the coffin was when sex was downgraded from its position as a means of spiritual transformation, by a religion which no longer had any philosophic basis to understand the role of Mary Magdalene as a divine courtesan, to just a pleasurable activity which led to the procreation of the species.

However, for the Greek philosophers of Hesiod’s time, the compelling desire evoked by Eros was for the native Good ~ aka Gaia or Mother Nature who is voluptuously attractive, brimming over with lush fertility and adorned with a cornucupia of stunningly beautiful panoramas, divine harmonies, exotic fragrances and delicious fruits which can engulf all reason and sensibilities in a delerium of euphoric bliss.

We find traces of this wisdom teaching in the myths about Dionysus, the grandson of Demeter, who “came from Eastern lands” and has many similarities to the much older Indian Shiva ~ the horned man-god with the adorned lingum, serpent, bull and female devotees of, shall we say, questionable moral character? in the West, we know him as Pan, Cernunnos or Gwyn ap Nudd.

http://www.paintingdreams.co.uk/images/enhanced/lord-of-wildwood_fabric-hanging.jpg

I’m not suggesting that we need to revert to the Bacchanalian orgies of celebration of Mother Gaia as were practised by the worshippers of Dionysus and the Roman Epicureans. Unfortunately, the true meaning and purpose of Bacchanalia has degenerated, in the Wasteland, into a meaningless piss-up on a Saturday night. But I am suggesting that we can once again attune ourselves to the Three Pillars of Wisdom by the shamanic practises expressed within his corpus of myths, and recognise and recreate the role of Beauty which will have the power of a million imploding atom bombs to create new and much better worlds for people to live in.

Full article: by Ishtar Babilu Dingir
http://www.ishtarsgate.com/forum/showthread.php?4772-Evoking-Eros-To-Wake-Up-the-Sleeping-Beauty&p=27197#post27197

dianna
18th December 2013, 22:27
If You Want Extraordinary Love, You Need To Fight For It


http://www.urbangeneralstore.com/shop/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/m/a/mad_passionate_extraordinary_love.jpg

The tides of life won’t always bring you back ashore — sometimes, you have to row yourself over. Often, nothing changes until you change it. Nothing is better until you make it that way. There’s nothing you’re not responsible for. Just waiting around for something to happen, lamenting that it isn’t, wishing, hoping, praying for it to change, doesn’t always ensure that it will. Go, move, act, speak. Your days are slipping by you, and every day you spend in the mediocre is another you miss in the extraordinary.

If you’re seeking the miraculous, keep seeking. Life is unimaginably short and passes even faster than that; there will be enough average things in your life. Don’t let love be one of them. Because if it’s unconditional, life-changing, mind-altering, madly-passionate-sometimes-extraordinarily-difficult-but-none-the-less-just-plain-extraordinary love that you find yourself inherently invested in with every bit of your heart, if it’s the person who is there beneath the layers of your heart that you’ve calloused over through the years—you need to go be with that person. Be with who uproots you and makes you realize you didn’t know how deeply your soul could stretch. Be with who loves you. Who really, actually, genuinely, truly, madly, deeply, passionately loves you. And to whom you reciprocate the feelings to as well.

This does not mean be with the person that you most easily get along with. Sometimes, extraordinary love isn’t easy (it usually never is) but in one way or another, it is always worth it. So don’t mistake the extraordinary for what you’re settling for. I know this is an extremely difficult thing to do most times, because when there’s nothing really wrong with your relationship there’s no reason to wreak havoc and go… except, there is. And that’s because the extraordinary is waiting for you somewhere else. In the words of Cheryl Strayed, have the courage to break your own heart. That’s awesome if you really like each other, and even if everything is swell but yet, somewhere you know, this person doesn’t absolutely rock your world, you need to go.

Because you need (and deserve) love that is something of an other-worldly connection, that you can’t really make sense of in your mind. Mind-blowing-life-changing-heart-stopping-blood-rushing-miraculous love. Don’t settle until you have it, if that’s what you want.

There is no time for love that isn’t miraculous. Get up and leave. Move. Go. Don’t hold on because you think you’ll never find someone else. If you’re even a little bit unsure, leave. Your uncertainty should tell you that at the very least, you need to explore other avenues. And if those roads lead you back, great. If they don’t, great. Wanting to leave is enough reason to go. And believe me, one way or another, you will eventually wind up where you’re supposed to. Whether it’s with some cool new person or back into the arms of the person you left, you won’t ever have to question whether or not you should be with them.

GreenGuy
19th December 2013, 00:21
What a marvelous thread- many thanks to the OP and the great thoughts shared in the responses! Far too few people realize, or even give any thought to the part that both love and sex play in the life of a complete and reasonably well-integrated person. Sometimes I think, how could they? The media turn love into a grubby, superficial charade. I sometimes think of the well-worn phrase, 'Love conquers all,' generally taken to mean that love overcomes all obstacles, or that if we simply love someone enough, life's hardships will cease to matter. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course.

What I take from the phrase is that no one is immune from the power of Eros. Everyone, at some time, is broken by either the quest, or by the tsunami of someone else's yearning. Even those who think to protect themselves by refusing to love are broken - in fact, those may be the most damaged of all. Sex is simply a sign that we're alive, while love makes us human. And real love can make us noble.

The Greek language has no less than six words which translate into English as love. How ironic that our language, which is so incredibly rich in expressive possibilities, has just the one word to express a host of emotions. I love my country, and I love ice cream. I love children (say buddy, what do you mean by that!?), and I love my wife. What does that linguistic poverty say about us?

dianna
30th December 2013, 22:30
The Fantasy of Liberation

The mechanization of sex, stripped of its excitement and mystery.


http://imjustcreative.com/wp-content/uploads/vintage-porn_9.jpg


We at Adbusters have been tracking Google Trends over the last few months, comparing Miley Cyrus to Syria. This sad graph acts as a mirror for the American psyche, reflecting our deepest obsessions with the cult of celebrity, which every half decade or so selects another young female pop-star to objectify. Beyond this, we remained concerned with the debasement of sexuality under capitalism. Is this what happens when third-wave feminism is co-opted by the market? Clive Hamilton believes the sexual revolution won freedoms that have been co-opted by the market.



The attitude of the sexual revolution – that apart from consent, there are no rules governing sexual behaviour – lifted the constraints on the libido. This gave permission for sex to be divorced from intimacy, a process that has reached its zenith in recent years.

We are now beginning to understand that free love exacts heavy price, one unwittingly exposed by author and libertarian, Catherine Millet. The publisher describers her best selling memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., as a “manifesto of our times – when the sexual equality of women is a reality and where love and sex have gone their own separate ways.”

Is this not what men, in their raw state, have always wanted, to separate copulation from intimacy? Is not every counsellor’s room witness to a stream of torn relationships in which she wants more intimacy and he wants more penetration?

In the world of Catherine Millet, women have entered the universe of sex constructed by men – primordial, unsocialised men driven by their ids – in which all finer feelings frown in a sea of testosterone. One begins to suspect that the sexual taboos of the past served not so much to oppress women but to protect them from the predatory urges of the unleashed male libido.

