“We have, in a very special way, sex on the brain… which isn’t the best place for it” - Alan Watts

The contributions of our species to the evolution of our civilization continue to push us toward some unknown destination.  As we are born into this civilization, these contributions provide the foundation on which we build our future, and the future of those who follow us.  Looking at the history of western civilization, a great deal of the contributions passed down to us by our ancestors have created a civilization that inadvertently disrupts the mental and emotional evolution of our thought processes by repressing, evaluating, cataloging, moralizing, stimulating, and marketing the physical interactions between our species.  This disruption can affect the relationship we create with others and ourselves as we become caught in a sex loop in western civilization. 

How do we gat caught in this sex loop?  To truly understand how it happens, we need to look at the history of its creation.  Now, a great deal of our ancient history is based on presumptions and myth, but a basic understanding of our evolution and the development of our moral structure is needed to give us a general idea of what lead to our society’s preoccupation with sex.  To begin, we now live in a society where the suggested form of sexual partnering is monogamistic heterosexuality.  This concept developed over thousands of years during our natural progression from being scattered groups of hunter-gathers to closely nit groups of agricultural communities.  During our evolution, our species explored all forms of social groupings and interactions such as polygamy, polyandry, group monogamy[i], etc.  It wasn’t until we started accumulating land and property that we began the practice of arranged marriages... which, interestingly enough, shows it was not a “moral” obligation that created coupled monogamy and marriage, it was our desire to protect and accumulate land, title, and possessions…a far cry from the concept of poetic love created during the French and Italian renaissance.  As our sexual partnering evolved, so did our intelligence, with a major peak in our intellectual curiosity occurring during the Greco-Roman era where philosophers attempted to understand the nature of man.  Plato theorized the possibility that personal enlightenment and sexual equality between men and women could be achieved through abstinence.  This theory introduced sexual contact as being something to avoid in order to achieve a higher state of consciousness and better sense of self.  Though Plato also believed that those who did not wish to aspire to so high a standard should be free to sleep around as much as they wanted to… which could explain why there were so few enlightened philosophers.  It wasn’t until the height of the Roman Empire, and the rise of Christianity, between 300CE and 400CE, that our species created most of its modern views on sexual morality and deviance.  Before the onset of Christianity, the people of the Roman Republic and Empire were largely “Pagonistic”, a generalized term used to define tolerance and respect for a people of differing religious beliefs.  So, Rome was made up of a large number of religions that often shared the same geography and the same temples showing tolerance and respect for the beliefs of others, which helped Rome create a sense of stabilized nationalism.  The coexistence of the Roman religions became disrupted as the Judean religion merged into Roman culture after Israel was conquered in 66BCE.  This was due to the fact that Yahweh, the Judean god, did not play well with others.  Judaism used the word “Pagan” to label those who did not worship Yahweh, and believed anyone worshiping another god was their god’s adversary.  An example of their distain and fear of those who worshiped other gods can be seen in their conflicts with the worshipers of Baal, the Canaanite god of nature and fertility, and Astoreth, the goddess of sexual love and maternity.  Judaism saw the worship of Baal and Astoreth as not only blasphemous, but filled with immoral acts expressly forbidden according to the law of Yahweh.  Now, Judean history, if taken literally, suggests that the wrath of Yahweh destroyed cities, slaughtered thousands, and even flooded the world when people began participating in experiences he deemed forbidden.  Since Yahweh saw all, one can see how his followers feared temptation because they feared it would ultimately bring about the loss of their god’s divine love, followed by the rage of his jealous anger.    

