“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(1), 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(2),
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”(3). 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(4) 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(5), 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”(6) … 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(7).
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(8). 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(9). 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(10). 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(11). 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(12). 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(13). 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”(14), 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”(15).
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(16).
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
Thank
you to all those who’s writings helped me though this… I did my best to endnote
those who contributed to this look inside my mind.
Sources:
[1] Fisher, H. (1992) Anatomy of Love: The Mysteries of
Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992.
2 Freeman, Charles (2004) The Closing of the Western
Mind: The rise of faith and the fall of reason. Knopf, New York, 2004.
3 Ibid…
4 “The Traditional Concept of HELL ...is a Myth”, Congregation
of Yahweh, article Compiled by Anthony V. Gaudiano (2001) http://www.congregationyhwhpc.com/articles/Hell-1/index.html
5 Freeman, Charles (2004) The Closing of the Western
Mind: The rise of faith and the fall of reason. Knopf, New York, 2004.
6 “Sex and Morality, Victorian Style”, Love
Ministries Inc., Site created and designed by Love Ministries, Inc.
(2005) http://www.loveministries.org/Articles/SEX%20VICTORIAN.htm
7 Haroian, Loretta Ph.D. (2000) Child Sexual
Development. Published in the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, Volume 3,
February 1, 2000.
8 “Wisdom of the Mountains”, Seminar on Tibetan
Buddhism, by Alan Watts
9 “Sex and
Religion”, Lecture by Alan Watts
10 Miller, Geoffrey F. (2000) The Mating Mind: How
sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature. Doubleday, US, 2000
11 Fisher,
H. (1992) Anatomy of Love: The Mysteries of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray.
Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992.
12 Miller, Geoffrey F. (2000) The Mating Mind: How sexual
choice shaped the evolution of human nature. Doubleday, US, 2000
13 This was an example I found on the internet while
searching for odd sex laws… not sure exactly where it came from.
14 Haroian, Loretta Ph.D. (2000) Child Sexual
Development. Published in the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, Volume 3,
February 1, 2000.
15 This was an example I found on
the internet while searching for the orign of the teenager, though I am not
sure of the exact website… there is a book that looks at this subject more
closely called “The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager” by Thomas
Hine.
16 Miller, Geoffrey F. (2000) The Mating Mind: How
sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature. Doubleday, US, 2000