This is the new “democracy of pleasure’, in the words of Ovidie, the French porn star and author who describes herself as a feminist, artist and philosopher. Ovidie starred in the mainstream film The Pornographer, of which one critic said, “No film in the history of cinema had portrayed oral sex with such a superb sense of existential weariness and melancholy.” The subtext of all porn is boredom, the mechanization of sex stripped of its excitement and mystery, reduced to what one person does to another – or, more commonly, what he does to her. Sex in porn is not the exploration of one with another; it is an act of relief, like defecation (indeed, on some internet sites the two are combined).

http://cdn.fatporntube.net/scj/thumbs/128/197_A_VERY.jpg

Perhaps we should accept this if such an attitude were confined to porn videos and sex sites on the net. But depersonalized, indiscriminate sex has crept into the cultural mainstream, so that the symbols, styles and even personnel of the pornographic genre are cropping up on television, in newspapers and in films. In Italy a porn star ran for parliament with the aim of normalizing the genre, and the international media treated it as light-hearted relief from the usual dull political fare. Even respectable global corporations such as telecommunications carriers have companies that make porn videos.

The novels of Michel Houellebecq mirror the turmoil of sexual politics rippling through Western cultures. His work has been called pornographic, yet, unlike Millet, Houellebecq has a purpose with his eroticism. For his characters, sex is an antidote to the meaninglessness of modern life, but the novels are also a meditation on that lack of meaning. They are a subtle journey into the vain quest for happiness in a post-scarcity world in which the promises of plenty, and the freedoms won in the 1960s and 1970s, have left a new barrenness.

If all has failed us and there is nothing left to believe in, why not **** till we drop? Whereas Millet puts her orifices on display, Houellebcq shows us his doubts. While Millet is still playing out the fantasies of sexual freedom, Houellebecq is waring of its perils: “The sexual revolution was to destroy the last unit separating the individual from the market.”



Clive Hamilton
https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/111/fantasy-liberation.html

dianna
19th January 2014, 23:08
Alfalfa and Eros

I'm In the Mood For Love …



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOsB4psC9E

Let Me Call You Sweetheart


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8fykuW4IHk

dianna
21st February 2014, 15:27
Polly: Sex Culture Revolutionary

https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/001/575/170/00c2d6ce8c12587c2edb2aec1bb564c2_large.jpg?1390981 067


A brazenly honest memoir about sex, self discovery, cultural evolution, and a mad plan to change the world

Over 13 years ago, Polly Whittaker began forging the new frontier of sexual expression. It began as a simple idea: to create an environment in which people could express themselves sexually in a social context in a way that’s not seedy or creepy, traditionally the case when talking about sexuality. With the help of hundreds of volunteers, she built Kinky Salon, a creative and sex-positive environment, that has since turned it into a global movement, with events happening in a dozen cities all over the world.

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San Francisco is the home of the sexual revolution, and the community that has evolved around Kinky Salon over the past decade is an important chapter in that history. By spearheading this intentional community-building, Polly has laid down the foundation for an evolution of how we view sexuality in our modern world.

Polly: Sex Culture Revolutionary, is a no-holds barred look into this incredibly creative world. It’s a book about modern relationships, counter culture, a quest for family, and a real-life glimpse into this little corner of the sexual revolution.


Polly Whittaker has lived three lives: A rebellious latex fashion designer with a penchant for dancing on tables, an irrepressibly optimistic social innovator with a mad plan to save the world, and a lonely girl defined by the death of her father. This powerful memoir, told with great honesty and humor, vividly captures the failures and triumphs of a young woman struggling to understand the meaning of her own existence, while pursuing her dreams to change culture.

From Chapter Sex, Power and Pain

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-biGefp3QZA

See more at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pollysuperstar/polly-sex-culture-revolutionary

dianna
14th March 2014, 22:02
From the Vaults of Erowid

Coming Out

http://www.erowid.org/columns/teafaerie/images/teafaerie_glinda.jpg


Come out, come out wherever you are…” The Good Witch of the North sings that song in the Wizard of Oz to encourage the Munchkin folk to quit hiding in the bushes and to come investigate a welcome change in local affairs. It’s the mantra chanted by children everywhere when the game is finally over, and it’s time to stop fooling around and go home.

Coming out: Like a hungry snail sticking its soft wet vulnerable head out from under the rim of its shell and beginning the long dangerous journey to the garden feast. Coming out: Like the gunman at the end of a stand-off, hands raised and conspicuously empty, finally ready to face the cacophony because the alternatives sound even worse. Coming out: like the stars at night, which were there all along in the daytime, too, but invisible until forced into sharp relief by the gathering darkness.

As a married woman who is both bisexual and polyamorous, I’ve had quite a few tough questions to answer over the years. When my husband and I started dating our mutual girlfriend, it took me a long time to tell certain people about it. In fact, I only just told one dear friend last week—and we’re fast approaching our fourth anniversary as a triad. The excuse is that my friend lives in Australia, and I like to talk about such things in person. Partly it’s that I was nervous, though. Not all of my conversations about the matter have been entirely pleasant, and certain people’s disapproval has the potential to weigh heavily upon me, sometimes so much so that when they really think I’m botching it all up, I’m inclined to doubt my own judgment. There are some important people, mostly older family members, whom I still haven’t told and I probably never will tell. (If you’re one of them—surprise!—and I’m sorry, and yeah I also write about drugs on the Internet. Call me and we can talk about it. Ahem.)

Similarly, for a long while I was only “out” about my use of psychedelics to a small handful of fellow explorers. After a while my mom found out. I can’t remember if I told her or if I got caught or what, but she was surprisingly cool about it. I probably didn’t go into much detail about the particulars of my practice at the time, because I didn’t want to freak her out or get into too much trouble. (I was a dumb kid and Erowid wasn’t around to consult about dosage, interactions, or harm reduction strategies, so I tended to sort of wing it. Results varied, as you might imagine.) Eventually I told my brother what I’d been up to, and shared some acid with him, which turned out to be one of the best trips ever. Next I started talking about my habits at social events, awkwardly at first and then more casually when the sky failed to fall. Lots of people had questions, and I got plenty of opportunities to dispel myths and to educate people. Eventually I started tripsitting, and people I had barely met started inviting me to their upcoming expeditions. The word was out about me, and as far as I was concerned that was just fine.

Then I got the opportunity to start writing for Erowid. At first I was elated! The more I thought about it, though, the more concerns begin to creep into my mind. This is for reals, I thought. This is on the Record. Sure, I don’t have to use my legal name, but it wouldn’t exactly take Sherlock Holmes to track me down. I wondered: Is it illegal to just talk about it? I mean Obama isn’t in jail for admitting to having indulged his youthful curiosity, right? What if I want to emigrate one day, or get into some kind of cool program or something, and my public connection with such a taboo subject counts against me? It seems unlikely right now, but life is long and the Internet is forever. Could I get busted for something like promoting terrorist activity under the Patriot Act or whatever? What if an extremely conservative regime comes into power some day and decides to round up all the troublemakers? I’d normally shrug off that kind of ideation (paranoia will destroy ya), but this time it really got to me. Sometimes it still does. I just had to do it, though. I’d end up kicking myself forever if I passed up the chance to contribute to my favorite website out of cowardice.