The fear of loosing the love of Yahweh became rooted in the foundation of Christianity which incorporated Jewish history and mythology into its belief system as it eventually became the predominate religion of Rome.  Apostle Paul, noted as the founder of Christianity[ii], incorporated his preoccupation with sex throughout many of his writings.  In Romans chapter one verse twenty-four, Paul says, “Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another”.  Paul believed that those who engaged in any form of sexual passion would be condemned to an eternity of punishment.  He went on to categorize sex with wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity… murder, strife, deceit and malice.  His “shameful lusts” were only practiced by those who belonged to the “Devil”, the adversary of the now Judean-Christian god.  It should be noted here that, where once our species focused its attention on “life”, Paul turned the followers of Christianity’s attention to the theory of “afterlife”, a better existence beyond death.  The mythology of “afterlife” grew through centuries of debate and imagination, but Paul’s emphasis that one must abstain from sex in order to be accepted into this afterlife by Yahweh was stressed in his writings because he believed that the end of the world was going to happen during his lifetime.  So the urgency for the people of Rome to repent from their sexual liberalness was immediate if one was to be delivered from the coming of Yahweh’s wrath.  Where Plato believed that sex would inhibit our growth in intellectual matters, Paul believed that it would deny us access to the “afterlife” and place our soul in a state of eternal punishment.  You can imagine this gave future followers of the Christian religion a rather distorted and bleak view of our sexual nature.  A good example of the effect this view had on Paul’s followers is that of Augustine, a Christian priest in the third century, who’s written works integrated “sinfulness” into the very construct of human nature.  Charles Freeman, author of Closing of the Western Mind, stated that one could not read Augustine’s Confessions “without being aware of Augustine’s preoccupation with his own sinfulness… his sexual feelings and experiences, even if they are relatively limited, disturb him continuously.”  To Augustine, sexual intercourse was strictly a necessary evil for procreation.  German theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann said that Augustine “fused Christianity together with hatred of sex and pleasure into a systematic unity” [iii].  Both Paul and Augustine believed Yahweh would inflict pain, punish, and persecute all those engaging in lustful desires.  To them, this was considered “tough love”…. with having ones soul burn in “Hell” for eternity as being the toughest form of this love.  “Hell” or “Hades,” was a concept derived from several myths including the Egyptian and Greek underworlds.  Hell was adopted into Christian doctrine during the third century by church fathers[iv] as a fiery pit of eternal torment for all sinners, becoming the key means for manipulating all forms of physical and mental behavior.  The pessimism and guilt bleakly outlining Augustine’s theology became staples of the Roman Catholic Church[v], where they attached to it various concepts on sexual perversion, repentance, punishment, and the belief that the only sure fire way to live without sin was celibacy…. or not to be born at all.  After the fall of Rome in 400CE, this theology turned first and second millennium Christians into what Alan Watts calls a “sexual regulation society” as the idea of sex being the ultimate sin against Yahweh spread throughout Europe by means of Roman Catholicism.  Pleasure was sinful, sex was sinful, making love was sinful, and with this we entered the Dark Ages. 

Now, little is known about the European Dark Ages except it was a time of exaggerated myth and widespread illiteracy, both apparently perpetuated by the Catholic Church.  Sex, when not specifically used for the sake of procreation, was evil… though sex for procreation was still considered a fall from grace.  Sex was a temptation of the Devil, and was a tool used to divert man from an afterlife in the kingdom of Yahweh.  Those who participated in “sins of the flesh” would be tormented on Earth and their souls would be dammed and sadistically tortured for eternity in Hell.  One could almost say that Christianity was an elaborate form of contraception and, powered by illiteracy and myth, its view of sex prevailed over the next thousand years.  As we entered the Renaissance, our species made great leaps in science, art, and philosophy.  Unfortunately, little was changed in regards to our attitudes on sex and relationships.  Though the Catholic Church lost several of its followers to the Church of England and the protestant reformation, its original idea of sex as sin were often adopted into these new religions.  These views became rooted in the social morals of our society, as rulers like King George III called for the rise of “virtue” and the punishment of “vice”[vi]… though King George was suffering from various forms of mental illness at the time.  

So, it was possibly a combination of Christian theology, lawmakers enforcing conceptual ideas on virtue, and newly recovered Greek philosophical views of sex and enlightenment that made people entering the Victorian age in the 1830s so sexually restrictive and repressed.  As our species took great leaps to refine itself socially, sex became a taboo… and indulging in that taboo could mean social rejection, imprisonment, and eternal damnation.  Though many were obviously having sex, they struggled with law, society, and conscience while participating in it.  These suffocating standards forced many Victorians into a sexual schizophrenia where they sinned in private and loudly denounced those who sinned in public[vii]. 

