Eros Unredeemed

[dianna]

Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, & Other Writings





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.



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]

Cause the sweetest kiss I ever got is the one I've never tasted (Sixto Rodriguez)

Philosophy of Kissing

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]

[dianna]

Evoking Eros

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.



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/sho...7197#post27197

[dianna]

If You Want Extraordinary Love, You Need To Fight For It

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]

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]

The Fantasy of Liberation

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

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).



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/1...iberation.html

[dianna]

Alfalfa and Eros

I'm In the Mood For Love …

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yuOsB4psC9E

Let Me Call You Sweetheart

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=K8fykuW4IHk

[dianna]

Polly: Sex Culture Revolutionary

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.

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

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-biGefp3QZA

See more at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...-revolutionary

[dianna]

From the Vaults of Erowid

Coming Out

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]

TEDseX

Make Love Not Porn: Cindy Gallop at TEDxOxford

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hm7cVImCJ6U

Why I stopped watching porn: Ran Gavrieli at TEDxJaffa

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gRJ_QfP2mhU

TEDxSF - Nicole Daedone - Orgasm: The Cure for Hunger

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=s9QVq0EM6g4

The Great Porn Experiment: Gary Wilson at TEDxGlasgow

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiU

Understanding the Sex Myth: Rachel Hills at TEDxLoughborou

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AdLUE4NUJHM

Christopher Ryan: Are we designed to be sexual omnivores?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LJhklPJz9U8

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

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=NT9isHpaG-M

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

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uaewLFHibEk

Select the right relationship: Alexandra Redcay at TEDxUpperEastSide

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jodhovumkHQ

[dianna]

Free Sexuality and Partnership

Dieter Duhm

Full article here:

http://realitysandwich.com/218970/fr...d-partnership/

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!




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.



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!



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.



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]

Posted by dianna (here)
Love Shack

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=leohcvmf8kM

for those in the lovely US of Freakin A

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9SOryJvTAGs

[dianna]

Lets do it …

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=lXYKGL6MgKM

[lastlegs]

I have to come back to this thread with more time but thanks for the postings.

[dianna]

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...ult-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.



“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



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]

http://www.danielvitalis.com/dispatc...-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