And then came the big one. See, I recently did something really stupid. Or maybe it was super cool. In any event it blew the closet door off of its hinges and shattered it to smithereens. A well known production company got in touch with me and told me that they were making an open-minded documentary about psychedelics that had all kinds of cool people whom I admire and respect attached to it and so forth, and asked me very nicely if I would possibly consider letting them tag along the next time I happened to be planning on taking something, anyway. (They were scrupulously careful not to suggest that I do anything just for their benefit.) The vision was to follow me around at some sort of festival, and capture a colorful glimpse of psychedelic sparkle to liven up what was essentially a fascinating but rather dry talking heads piece.

Well. I had just finished writing that column about records (Are We Recording? ) and why it was extremely sketchy indeed to so much as make a secret video of yourself tripping in the privacy of your own home, and now here was this strange request. I meditated upon it for several days. Literally millions of people would see this. Some of them might be friends and relatives who would be shocked (shocked!) to see their beloved Faerie both breaking the law and ruining her once brilliant mind. Could I be prosecuted even if nobody ever saw me take the drug and it was just implied that I had done it? Worse yet: What if I made a fool of myself and, by extension, brought shame and dishonor upon the psychedelic community at large? I look like a freak, for one thing. I’m not representative of anyone; I’m sure as hell not the poster child for psychedelic culture, and I have no desire to be. There’s no such thing as psychedelic culture, anyway. It looks as much like a therapy session, or like your dentist and your accountant sitting around the living room with goofy grins on their faces, as it looks like a rave, or like a concert scene.

In the end I accepted it. The fact was that they were going to find somebody who would do it eventually, and I didn’t have anyone to recommend to them that I trusted more than myself and Seuss Dean, who is always willing to share both my honor and my peril. I told them that I wasn’t comfortable with the hedonistic festival idea, though, and suggested that they come record our actual practice instead. All and all I think it went pretty well. I feel confident, at least, that it was better than the festival thing would have been if I’d let the cup pass from me.

But now I’m waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats. The cat is out of the bag and on the loose, shredding up the furniture and pissing on the rug. I keep thinking of more and more people who might see that documentary, like for instance my mother-in-law. I keep wondering what clips they’ll use; some of the stuff that I said I’m really proud of and some of it was silly, but even if I’d done a perfect job they could surely cut it to make us look like assholes if they wanted to. I’m statistically certain that it will come back to haunt me again and again, sometimes in amusing ways, sometimes maybe not so much so. Whatever. It’s out of my hands now. The point is that I’m feeling it, okay?

And it is from the nauseating pinnacle of this state of extreme overexposure that I want to talk to you about coming out.

One of the things I told the documentary crew was that if even five percent of the people who use psychedelics would admit it, the entire landscape of the debate would be radically altered. Social outliers like myself tend to be the first demographic to step into the light, perhaps because we have less to lose than, say, teachers and police officers. It’s unfortunate though, because that gives the straights the impression that psychedelic users tend to be fringe dwellers. The same thing happened in the gay community. When I was a kid it was largely portrayed as a freak subculture because the freak subculture was its most visible and vocal manifestation. It wasn’t until good solid Joe Average Citizens—bankers and bakers, respected authors and politicians, parents, educators, doctors and members of the clergy—started standing up to be counted that society at large was forced to re-examine its prejudices. I don’t think that the solution to this is to silence the committed minority. Rather, I think the large majority of quiet and respectable users need to be encouraged to speak out about their practice and politics, their convictions and their experiences.

Not all users share the same agenda, obviously. Political and social stances vary both widely and sharply. Some people would simply like to see restrictions relaxed on scientific research, whilst others want to legalize everything and let natural selection sort it out. Most people fall somewhere in between. There is no official party line here. You have to examine the issues and decide for yourself what you stand for, how much it means to you, and how far you’re willing to go. All I’m asking is that you take the time to assess the potential risks and rewards of sharing your opinions on the matter, whatever they may be. Many of you will find that it’s really not worth it, and if I were in your shoes I might well come to the same conclusion. For instance if you’re a junior high school teacher or you foresee a custody battle in your future, speaking out about cognitive liberty issues might not be a wise decision. Your energies may be badly needed elsewhere, and you can’t afford the risk or the time. Your family, friends, church, school, or co-workers might be so anomalously intolerant that you’d turn your life into a living hell if you came out. Maybe it’s just super personal to you and you don’t think it’s anybody else’s damn business. All of this is perfectly legit. I’m just asking you to think about it.

My own position kind of waffles, but I suppose I ought to lay my cards down if I want to inspire anyone else to do the same. I do think people should have the right to experiment with various research chemicals, assuming that the situation can be brought sufficiently above-ground to guarantee materials of known quality and dosage. For sure the actual bleeping researchers ought to be allowed to explore them! And there’s got to be some system in place for therapeutic access to empathogens. Frankly, I don’t think it’s Uncle Sam’s business what adults decide to put into their bodies. I feel pretty strongly about that in principle. On the other hand nobody with any common sense wants to see heroin vending machines on the local street corner, so there’s a conundrum. I feel pretty good about supporting the decriminalization of psychedelic plants, because while it doesn’t go far enough it also doesn’t go too far, if you see what I mean, and it seems like a just barely plausible goal; whereas the blanket legalization of all psychoactive medicines strikes me as neither attainable nor wholly desirable at present. Let’s call it a starting place. It’s somewhere to stand. (Now if I only had a long enough lever…)

For me the prohibition of psychedelic plants is a civil and human rights issue of the first order. Fundamental principles are at stake. Who will make important decisions about our bodies and our minds? From what perspectives shall we be allowed to see ourselves, and through what lenses may we look out upon what we are pleased to call our shared reality? These are huge questions, and they’re only going to get bigger faster as emerging technologies and advancing research put ever more fascinating tools into our hands.

It’s also a religious freedoms issue. The U.S. Constitution guarantees all citizens the right to address metaphysical matters as they see fit, and according to my interpretation that ought to include the right to alter one’s consciousness with psychedelic plants. In fact, I believe that access to our own souls is an inalienable right, regardless of what the Constitution has to say. The association of psychedelic plants with religious and spiritual motifs throughout the archaeological record is obvious even to skeptics, and they continue to be widely used for shamanic purposes in primary cultures all over the world today. The famous Good Friday Experiment, in which graduate degree divinity student volunteers participated in a double-blind psilocybin study, scientifically confirmed the association between psychedelics and the manifestation of direct spiritual experiences. Almost all of the participants who received the active compound (as opposed to the placebo) reported a range of classically mystical phenomena. Furthermore, a follow-up conducted more than twenty years later found that most of the subjects still considered the experiment a peak experience, and still considered it to be relevant to their spiritual lives. My own most profound experiences and insights, by orders of magnitude, have been attained through the use of psychedelic plants and chemicals. These experiences meet and exceed my own wholly personal definition of metaphysical relevance. Add to that the hundreds of breakthrough trips that I have witnessed, and the literally thousands of self-reported entheogenic encounters that have been posted by users on Erowid and elsewhere, and you’ve got yourself something that feels like consensus. Lots of psychedelic explorers never get anything like that, of course, but it’s pretty well established that it happens. For some people it’s the only functional point of access to that kind of thing. And it’s largely illegal. And I just can’t seem to shut up about it for some reason.