By looking back at this history, we can see the major force behind this schizophrenia was the underlying fear we attached to our sexual nature.  To fully understand this we must first see that the sufferings of our species, especially the psychological ones, are, for the most part, imagined and created by the convergence of apposing thought processes.  Meaning, the problem is in our head, and not part of the world that exists outside of us… which has no problem[viii].   Second, after looking at what created this fear… we need to look at what we’re afraid of from a different perspective.  To put it simply, we’re afraid of nature... our nature.  Whether those who pass down the beliefs that influence and control the physical interactions between our species like it or not, life is sexual.[ix]  We come from sex, and it is through sex that we carry our species into the future.  Darwin theorizes that the physical aspects of our species evolved, not to compete in the survival of the fittest as was once thought, but as a form of  “evolutionary competition” where our bodies evolved to attract and arouse sexual partners[x].  During the sexual evolution of our species, if we had the same sexual habits as other primates, it’s possible that early forms of mate selection involved males staring at their potential partners while sitting with their legs wide open and flicking their erect penises with their finger[xi].  While this would not go over very well in our more modern era, women at that time were drawn to men with elaborate and sexually stimulating phalluses, which caused a positive feedback loop encouraging men to parade their genitals around in the hopes of attracting a mate.  This was our first attempt at courtship.  Our ability to attract partners has evolved considerably since then.  The sexual selection theory suggests that the male genitals evolved specifically to attract females… and females developed sexual ornamentation to arouse males.  As a particular trait became preferable, that trait became predominant in our evolution such as exaggerated upper muscle strength, female breasts, buttocks, and our heightened orgasmic capabilities[xii].  The greater the probability of arousal, the more likely we were to attract a partner.  It’s not surprising that Victorian biologists rejected Darwin’s theory since they viewed the sexual parts of our bodies as immoral and vulgar.  So, those without desirable ornamentation had to come up with different ways of arousing each other through intellect.  Geoffrey F. Miller, an associate professor at the University of New Mexico, expands on Darwin’s theory in his book “The Mating Mind”, where he states that sexual selection through mate choice was one of the greatest contributing factors in the evolution of human intellect.  With the evolution of our intellect, we were no longer at the mercy of our genetics, and quit waving our genitals as we devised ways to attract others outside of nature.  By following Darwin and Miller’s theory of sexual selection, it would appear that our desire for the enjoyment of sex and physical companionship lead to the evolution of both our mind and body.  This is ironic considering the very intellect our desire created was later used to suppress it.  By using our intellect to place restrictions on sex and sexual stimulation, the generations ahead of us paved the way for an entirely new form of sexual attraction… the desire for something forbidden.  Which is also ironic in that it was the removal of our freedom that heightened our desire. 

By the time we reached the Victorian age, our restrictive and repressive view of sex, helped attach an underlying state of fear and repressed desire to all forms of physical contact between our species.  The regulations and boundaries within which certain acts were permitted or forbidden only heightened our sexual interest and schizophrenia as we tried to define what exactly was “normal”.  For example, in Spain, it was illegal for anyone other than a woman's husband to see her bare feet.  A woman could freely expose her breasts, but feet were considered sexual and had to be covered[xiii].  Being attracted to specific body traits was not confined to the west, but it was the west that sought to conceal its arousal traits under piles of clothing in an effort to avoid temptation… which only succeeded in heightening our temptation by making the trait seem very exciting in an interestingly erotic and dirty way.    

Now, before I go on, the ancient history I’ve described, and the history we’re taught in school was put together after the seventeenth century using some old paper, investigative theory, and a lot of guesswork.  So, it’s more than probable that the currently accepted version of ancient history is not entirely factual… if it existed at all.  But, even though the history we’ve accepted as truth may not be entirely true, we use it to create an understanding of our world, where we’ve been, and where we’re heading.  So the beliefs we’ve created from the “accepted” history has greatly affected our present and our future both individually and collectively.  For example, it was our belief in this ancient history that lead the late Victorians to separate “childhood” and “adulthood” into two apposing worlds.  They did this in an effort to protect younger generations from “immorality”… a concept created by this collective history.  This separation created a drastic upset in the evolution of our social, sexual, and intellectual growth. 

