It is strange to think that all the skyscrapers in our largest cities were in no small measure created in response to the sexual instinct. Everything you see in front of you–the roads, homes, stores, telephone lines, your computer, the Internet–were created in some measure as a result of the sexual instinct.
For his part, Freud wanted to see us as swimming in an endless ocean of emotional energy ultimately deriving from the reproductive urge, which is to say our sexuality. The only events that matter in this lifelong swim are birth, reproduction, and death. Everything else is meaningless detail. Dawkins “love” of science is a sublimation of the instinct to put his penis in every hole which opens up to him, and plant his seed there. It “means” nothing. Meaning, itself, is an artifact of this process. It conduces to reproduction.
For my own part, as I have often said, I feel (and for which I can offer empirical evidence) that we are composed of both our instincts, and something higher, which I tend to term the capacity for non-statistical coherence, which is to say the ability of consciousness to affect what we term matter, which would include our brains, and behavior.
Yet, here we are.
Once, I dreamed of a beautiful purple crystal created by the Swiss over a long period of time, a structure that created itself, but with loving care by craftsmen, who directed it much like a bonsai tree, who created tendencies, but not precise outcomes.
Perhaps we are like children on an endless river, forced to choose left or right, and given a tendency, but who with work can make a different choice, and at some point sever the alternative, travelling a unique canyon.
I watch my own sexuality, and it has often seemed a curse. Do men not often look at women as sexual objects, without meaning to? Do we not catch ourselves sneaking peaks of breasts, even of women we consider friends? Is there not this endless need, at least for the sexually healthy, to inseminate the world? There it is: driving, driving, driving.
So much misery comes from this, especially in our modern world. Historical cultures faced the same evolutionary biology we do. They solved the problem, in many cases, of sex by creating very strong, and very strongly enforced, social taboos, making the miseries of jealousy and resentment logistically difficult, since failure was so violently punished. Not in all cases: many American Indians shared their wives with early explorers, getting syphillis and gonorhea for their trouble.
You can’t have sex with everyone all the time: this creates, at least in this stage of our evolution, a lot of trouble.
And to the point, it is not sex we want: we want connection. If I have any readers, they may roll their eyes, but I was reading an interview with someone who had had many Out of Body Experiences (which, by the way, is a scientifically replicable procedure for most people, as far as I can tell), who was commenting that “sex” in other worlds is in effect a meeting of souls, in which you share who you ARE, in the most intimate sense, and so does someone else. This makes for the most perfect connection possible. It has nothing to do with the “exchange of body fluids”. That exchange is merely an inferior symbol for what is possible. In our own world, this exchange can be that of life itself, but the life of another. In other worlds, I believe, that exchange can be of OUR lives.
Consider this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHpJotjP2kM
Here are a few lyrics:
You left me here
Alone in my own world
From pain
A new light is born
Your perfect world’s
Evading
Sedating
Your perfect world’s
Evading
Sedating
I hate your face
Reminding
Despiting
I hate your life
You cast me down
You look at me with one glance
And turn your face
To watch you burn
You bury me alive
In your perfect world
I’d rather make peace with 3 rounds
Now, I was looking for a different song I just heard on the radio, with roughly the same theme, but this will do. I don’t expect most people will get far in that song.
Sex and love are connected with trust. To the extent we value sex, we value multiple partners, since reproductively all fertile men and all fertile women are roughly equal. If life is just about sensations, then why not have as many as possible?
Yet, this mindset leads necessarily to betrayals of intimacy, of love. I don’t think it is precisely accurate to say that the more sex, the less love, but it is close. I heard the Summer of Love summarized once by someone who was there as: “a lot of sex, but very little love”. Summer of betrayals may be perhaps more accurate, where jealousies were masked but not eliminated by drugs and alcohol, and a culture which demanded that anything go. In all such cultures, there will be winners and losers.
When I listen to this music, I can’t help but seeing it as the inverse of the Summer of Love. It is the ugly reality, stripped of its veneer of superficial joviality. It is the insanity of never being able to deeply trust anyone, since everyone is always looking for something, and someone, better.
These are a few thoughts. I think by thinking, and as I have said chose some time ago to think publicly, in the hope my musings may benefit someone.
I have come to the conclusion that the only way to counter the effects of the sea is to grow legs long enough to reach the bottom. We must become giants, and that cannot be done through reason and emotions alone.
The truth of that statement is in the spaces here. You will note that the possibility of the words emerges from that space. Nothing otherwise would have form, and no communication would be possible.
Happy Moonday!!! May your lunacy be less today, and your sanity more.