Even if I thought all that was mumbo jumbo, I’d still be feeling it for the countless people all over the world who have reported significant psychological, interpersonal, and artistic breakthroughs through the use of various proscribed compounds, and for those who would like very much to have that sort of experience, but who are afraid to do it because they respect and/or fear the law. How much would your set be improved if you didn’t feel like you were doing something that you had to hide? Lots of folks have reported that single sessions were equivalent to months or years worth of traditional therapy. Healing, insight, access to repressed memories, remission of addiction, and even the transcendence of end-of-life anxiety are all potentially available to some people through responsible application of these fascinating folk remedies. We know this. Do our neighbors know? More and more of them do, thanks largely to the tireless efforts of groups like MAPS that work hard to legitimize psychedelic research and to get the word out to the media. It feels like we’ve still got a long way to go, though.

Assuming that there is going to be any kind of a civilized future at all, it seems to me that the people of the future will look back on the prohibition of psychedelic plants and shake their heads in shame and wonder at our past mass backwardness and ignorance—much as we do now when we think about slavery and segregation, or the fact that women couldn’t vote until the 20th century. Likewise, I think that society will revere the people who took a responsible, committed, non-violent stand for cognitive liberty. They may not name elementary schools after us, but in more enlightened times bongs will be raised to those who fought the good fight, and I’ll be proud if I make a significant enough contribution to be counted amongst their number. This story shall the good man teach his son. Any law that denies us access to the numinous is obscene, and I’m going to keep saying so as loud as I can.

I’m not asking you to take drugs on TV here. Like I said, that was probably stupid. Don’t take five grams of mushrooms and chain yourself to the steps of the Capitol Building. That kind of thing wouldn’t help, anyway. Don’t wreck your life over it. All I’m asking you to do is to assess your position and to consider voicing as much of the truth as feels safe for you. Take advantage of easy opportunities to educate people. Go as far as you comfortably can. You don’t even have to admit to taking drugs to speak out for other people’s right to do so, just like you don’t have to be gay in order to support marriage equality. Contribute to organizations that educate people on the topic. Tell people about your experiences. Erowid is a great place to do that anonymously. Share what you know. If enough people did that, it would make a difference pretty quickly.

Come out come out wherever you are! It’s true that the bad witch has a sister and the game is far from over, but it’s high time we quit fooling around in the closet and started heading home.

dianna
16th March 2014, 20:31
TEDseX

Make Love Not Porn: Cindy Gallop at TEDxOxford

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm7cVImCJ6U

Why I stopped watching porn: Ran Gavrieli at TEDxJaffa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRJ_QfP2mhU

TEDxSF - Nicole Daedone - Orgasm: The Cure for Hunger

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9QVq0EM6g4

The Great Porn Experiment: Gary Wilson at TEDxGlasgow

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiU


Understanding the Sex Myth: Rachel Hills at TEDxLoughborou

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdLUE4NUJHM

Christopher Ryan: Are we designed to be sexual omnivores?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJhklPJz9U8

Sex: Mind full or Mindful?: Dr. Jennifer Gunsaullus at TEDx

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT9isHpaG-M

TEDxBloomington -- Debby Herbenick -- "Why Your Bed is the the Ultimate Treehouse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaewLFHibEk

Select the right relationship: Alexandra Redcay at TEDxUpperEastSide

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jodhovumkHQ

dianna
5th May 2014, 22:18
Free Sexuality and Partnership

Dieter Duhm

Full article here:

http://realitysandwich.com/218970/free-sexuality-and-partnership/

http://realitysandwich.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/noname.jpeg


Both halves of the human being, man and woman, have searched for one another for generations and always missed one another. When we founded the Tamera project, almost all my former friends’ love relationships had been broken. It is mostly due to the issues of sex and love that so many political and alternative groups failed. We cannot generate peace in the world so long as this issue remains unresolved. It is, above all, about finding an authentic answer to the question of how the wild sexual desire of human beings can be compatible with the longing for the one big love. Is there a solution for the apparent contradiction between free sexuality and marriage?



…..


To start with, I want to clarify what is meant by free sexuality. It is about truth and trust in the relation of the genders; above all, it is about truth in the realm of our sexual desire. It is not about random promiscuity and unreliable relationships. The point is that a love partner who has dared an “escapade” does not lie to their partner! This is an ethical imperative. We cannot realize free sexuality if somebody has to be lied to. There are ethical guidelines that do not permit this. The culture of free sexuality is firmly bound to these guidelines. We know the agony in the soul of a partner who needs to conceal their sexual relationship to another lover. It is cruel for everybody involved; and it is cruel for the children. This misery often has fatal consequences. We are not dealing with a private conflict here, but with a societal issue. How many tragedies are accounted to a hypocritical sexual moral! More people die because of failed love than because of any other reason. Here, a new concept for healing needs to be integrated into the cultural development of human society. This was, and is, the thought that we brought to the world some years ago under the title “Sexpeace.” Sexpeace – peace between the genders!


http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/NTE1WDYwMA==/z/o74AAMXQTT9R0JOn/$(KGrHqN,!rUFHNeQV(mnBR0JOnM8jw~~60_35.JPG

Free sexuality is no mandate, but an offer. People may experience free sexuality and then decide whether they want to live in monogamy, polygamy… or any other “gamy.” The crucial point is that the experience happens in a social and ethical milieu of trust. So don’t just rush into it with your mind switched off, but the other way around – engage your mind and then act. In this sense we humorously called our project the “Monastic Academy for Free Sexuality.” With the word monastic, we mean the holy spirit of truth and not gray devotion.

http://perisicmarija.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/bukowski2.jpg

Free sexuality is bound to three principles, without which it can never function: contact, trust and solidarity. So that man and woman can again become truthful in their mutual desire and no longer need to secretly swindle, they need contact, trust and solidarity. That is a lot. Contact means that we see the soul of the other and not only their body. Trust means that we no longer lie to each other, not even secretly. Solidarity means that man and woman encounter each other in sincere friendship and cooperation, without condemnation and irony. These requirements are mostly not given in the existing world.

This is why we have no choice but to develop new systems where it becomes possible to orient our lives around basic humane values again. We need a system of co-existence where human beings can trust each other again. A system where lying and betrayal no longer carry any evolutionary advantage. A system where the sexual relationship of one to another no longer causes any fear or hatred in a third. These were some of the core thoughts that moved us to found this project. In combination with the ecological thoughts, they form the core of our education internally, and externally by way of the Terra Nova School.

Let’s get back to the problem. How do we solve the apparent contradiction between free love and couple love, between free sexuality and partnership? There is a real problem as a matter of fact because we human beings do not only want free sexuality, we often also want a stable and lasting partnership – “until death do we part.” Suddenly we face a seemingly insoluble conflict – the conflict between the new image of free sexuality and the old archetype of marriage. The archetypal image of marriage, of the eternal relationship between one man and one woman, is deeply anchored in the human soul. We all know it, and within all of us is a longing in this direction. Every longing waits for its fulfillment. The longing would not even exist if there were not also a fulfillment, for our longings are not arbitrary. A community will very surely fail if it fully relies on free sexuality while ignoring this deep longing. Here we can apply the dialectic theory of Hegel: thesis – antithesis – synthesis. Marriage was the thesis; free sexuality was the antithesis; the synthesis consists of a new system in which thesis and antithesis are dissolved or united on a higher level. We’ve been working on finding this synthesis for some decades.