From what I understand, before the middle of the eighteenth century, “children” were simply “young adults”, prearranged to marry as early as twelve years old.  The Victorians “idealization of childhood innocence”[xiv], turned childhood into a separate stage of life free from all sexual knowledge, interest, and behavior.  It would appear that our forefathers couldn’t control their own sexual desires according to church, country, and aristocratic social standards… so they decided to place the burden of western civilization’s desire for moral uniformity on the younger generation, using law and punishment, such as “anti-masturbatory therapy”, to curb them of sexual curiosity and behavior.  In an effort to distract them from “adulthood”, their familial, religious, and cultural institutions filled “childhood” with fantasy and fairy tails equipped with moral undertones and life lessons to help shape their character and save their soul.  Overtime, this created a large rift between the world of “children” and the world of “adults”.  Marriage, the passage into adulthood, was considered the “ultimate” and possibly “only” goal for children.  Sex was for adults, and was something children would learn about on their wedding night.  Girls who were sexually active before their wedding were considered dirty, unclean, spoiled, and possibly a tool of the Devil… not a good selling point when trying to arrange a marriage.  This separation widened after 1890 when we created “adolescence” to define our sexual maturation beginning with puberty and generally ending by our nineteenth year… or when we start behaving like an “adult”.  An “adult” is a theoretical concept dreamt up by our family, church, and lawmakers as the perfect representation of a person contributing to their particular social group and belief system.  By the early twentieth century, these three stages of development; childhood, adolescence, and adulthood were cemented into our social conciseness.  Shortly afterward a number of “experts” designed what they believed to be an “ideal” environment for future “adults” such as the Boy Scouts, YMCA, church, and most importantly… school, with over seventy five percent of American youth enrolled in high school by nineteen-forty.  In fact, it was a combination of compulsory education, child labor laws, and youth directed consumerism that led to the creation of the “teenager”[xv].  The teenager is a mutated form of adult, an adolescent who must act like an adult without having any of the benefits of adulthood.

My point in all of this is that the generations ahead of us hid what they believed was morally unacceptable from us during our “childhood”, enforced what they believed was morally acceptable during our “adolescence”… followed by a swift kick out the door as we entered into “adulthood”.   This is the general outline of human development western civilization evolved into over the course of two hundred years.  These stages of development were originally created to protect future generations from becoming socially deviant.  Given that we’ve had over two hundred years to create and refine this process, one would think the younger generations would have embraced the strict moral code set up by our church and state by now.  When, it would seem, western civilization has become only slightly less preoccupied with sex than the Victorians.  So, it appears the attempt to fill the world with monogamously heterosexual relationships that confine physical interactions to procreation didn’t work.  In fact, it has done the exact opposite.  We now have more variances for sexual arousal and interactions than at any point in recorded history.  Although two thousand years of fear and repression can make sex more interesting, it can turn a minimal part of our growth experience into the focal point of youth.  The more the generations ahead of us restrict and repress us sexually, the more sexual we seem to become, which causes the generations ahead of us to create more restrictions.  The process of inhibiting younger generations from naturally progressing through their sexual maturation has become a complex loop of repression creating sexual anxieties, distortions, misunderstandings, and obsessions which have ultimately heightened our schizophrenic relationship with sex.  So, it would seem the separation of childhood and adulthood is creating the very thing it’s trying to eliminate.  This is the sexual loop in western civilization.