Many people who have gone through thick and thin ..., and have stayed with it, now feel the “third way” and the real possibility to gain the one without losing the other. They slowly understand the sentence, which has been essential to the project since its very foundation and, which we repeatedly wrote in all our publications: Free sexuality and partnership do not exclude each other; they complement one another. One who lives in a solid relationship does not need to be afraid of losing their partner due to other sexual contacts; and one who lives in free sexuality does not need to be afraid of missing out on the happiness of a stable partnership. All these conflicts only exist in our head, not in the logic of the matter. For the two things, marriage and free sexuality, complete each other, they belong together, and together they form the essence of a new erotic culture. However they can only be compatible under certain social and ethical preconditions. The apparent contradiction between free sexuality and couple sexuality can only be solved on a higher level of order.

What is the higher level of order? To put it in one word; it is the level of trust. As long as there is mistrust amongst the genders, the contradiction cannot be solved. As soon as real trust arises the contradiction is already dissolved, for it is self-evident that both partners again and again have lust for others, and it is also self-evident that a genuine love relationship does not break apart because of this. I wish all couples that come to Tamera from afar can find and understand this self-evidence. Jealousy does not belong to love. We need some time to rid ourselves of the old conditioning and yet this has happened surprisingly quickly for most co-workers in Tamera. If the two genders can fully, freely confess their joys of polygamy, then they can establish their partnership just as freely, for they have extinguished the secret mistrust. If they no longer react to their partner’s occasional escapades with jealousy then their sexual love to each other begins to grow in a new way. When one of them gets into a conflict we can only tell him or her: follow love!

http://i00.i.aliimg.com/wsphoto/v1/611532418/Sex-Funny-Adult-Love-Humour-font-b-Gambling-b-font-Sexy-Romance-Erotic-Craps-Dice-Pipe.jpg

With the principle of free sexuality, a new climate arose amongst the women. As they could reveal their secrets with new openness, a new form of women’s solidarity came into being. A woman falls in love with her friend’s boyfriend. The girlfriend recognizes this and offers her own room to her so that the two can spend a night together. Such and similar stories are not fairytales in Tamera; two women that love the same man is no reason for hostility under the conditions of truth and solidarity. The new women’s field liberates the woman to a certain extent from her fixation to the man and through this offers her the possibility to connect anew with her feminine source.

Love emerges when two partners start innerly seeing each other. It does not happen very often that man and woman “see” each other because their encounter is shaped by convention and projection from the very beginning. The man mainly reacts to the sexual signals of the woman without seeing who this woman really is and what she needs. When encountering the “right” woman, the man often reacts with a subconscious mystification. He is no longer in control of his passions when he is close to her. She is everything to him. She is the beloved, mother, whore and saint all at once. There is an almost unbelievable adoration of woman in man’s subconscious treasure of the soul, one that is not compatible with “ordinary” sexual desire. The saint and the whore at the same time – how should the man be able to cope with this? In the patriarchal era he has solved this problem by lowering and humiliating woman in real life and by elevating her to the holy Madonna in the ecclesiastical life. The gothic cathedrals were called “Notre Dame.” On one hand, they prayed “Ave Maria;” on the other hand they burned women. The trauma has been deeply inscribed into the souls. To this day, the laws of subconscious, psychological projections that originated from a long, vile history reign in both men and women. Human society was unable to solve the issue of the genders in a humane way.

http://image10.spreadshirt.com/image-server/v1/compositions/4385635/views/1,width=235,height=235,appearanceId=4/Game-Over.jpg

Society is a product of human beings, not of gods. Its valid laws were made by human beings and can therefore also be corrected by human beings. Such a law for example is prescribed monogamy, which means the duty of a married couple to renounce other sexual contacts. An infinite amount of suffering has been produced through this vow, for this prohibition mostly contradicts human nature. Both genders have the tendency to be inclined toward polygamy. As soon as they need to hide this from one another the lies, mistrust and a slow transformation of love into hatred begins. We often see the same pattern when love couples or married couples come to us. The man first begins to step out of the bounds of the marriage. The woman follows in step after some time, and starts enjoying the sexual freedom. The initially quite courageous man often reacts to this with a jealous fear of loss, which he reluctantly admits. After some time the two come to terms with the situation. Now they face the possibility to stay together on a completely new level.

Once the sexual prohibitions are lifted, women react with shyness in the beginning, then ever stronger with unreserved joy. Many women love sex. And they love it far more than the high laws of human dignity allow. This is a fact that we need to accept. Actually, why shouldn’t it be accepted? Sexuality is a natural function of the human organism and generates one of the greatest pleasures that are given to us in this earthly life. Sexuality sometimes ambushes us with such an irresistible power that it would come close to insanity to moralistically strike back. We have lost this fight from the outset; for “Sexus” is a superpower. Instead of fighting this power, we should accept it gratefully. Only then will we be able to liberate ourselves from its tyranny. And this is what it is about in a humane society – humanizing its explosive sexual powers by accepting and integrating them into our cultural life.

So long as an essential part of our sexual drive needs to be suppressed there will consequentially be sadistic excesses, child pornography, psychosomatic diseases, violence and war. Violence against women belongs to daily life in the patriarchal world. A secret war between the genders has already been looming behind the scenes of modern society for a long time. It always has to do with the issue of unfulfilled sexuality. Both genders suffer from a sexual hunger that they cannot admit in front of each other. Facing the dramas of jealousy in our time, facing the horrible consequences for the children and facing the ethical truth, we lift free sexuality to become the foundation for a new culture.


What will happen then with marriage, with partnership and with this deeper form of love that moves us to vow eternal faithfulness to one another? This is a mysterious question, because in fact this deeper form of love and the eternal faithfulness between two people exists. But what has prompted us to connect this faithfulness with prohibiting “extramarital relationships”? What kind of love is it that has to be protected through such prohibitions? Of course the couple relationship between man and woman is exposed to a greater strain if both partners are allowed to stray, but in return both are also alleviated from a great inner burden if they no longer need to hide anything from each other. Even more, it is mostly an enrichment for both because they find new lust for each other, as they no longer take one another for granted. Nothing is more detrimental to a vivid love relationship than a daily routine in sexuality. Variety, surprise, discovery and conquest belong to erotic life. “You can only be faithful when you are also allowed to love others.” This is how it is written in our books.

There is also for sure an authentic form of monogamous marriage. The sacrament of marriage contains a profound essence. If two lovers come to a point in their love where they decide, in deepest agreement, to exclusively reserve their sexuality for one another, then they should do it. There is no law here. There is only the inner truth. In our community we again and again recommend that new couples stay monogamous for a while so as not to lose their young love in the temptations of free sexuality. We do not work against, but in favor of, partnership wherever it authentically arises. We do not believe however that the happiness of human life is mainly dependent on a fulfilled partnership.

At what point is a human being actually able to live in a partnership? Isn’t it good if he or she has gathered enough sexual experiences before they say “I do”? In most cases, it is the totality of sexuality’s first stirrings that prompts two young human beings to vow eternal faithfulness to each other in their happiness. Usually this is the beginning of the end because it is not sexuality, but the cohesiveness of the souls, that is the basis for a lasting relationship. We need to create life conditions where people are able to make such distinctions. These are life conditions of trust. In free sexuality, as well as in partner love, we need absolute trust. We need communities that restore the lost trust of humankind. Where there is trust, there are no lies and no meanness. A new erotic culture can thus arise as it is laid out in the entelechy of the human being – a wonderful connection of free sexuality and partnership. If creating peace in love has succeeded, then peace arises all over the world; and all of evolution, with all its children and animals, leap forward jubilantly.

A historical note to conclude. The drama of the genders permeates our entire civilization. The male world needed to humiliate the woman in order to be able to cope with her sexual radiance. The female gender needed to endure unspeakable atrocities. Three hundred years ago women were still burned alive because they were attractive and were therefore demonized by the powerlessness of the man. In spite of this all, the female gender has not lost their love towards men. As a man, I can only be grateful for this female faithfulness. We are working on a project where both genders can liberate themselves from the horrors of the past forever.

Chester
6th May 2014, 02:02
Love Shack


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leohcvmf8kM

for those in the lovely US of Freakin A

9SOryJvTAGs

dianna
3rd July 2014, 22:46
http://fe867b.medialib.glogster.com/media/f0/f081c8df92d32386883dfacde2d3131c92db4263a9112bbd64 ffbd4fe331b631/lets-fall-in-love-cropped.gif


Lets do it …


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXYKGL6MgKM

lastlegs
4th July 2014, 03:16
I have to come back to this thread with more time but thanks for the postings.

dianna
17th December 2014, 00:07
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7b/Yuck_Album_Cover.jpg


yuck1
yək/Submit
informal
exclamation
1.
used to express strong distaste or disgust.
"“Raw herrings! Yuck!”"
synonyms: ick, ugh, yech, blech, phew, eww, gross
"Yuck! What is this slimy green stuff?"
noun
noun: yuck; noun: yuk
1.
something messy or disgusting.



On Dabbling in the Cult of Orgasm

Dani Katz
http://realitysandwich.com/235354/on-dabbling-in-the-cult-of-orgasm/


“I hate LA, and I hate my life,” I sputter in a flurry of tears, snot and spaz-out, not to mention some really toxic languaging as I drop my purse on the floor of Jamie’s kitchen, and freak way out.

Granted, I’m the one who scheduled a two-thirty meeting in Santa Monica on a Friday, knowing full well it would thrust me smack dab in the middle of rush hour on its flipside, thus leaving me no choice but to crawl my way back to Silver Lake at a half-crushed snail’s pace, biding my box-bound purgatory picking my face in the rearview mirror between sneaking peeks at my Facebook app, hoping for – I don’t even know – a couple new likes on the Osho quote I posted this morning? A friend request from Björk?


…..


“I had a feeling,” Jamie nods. “Let’s get you stoned; let’s get you fed; and, let’s get your pussy rubbed.”

While this last zinger might seem wildly inappropriate coming from anyone else, Jamie is a One Taste devotee, an adept in the cult of orgasm, and – as such – her answer to pretty much everything is: Get your clit rubbed.

For those not yet hip to the casual stroking craze that equates orgasm with meditation, and mindfulness with turn-on, Orgasmic Meditation (OM) is a practice focused on female orgasm. It involves two humans, at least one vagina, a timer, a dash of lube, a tightly held container comprised of a very specific configuration of pillows and limbs, and a very (very, very) precise stroke – a gentle, vertical petting atop the surface of the upper left quadrant of the clitoris with the tip of the left pointer finger, for fifteen minutes.

“Okay,” I sniff, wiping an errant strand of hair from my face. “Can we make that happen?”

“Pfft,” Jamie snorts. “Duh.”

I should probably mention that all three of Jamie’s roommates also OM. Like, religiously, and even then, fanatically, as in several times a day, facing some erotic Mecca while chanting the name of a little known Hindu vag deity. Or something. It’s but a symptom of the One Taste organization’s culty-er aspects – outcroppings of community houses packed tight with pussies keen to be rubbed, and fingers eager to rub ‘em.

“Hey, Dani,” says Jamie’s roommate, Josh, walking into the kitchen all of two seconds later.

“Hey, Josh.”

While Josh and I exchange greetings, Jamie – not one for subtleties – mimes a diddling motion with one pointer finger, while directing the other one my way, and – if I know my friend – likely doing something suggestive and upward reaching with her eyebrows. She’s a Capricorn; she makes **** happen.

“Wanna OM?” Josh blurts.

For those not living in houses populated exclusively by Orgasmic Meditators, most folks go about finding vaginas to rub, and fingers to rub ‘em on the OM Hub, a private online network available to those who qualify (i.e. throw down the cash for the online course, pass a quiz, and then throw down even more for annual network access; oh, and who aren’t registered sex offenders).

Anyone near Mar Vista wanna come stroke my pussy today between 3 and 5:30? reads a sample posting.

The community operates on an any finger/any pussy/anytime philosophy that has, historically, bumped up against my own vaginal mythology, the narrative that deems my honey pot holy, and its’ engaging a high privilege reserved for only the worthiest of suitors. The extent to which the randomness of the OM hook-up icks me out has proven prohibitive to developing any regularity around the practice. To this end, while certainly never a Kool-Aid drinker, I barely even qualify as a practitioner. Dabbler’s probably even pushing it.

“Oh, hi honey,” Jamie said, meeting me at the top of the stairs back when she was first inculcated into the Grand Order of Holy Diddlers. “I’m just gonna squeeze in a quick OM, and then we’ll go.”

I took a seat on the futon in the loft, and texted our friends to let them know we were going to be late for dinner. It wasn’t long before the telltale sounds of turn-on started seeping forth from the backside of Jamie’s bedroom door.

“Mmmmm….uhhhhhh…ooooooooohhhh…oooohhhh….oooh-oooh…ohh…”

Ew, I thought, scrambling to untangle the earbuds I couldn’t get out of my purse and into my ears fast enough.

It’s not that I’m prude, or shy, or at all delicate when it comes to erotic expression. Still, I don’t really want to know what my friend sounds like when she’s getting off, much the same way I’m not interested in smelling her used tampons. TMI – way (way, way) TMI.

Minutes later, a man wearing glasses and a Pokemon t-shirt came strutting out of Jamie’s bedroom.

“You next?” he asked, waggling a finger my way – a finger I could only guess was coated in vagina slime.

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“Ew,” I snorted, thoroughly put off by the creamy digit aimed in my direction, but moreso the assumption that my holy vag was this random guy’s for the stroking.