Now that we can see how the loop was created, we need to understand how it is affecting us.  I don’t mean affecting us as a society… I mean, how does it affect us individually.  Our society has already spent a considerable amount of time and effort trying to study, control, define, and explain a general sociological view of western sexuality, which has lead to an endless collection of data and theory in the attempt to understand and document similarities and differences in our sexual nature.  Just as the Kinsey institute releases yet another test measuring our sexual differences, other researchers are studying how men with sexual problems react to anxiety-inducing threats of mild electric shock.  The overzealous study of human sexuality has lead to thousands of articles spanning over two hundred years that analyze the cause and possible treatment of sexual dysfunction, high-risk sexual behavior, abnormal behavior, abusive behavior, exotic behavior, lack of motivation, lack of desire, lack of arousal, too much arousal, inability to orgasm, premature orgasms, erectial dysfunctions, combined with varying opinions and theories on what’s considered “normal”.  One would think this would ultimately lead to some greater understanding of our sexual nature, but it’s mostly created a mountain of generalized trivia that winds up filling a large section of a scientific journal just before it’s used to line the bottom of a birdcage.  One would also think this information could be quite helpful for someone practicing psychology or psychiatry, but it seems to only assists in defining us using a generalized theory created during someone’s attempt at providing an opinion.  When a psychologist attempts to define us using a pre existing definition, they are attaching to us the beliefs supporting that definition.  For example, the sexual relationships between our species are separated into three types; heterosexuality, bi-sexuality, and homosexuality.  What was once “sexuality”, has been cut into three separate categories, allowing us to create opinions about each type of “sexual” as good, bad, or indifferent.  Then we turn the verb, the act of being sexual, into a noun by defining a person in the act of sex by how they’re being “sexual”.  This means that, instead of saying someone is being “sexual”, we now say they are a “homosexual”, “heterosexual, or “bisexual”.  It was the separation of “sexual” into subcategories that allowed our family groups, religious leaders, and lawmakers to create an opinion for these subcategories based on their concepts of right and wrong.  By the mere act of defining “sexuality”, we became more concerned with our opinion of its definitions than the experience of having it.  And, by defining someone by one of these subcategories, they become an object subject to the opinions of that subcategory.  This is because we no longer see that person as creating a life that is unique only to them, they are defined by their subcategory and the personal belief system we’ve created for that subcategory.  This has caused a great deal of difficulty during the early stages of our sexual maturation as we become afraid of being placed into a category that is not accepted by those governing our belief system creating deep feelings of guilt, anxiety, fear, or sadness depending on how we have defined ourselves based on our thoughts and experiences.  For example, homophobia is created by the fear of being defined.  Those who do not concern themselves with definitions creating unpredictability, like heterosexual adults who participated in healthy forms of same-sex experimentation during their adolescence, proving that “sexuality" is not a concrete, finite, and clear-cut concept that can be calculated, weighed, or measured.  By defining it, we’ve turned people into objects in an effort to label them according to our belief of what is “normal” and “moral”.  The older generation presents these objects to the younger generation as truth, allowing younger generation to define someone else using the same belief system creating a self perpetuating loop of obsessive defining.  Defining someone by subcategories limits them to our opinion based on those subcategories.  To define someone is to limit them in our mind.  To define yourself is to limit yourself in your mind. 

So, like sex, we are an action in motion… we are life moving forward.  We are in a constant state of change.  To fully understand how definitions limit and affect us, I would like to take a closer look at how we can define ourselves and others into objects.  An object is basically an idea, a collection of definitions trapped in a single moment of time supporting that idea.  For example, a sex object is someone we’ve defined by their ability to sexually arouse us...  basically someone with a large percentage of what we’ve defined as sexually stimulating.  A majority of the definitions we use to create sex objects were passed down to us… meaning that, aside defining an orange as being an orange or a star as being a star, the generations before us defined which of our biological traits constitute as sexually arousing.  For example, unlike in the south pacific, where women run around with their breasts uncovered, a woman’s breast has become extremely erotic in the west.  What are basically the human equivalent of udders have become sexually alluring objects that can sell beer, power tools, magazines, clothes, sunglasses, and office furniture by being partly exposed, fully exposed, pushed up, pushed together, strapped together, inflated, implanted… in fact, our fascination with defining the breast has greatly affected our culture by creating a positive feedback loop leading to a form of “runaway evolution” resulting in a dramatic growth in breast size.  Ronald Fisher, an evolutionist who expanded on Darwin’s idea of “sexual selection through mate choice”, suggested that our desire for a certain sex trait would eventually cause that trait to become more extravagant over the course of evolution[xvi].  In the case of the western breast, it was not the breast that evolved, what evolved was our ability to scientifically augment it.  Our species has created an offshoot of science and medicine devoted to the preservation and replication of what we’ve defined as “beautiful” or “sexually arousing”.  Our scientific and medical ingenuity has evolved to a point where they can help us nip, tuck, alter, shrink, tighten, straighten, add, remove, enhance, highlight, tone down, burn off, uplift, and renew bits and pieces of ourselves creating a non-stop assembly line of products and contraptions to use in the hopes of changing our definitions so we can attract each other.  This has created a civilization of obsessive groomers trying to avoid being defined as imperfect. 