When it comes to touching my vagina, the list of those who qualify for the privilege is short, and contained – lovers, gynecologists, the occasional nurse practitioner, and the Russian lady who waxes my bikini line. Hired tenders aside, it’s a highly restricted area, reserved for those I deem special/worthy enough to handle both the sacred wonderfulness that is my labia, as well as my heart, because – like so many people in our culture and maybe on the planet in general, I am programmed to believe that the regions are inextricably bound. As such, unless I’m in a relationship, my pussy doesn’t get much play. Aye, there’s the (un)rub; and therein lies the beauty of the OM, once she who is grossed out by the culture figures out how to meander her way around its ickier aspects. Hanging out at Jamie’s, I’m now realizing, is a fantastic method to this end.

“Yes, please,” I reply to Josh’s hovering Wanna OM? inquiry.

“When?” he asks.

“Immediately.”

And so it is that I am now dropping chlorella-stained trou in Josh’s room, while he places a washcloth in the center of “The Nest” – which is really just a yoga mat surrounded by half-moon meditation cushions strategically placed for my head, my thighs and his ass, but will be honored as holy, and thus entered with the implicit understanding that while so cradled, there will be no canoodling, and no reciprocity, just pussy-stroking. For fifteen minutes, no more, no less.

“Are you comfortable?” Josh asks, pulling my leg over his thigh, and arranging his foot so that it’s flat against mine.

I catch myself before asking How are we defining our terms? Because, while sure, I’m enjoying a semblance of ergonomic ease, I am also naked from the waist down, lying with my legs splayed to reveal my six days un-groomed pussy as a relative stranger dangles his arm over my thigh, which – while fine – has me feeling more than a little vulnerable. Plus, there is the matter of warm-blooded man hands touching my inner thigh, of palm against flesh and the grazing of tinglier skin sections, and – um, the novelty of our flesh’s alchemy on this unique, raw and dense plane of purely physical exchange. Which is all to say, comfortable isn’t the first descriptive that comes to mind.

“Uh-huh,” I chirp, because now is not the time for heady unravelings of my mental state, and because Jamie got me stoned while Josh arranged the pillows, and I’m just blitzed enough not to give a **** what he thinks of my spread eagle lady bits.

“Okay, I’m going to ground you, now,” Josh says, mashing his palms along the surface of my thighs.

It’s standard, The Grounding, as is the practice of announcing whatever touch is about to happen. It lends a sterile, business-like vibe to the exchange, which I happen to appreciate. As impersonal as we can keep our interaction, the better, I say – all the easier for me to focus on the touch, and to sidestep the many variations of human trickiness that so often steal/fracture my attention every other time my clit is being stimulated.

“But, you meditate every day,” my mother scolded during an otherwise bizarre conversation about the OM practice, shocked and more than a little disappointed to hear that I, her oh-so spiritual daughter, space-out during sex.

Yes, mom, I meditate every day. But, that single-pointed focus that – all these years and vipassanas later – I still only sometimes wrangle while perched atop my zafu cushion doesn’t necessarily or even often translate when I’m naked and aroused and engaging a penis while wondering if the man it’s attached to likes me, and is enjoying what I’m doing, and thinks I look pretty doing it. I mean, the giving while receiving set-up alone is a mind**** of epic proportions, to say nothing of the laborious task of tracking and harmonizing hands and lips and tongues and erections while also making sure that I’m well lit, and flatteringly angled, all while maintaining eye contact, and not checking out of the experience to revise my book in my mind.

Trust me, I’m way more disappointed at my sexual spaciness than my mother ever could be. I see it as a massive missed opportunity – the extent to which I vacate most erotic exchange – because it means I’m not only not focused on the sex we’re sharing, or the dynamic the we are allegedly consummating, I’m certainly not focused on my own experience of the larger sexual energies moving through me.

But, Josh is not my lover. Josh isn’t even a friend. Josh is the guy attached to the hands that are right now mashing my thighs, and my pelvis, and is getting ready to—

Oh ****, I think, just now remembering the sequence of events.



The Noticing

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Please don’t do The Noticing, I silently plead. Please don’t do The Noticing.

It’s my least favorite part of the practice, The Noticing, wherein the stroker ogles the vag in front of him and then shares his visual observation. Out loud.

“I’m noticing that you have one pubic hair that’s really straight, and poking straight up towards the ceiling,” a stroker once told me, as I wished a hole would open up in the ground beneath me, and swallow me at once.

“The outside of your lips are, like, a really dark pink, almost like cranberry juice,” Noticed another, as my cheeks turned a similar shade, and I stared at the ceiling and wondered why any and all references to my vaginal “lips” creep me out so hard.

Please don’t do The Noticing, I psychically beg/command.

That Josh actually skips The Noticing is as much a testament to the anti-Noticing trend Jamie will later tell me is sweeping the community at large as it is to my psychic authority. No matter. Noticing isn’t happening. I’m golden, I think, grateful to have escaped the humiliation of Josh’s take on the whitehead lodged inside my inner thigh crease, as he starts the timer on his smartphone, snaps on a pair of latex gloves, and goes about sliding a hand underneath my ass.

“I’m going to touch your introitus now.”

Safeporting, they call it, the resting of the stroker’s thumb against the vaginal opening. I guess it’s supposed to help the strokee to feel held, to quell any lurking fears of floating up and toward the ceiling, of slipping through the cracks of an air vent and being forever lodged in the crawlspace with no pants on. Jamie has developed this annoying habit of rolling the term into her everyday lingo to reference any sort of safeguarding, like the time we were invited to our friends’ house for dinner, after a particularly awkward series of texts and naked hot tub gropings, and she said: “I know Michael and Katrina keep trying to **** you, but don’t worry. I’ll be right there, safeporting you the whole time.”

I appreciated the sentiment, but, the languaging? Um…ew. I know it’s judgy and small, and totally my ****, but cultspeak gives me the willies.

“I’m going to touch your pussy, now,” Josh announces as his lube-globby finger makes contact with my clit.

They’re big on the P-word, these Orgasmic Meditators from whom I continue to distance myself, despite the current (and previous and future) availing of my own P-word for the stroking. On the one hand, it’s refreshing, especially given how many Tantra intensives I’ve attended wherein the words yoni and punani are tossed around like so much New Age-appropriated Far Easterly exotica that seeks to make holy that which, I suppose, our crass, pedestrian and also appropriated English – allegedly – doesn’t. Still, if one more soft-eyed dude wearing three-day beard scruff and a rudrakshra mala wrapped around his sacred geometry tattooed wrist greets my by mashing his hands together at his curiously hairless heart chakra, and bending at the waist, and purring Namaste, I might have a stroke. To this end, I’m all for the P-word. And yet, I find something slightly confrontational about its ubiquity, as though those who OM are wielding the word in the hopes of inspiring discomfort, verily daring those within earshot to take issue with their languaging, and their lifestyle.

“Okay,” I sigh, narrowing my focus of attention to the point of contact between Josh’s finger and my clit, while expanding my awareness around all the sensation said contact is generating.

“Why can’t you just do it yourself?” my mother prods when I meet her at Pilates a week later, still wanting to not be disturbed by the idea of her daughter having her clitoris stroked by a rotating harem of strange men, and still not getting it.