So, where did modern definitions for “perfect” come from?  Well, we could say it began with an artist who decided to create his vision of the perfect man and the perfect woman.  By doing this the artist created a man and woman others could aspire to become, creating the ‘idol’.  Overtime, these idols became rooted in the social mass consciousness as the ideal form of beauty.  Then we’re born into this mass consciousness and define ourselves based on our belief in idolistic representation of perfect and imperfect.  Now, with the help of advances in our technical and medical fields, we’ve placed unrealistic idols into our social mass consciousness creating extreme standards for perfection, not just in how we look, but what we wear, how we act… and, most importantly, what we’re attracted to.  As we define ourselves based on these idols, these images, we attach feelings to them, giving our belief in them power over us.  This “power” fuels our free market economy which uses these idols, these definitions, to target those who believe in them in an effort to stimulate sales.  Once a target market is created, it becomes tied to the health of our economy.  If the belief supporting a target market is eliminated, we eliminate the target market, and companies stand to loose billions of dollars in revenue.  For example, a greater part of our advertising is designed to arouse us so we’ll be attracted to whatever the model is wearing, using, watching, riding, saying, eating, kissing, etc..  Each ad uses idol worship to sell its product… hoping that we’ll either want the idol, want to become the idol, or both.  Without the idol we would just be staring at pictures of vacuums and dishwashers… which aren’t very exciting and might be overlooked unless there’s someone straddling them.  We all know that arousal is big business, and it is in the better interest of our economy that nothing change, as a majority of it relies on our sexual schizophrenia for its survival.  Sexually oriented material ranging from pin-up posters to adult movies has evolved into a billion dollar industry by targeting a market produced by the schizophrenia created during our sexual maturation, enabling our species to be the only creatures on this planet to produce feelings of arousal through artificial stimulation.  By using artificial stimulation we condition our mind to rely on images and movies to create arousal.  Overtime, when we attempt to have a sexual encounter without artificial stimulation, we often have to picture these fantasies in our mind in order to create arousal… making sex more mental than physical.  In a way, artificial stimulation has become an addiction, replacing physical intimacy with mental fantasy.  This has created a symbiotic relationship between those that repress sex and those that make money off the addiction caused by the repression.  One would almost think that the church, government, medical, and sex industries were working together... because they are inadvertently creating an endless loop of idolization.  And, as we are introduced into this loop, we create a number of psychological problems than can follow us throughout our lifetime.

The loop of obsessive definitions, the loop of idolization, the larger sexually repressive loop created by the segmentation and control of our growth process into childhood, adolescence, and adulthood has caused a considerable amount of confusion when it comes to the relationship we create with ourselves.  As we discover sex, many of us are unaware that we’re caught in an intricate connection of loops that guide us through our youth much like a teacher guides us through a particular subject.  Consider how we study a foreign country.  In social studies we are taught a country’s geographic location, a brief review of its history, our perception of that history, and possibly the colors of the country’s flag… that’s about it.  To learn anything more extensive we must take advanced courses in language, art, music, literature, and the history behind it all.  The thing is, no matter how much we study, it’s still someone else’s interpretation of that country.  To truly learn about a country, one would have to live there, experience it for themselves, learn about it from the inside, so that they can create their own opinions based on personal interaction.  It’s the same with sex.  In sex education we’re taught the geographical locations of the human sex organs, a brief review of how reproduction occurs, some perceptions of sex when not used for reproduction, and a great deal of information on venereal diseases.  Since there are no advanced courses on sex education, any information outside of reproduction is left for us to learn on our own through outside influences that simultaneously stimulate and repress, encourage and prohibit, punish and reward us for our sexual interest and behavior.  Our inability to experience sex has let the generation behind us create that portion of our thought process.  In fact, before experience, our mind can believe anything it hears… and create an intricate system of automatic responses based on our belief system.  As our automatic response become unconscious, and we define ourselves based on our belief system, how we view ourselves also become unconscious.  Since each of us lives in a mind we created during our youth, the collection of stimulus, unconscious response system, and the loops we create during our development stage, become the processor that governs all future thought.  How many of us have said we don’t want to look back at our childhood?  How many of us are afraid to remember what we defined ourselves as, or how we let others define us?  Our childhood is not a block of time we leave behind as we pass into adulthood.  As I said before, childhood is a concept dreamt up by adults, and adults are only a concept dreamt up by children… both collide with excessive force when one tries to repress or become the other.  Our life is not split into segments, it is one continual journey, which is why the psychological confusion we experience during the early stage of our life can greatly affect the relationship we have with ourselves as we grow older.  For example; if we develop feelings toward a friend who happens to be of the same sex, and we’ve defined our feelings based on a collection of beliefs that say those feelings are bad, then our beliefs don’t change the fact that we have sexual feelings toward our friend, it only changes our opinion of our ourselves based on how we’ve defined that feeling.  These opinions are used to create our relationship with ourselves and govern the feelings we attach to our actions.  If we have sexual intercourse with someone before we’re married, and see the action as sin, then we’ll define ourselves as “sinful”.  If we see the act as loving, we define ourselves as “loving”.  The opinions we use to define ourselves are often based on a belief system created by fear, misunderstandings, and untruths passed down through generations of confused repression.  We often hide our feelings, creating a mental loop where we suppress our feelings instead of working through them.  When we feel guilty, we hide it, when we feel sad, we hide it, when we feel confused, we hide it… and it stays hidden with the judgment and emotion we attach to those thoughts and actions.  Overtime these definitions, the beliefs, these loops, become part of the unconscious operating system by which we evaluate all past and future experiences.  Our thoughts, our imagination, our behavior are all judged by the operating system created by our own mind.  While many of us were able to leave that judge behind as we progressed further in life, some are still working on letting it go, while others are still governed by the judge of our youth.  In short, our sexual confusion doesn’t end with a sudden flash of inspiration when we hit eighteen, or get married, or have children… we simply carry it with us as part of the conscious and unconscious programming we use to build the rest of our world on.  And, not only do these loops affect the relationship we have with ourselves, they also affect our relationship with others since we relate to others based on how we see ourselves and the world we’ve created in our minds.

It is by stepping outside the loop that we can see the world created for us as children, while entertaining, was a fantasy designed to protect and distract us from growing.  Do we want to continue this in future generations?  Some of us have an attachment to what we remember as being “innocent”.  Well, innocence is basically the feeling we have before we were taught to fear our human nature.  When someone says, “we’ve lost our innocence”, they’re saying that we’ve participated in sexual intercourse - and guilt, fear, doubt, humiliation, relief, anxiety, and a hundred other emotions can accompany this loss depending on our perception of it.  But, innocence is not a state of purity as people would think, it is actually a state of unknowing.  Innocence does not end at puberty, innocence does not end, because we are always in a state of unknowing, since everything we know is based on theory and belief created in a world of our own design.  True innocence is never lost, it’s simply forgotten until we let go of the beliefs given to us as children… until we wake up… until we are no longer encumbered by the beliefs of others... until we can see a man or a woman without turning them into an object.  A return to innocence is a return to a time when there was no childhood, when there was no adulthood, when there was no fear, when there was no definition.  It is our awakening, our rebirth, our second chance at seeing the world for the first time, with the knowledge to create our own personal belief system based on our own experiences, which breaks the loop and reclaims our innocence. 