It’s not that I can’t; it’s that I don’t. Just like I don’t seem to remember that it’s not that everything sucks, rather that I’m about to bleed, I tend to forget that a) I have a bundle of nerves in my vagina that tingle when stimulated; and b) I can stimulate them whenever I want to. I’m a heady gal – “an upper chakra creator” as Trish, my go-to psychic, likes to say. More often than not, I forget I even have a body, let alone that caressing it is an option. But, even if I chose to remember, OMing and masturbating are not the same thing.

“Ooohh…” Josh groans, clearly navigating a surge of arousal as the tip of his finger waggles up and down and up and down and up and down along the top of my clit.

OMing is an exchange – of trust and vulnerability, and of grunts and desire, but mostly of the electro-chemical polarities that attract masculine and feminine, and that – when it comes to base physics – render 3D form even possible.

“I felt this electrical jolt – like a lightning bolt – shooting out of your clit and into my finger, where it traveled up my arm, across my chest, into my heart, down into my cock, and out my other arm, like a circuit, and then it just kept circulating for rest of the OM,” said Lance, a guy who once stroked me while I was crashing at Jamie’s, while we were Sharing Frames after the stroking part, which isn’t quite as cringey as The Noticing, but is sort of in the ballpark.

The point is that something larger, magnetic and infinitely more mysterious happens when fingertip strokes clit in this specific way and inside of this container – something that doesn’t happen when I’m jerking myself off.

It’s the electro-chemical exchange that inspired me to try Orgasmic Meditation in the first place, back when I was cozy in a monogamous love thang, and my partner and I read Slow Sex together at a Colorado hot spring, and thus grooved on Nicole Daedone’s whole down with stimulation, up with sensitivity/awareness philosophy, and took to a daily OM practice.

“Achoo!” sneezed then boyfriend.

“Wow!” I said, shivering, because I felt his sneeze in my own body as palpably as if it were my own.

I liken it to Vipassana meditation wherein the prolonged practice of scanning the body for sensation strips away the walls and shadows that obscure our hearts and our light and our genius. The practice of OMing strips away the walls and the density that obscure not only our connection to our own feeling nature, but to the shared feeling nature that conscious sexual exchange inspires when we know how to work with it.

“Ooh,” boyfriend said, when he hit a particularly sweet spot with his tongue during a post-OM canoodle. “I felt that one in my toes.”

“Do…more…that…” I instructed, palming his skull, trying to catch my breath, “…hnnnh!…”

But, it’s not just instances of Freaky Friday-like feeling-sharing that differentiates OMing from diddling myself. There’s the specificity of the stroke which, when proffered by another, means I don’t have to navigate the allure of climax, the restraint necessary to not take myself over the edge. I’ve been pawing at myself for decades. I know precisely how I like it – the pace, the pressure, the angle, the alignment. And sure, I’m not a fiend; I can take my time and drag it out, but still, there aren’t really any unknown factors that are going to present themselves in my experience when it’s my finger and it’s my pussy; and so, at some point in the scenario, I’m going to rev up my rubbing, and take myself over the edge. Game over. Orgasmic Meditation isn’t goal-oriented. There is no race toward climax. It’s not even a destination. Sure, it happens; I hear. I’ve yet to climax during an OM, and I have all of zero interest in doing so, and not just because I think it would be thoroughly embarrassing. Climax is rote. The magic is at the edge, which is where all magic lies, and – for me – OMing is the perfect set-up to play with that edge, to redirect the energy that threatens to undo me in a fit of trembles, spasms, shrieks and sensation, and to instead redirect it up my spine, and into my head where it dances between my third eye and my crown, and it animates my entire body with a thousand and one lightning bolts exploding behind my eyelids and across my every meridian in fractalized bursts of psychedelia.

“UNNHHH!!” Josh sucks in his breath at the very same moment a jolt of electricity explodes in my upper cervical spine, and then mutters a thoroughly floored: “Whoah.”

“And, what’s in it for the guy?” Mom presses.

I can’t really say, not being a guy or having ever stroked, but that doesn’t stop me from rolling my eyes, and snorting, and saying “Mom, I already explained this,” because even though I’m a grown woman, there’s something about sharing time/space with my mother that inspires adolescent histrionics. “It strips away the layers of calcified density, and renders them more sensitive and available to experience their own sensation through less and less stimulation.”

Plus, as far as I can tell, a lot of the guys in the community are spazzy dweebs who, if it weren’t for One Taste, wouldn’t likely see much pussy, let alone get to touch any, unless they were paying for it.

“Two minutes,” Josh says, alerting me to the impending close of our session with a pronounced shift in his touch – Downstroking, they call it, which is totally applicable when spread eagle and doused in coconut lube in The Nest, but kind of annoying when chatting with my friend over kale smoothies.

“You probably want to downstroke her before telling her you don’t want to work with her anymore,” Jamie advises.

I roll my eyes and vomit just the tiniest bit in the back of my throat, not because it’s not good advice, but because I’m still having a hard time getting used to my friend’s tendency to talk like a cult member.

“Time,” Josh says with a massive exhale, removing his hand from very, very tingly pussy, despite my clit’s silent pulsing pleas for him to come back, to stay awhile, to keep doing that thing he was doing with his finger for – like, I dunno…ever?

I exhale as Josh grounds me back into my body, and into the room, again mashing his hands atop my trembling thighs. He helps me up to a sitting position where I drape the now damp washcloth over my lady bits, and avail myself to the grand finale – the Sharing of Frames.

“There was this moment, when I saw, like, a drop of – um…well, your juices on the edge of your pussy, and – uh, well – when I did, I felt a lot of sensation in my cock.”

I think the point is to get us in the practice of communicating our turn on, and our feeling experience. It’s gotten easier, the Frame-Sharing, minus the moments when I realize, mid-OM, that I’m going to have to do it, and then I retreat to my head, scanning the practice for something noteworthy to speak to. That, and the fact that I don’t love talking to strangers about my turn-on, but – whatever – I’m a grown-up; I can deal.

“There was a moment when you pulled back on the pressure, and I found myself wanting to chase it, but instead chose to inhale into my clit, and found the connection I was craving through my own breath.”

“Awesome.”

“Rad.”

“Thanks.”

And with that, we are complete.

It’s actually my favorite part of the whole experience, the leaving, the absence of lingering eye locks, of nervous heart flutters, of carefully couched farewells that may or may not allude to a deepening intimacy, and to future dalliances that won’t actually come to pass. I love the none of that. It’s honest. It’s clean. We have accomplished the business at hand – the touching of my pussy – and now that we are finished, I will be on my (way merrier) way.

Back in Jamie’s kitchen, dinner is ready – kale salad with pumpkin seeds and tons of nutritional yeast.

“How was that?” Jamie asks, knowing smile hijacking her perpetually radiant face.

“Best. Friend. Ever.” I gush, proffering a bear hug while feeling infinitely less suicidal and – dare I say – pretty darned good.

Orgamsic Meditation: It’s more than just a skeevy sex cult.

wegge
18th December 2014, 09:16
http://www.danielvitalis.com/dispatch-5-awakening-sexual-intelligence/

here you can find also a wealth of information on this topic.
He´s also making the connection to sexuality in the natural human environment.
There´s also a interview with Chris Ryan from one of the youtube videos above