So, what have I learned?  Well, it seams that western civilization is caught in a loop that began at the height of the Victorian age where the older generation segmented our growth process by creating a separate world for children to grow up in.  Then laws were created to protect the world of children from the world of adults… which, if the laws worked, the loop should have dissolved overtime as the protected children grew up.  Instead we’ve become the very adults we believe the next generation must be protected from.  With the advent of the teenager and the laws that control sexual conduct, the sexual maturation of boys and girls has been delayed, causing some of us a great deal of confusion and psychosis which follows us into our adulthood.  To break the loop we must look at our individual history to gain an understating of what lead to the creation of ourselves.  What did we take in as truth?  How did that truth affect us and our unconscious operating system?  Does that truth consciously or unconsciously guide us towards its own means… which is to secure its existence?  What we must finally come to understand is that we are not children, we are not adolescents, we are not adults, we are human beings in a constant state of growth with only one beginning and one ending which are connected by series of experiences.  Now, this goes completely against our society’s obsession with defining us, especially when it comes to our sexuality.  Sex is not what we’ve defined it to be.  Sex just is.  We’ve made something very simple very complicated.  By understanding that sex is not what we’ve defined it to be, we can begin the process of letting the definitions go.  Once we realize the world we live in isn’t real, we can look at how it affects us.  Of course, without this repression, we would have nothing to rebel against… and, the fun is often in the rebellion.  But, until we let go of the loop, we, and our society, will be unable to move forward.  So, the question is, do we want to continue this loop or break from it?  Is the thrill worth the ride?   

There is no milestone in time that changes our perception other than when the perception is changed.  We carry the burden of western thought, but by seeing the big picture we created trying to define the big picture, we can release ourselves from it.  As far as having an answer to, “what is sex?”… there really is no answer because that would be turning an action into an object based on belief and opinion.  Each of us has a different perception of sex.  Once we look back in a way that allows us to understand how we created that perception, where that perception came from, how it affects us, how it affects our relationships, and how we use it to perceive the world… then we can let go of our beliefs, reclaim our innocence, and live without fear.         

We’ve created a lot out of nothing.  Peace comes from turning a lot back into nothing.

Steve Reedy

3/1/2005

Additional thoughts to ponder:

pieces I trimmed away but couldn’t leave behind

• The repression of sex is remote only to our species. 
• Sex could not exist without opposition, for it was opposition that created it… sexual vs nonsexual. We define things with good intentions, but never really look at the result of those definitions.
•  When we say we are involved in the act of sex, are we acting?  No, we’re sexing.  The French have a word for this, but children are severely punished for saying it.  When we ask why we’re being punished, we’re told that it’s a dirty word.  This “dirty word” defines the act of sex…. which implies that sex is dirty, evil, something to be avoided, abstained from at all cost in order to live as a good person.
• There is another loop called – “second childhood” where we relive our childhood through our children, creating a symbiotic relationship between parent and child that’s broken at the arrival of puberty… since we don’t want to go through that chaotic mess again, we often prolong our children’s “childhood” as long as possible.
• We should be learning how to have relationships with each other free from someone else’s version of what that relationship should be.
•  Yes, we don’t want our youth breeding like rabbits, but that’s no excuse for creating fear… seeing what it’s done to our society as a whole. 
•  Men and women have been created into two separate beings… when we are really the same being divided into two beliefs.
• We often treat relationships like stock that’s lost money, holding onto them hoping one day they’ll improve in value.
• Our greatest weakness is our inability to see beyond ourselves. 
• The moral principals of our youth are based on a collection of ideas rather than our own natural progression through experience.
• Since sex is part of the adult world, it is something children will migrate toward in an effort to grow up… where it can become a goal instead of a natural progression.  
• If we judge ourselves, then we believe others will judge us to the same extreme, and we are judging ourselves when we fear judgment from others. 
• When we look at a person as an end to a means, be it sex, marriage, friendship, idolization, etc… we turn them into an object of expectation.
• To see the person in front of us we must let go of our beliefs that define them.  If we see with judgment, we will always see objects and idols. 
• They took the ultimate form of love and turned it into the ultimate form of sin. 
• The last thing we need is a bunch of confused people doing research on a bunch of confused people.
• Allow touch to arouse you instead of your mind.