Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 18

“Born Again” “Pseudo-Idealism”

Let’s first look at the limited situation in which there is some truth to Griffith’s concept of “born again" “pseudo-idealism”.

What he is saying is that we have a genetic orientation to selflessness, but our developing mind has to defy its oppression and seek self-understanding which leads to anger, egocentricity and alienation. But if we become too corrupted by these qualities we transcend them (except alienation since to transcend alienation is to become more alienated) and adopt some form of “good” behaviour and convince ourselves that we are now an uncorrupted individual.

We have to look at this in terms of armouring. Many people whose initial form of character armour involves trying to compensate for their compromised self-acceptance by “proving” themselves in an aggressive, materialistic or combative way will eventually find that they can’t maintain it in the face of idealistic criticism, both from others and from the conscience they learned in childhood. So they will either shift their “proving myself” strategy to one of demonstrating their worth with good deeds or verbal support for a good cause. This may be a very dramatic change in which the whole basis of someone’s life reverses, or it may be only a superficial coating which coexists with much of the same aggressive, materialistic or combative characteristics which were there before. To really be healed and returned to our capacity for unconditional love we would have to abandon the battle to prove ourselves altogether in favour of unconditional-self acceptance. This is what Jesus meant when he talked about the need to be “born again”, but this is not what is happening in the situations Griffith is referring to.

In Griffith’s view of the world pretty much all of us are a bottomless pit of rage and corruption and therefore any attempts we make to do something positive about the problems we see around us are just signs of how “false/dishonest/‘phoney’/‘fake’/deluded” we are. Now there is some truth that doing what we feel to be right sometimes involves transcending selfish impulses or feelings of anger for a while. This is after all what Griffith himself has to do when he transcends his angry feelings about our non-ideal behaviour and expresses sympathy for our position.

But since I see no reason to believe we have a genetic orientation to selflessness, I see no reason to believe we have 2 million years of accumulated rage to transcend. We do accumulate rage to the extent that we have to repress it within our character armour, but anyone who does not undermine their self-acceptance by exposing themselves to too much corrupting idealism and provides themselves with plenty of outlets for their frustration, will find they don’t have all that much to transcend. Certainly not as much as Griffith himself who has been both exposing himself to extreme levels of corrupting idealism but also avoiding many of the normal healthy outlets for the frustration that must engender.

The most dramatic evidence of projection in Griffith’s writings is his views on the “pseudo-idealistic” movements.

First of all it is important to consider what we mean by “idealism”. Griffith emphasises the ideal of “selflessness”, but an ideal is any human concept of perfection. For the Nazis racial purity was an ideal. The Nazis were extremely idealistic especially in their worshipping of the beautiful body. Machismo is an ideal - the ideal of the perfect patriarchal male. And the conflict between the left wing and the right wing is not one between idealism and the need for freedom from the oppression of idealism. It is a conflict between two kinds of idealism which can be equally oppressive - the communal ideals of the left and the individualistic ideals of the right.

To really understand the social phenomena Griffith identifies as “pseudo-idealism” we need to recognise that the opposite of idealism is pragmatism. Pragmatism is an approach which puts aside all idealistic expectations in favour of a “whatever works” attitude.

Within each of these social phenomena - religion, socialism, feminism, the New Age movement, environmentalism, etc. - there are differing degrees and varieties of idealism and dogmatism, often conflicting with each other, existing alongside pragmatic approaches.

That Griffith can look at this complex chaotic diversity and see in it simply a dogmatic insistence on ideal behaviour and oppression of expression of contrary feelings or ideas, shows how he is seeing himself reflected in the mirror of the world. He is the dogmatist. He is the one insisting on us deferring to his personal conception of ideal behaviour (now that he has provided a bullshit “defence” for our having departed from it in the first place). His is the boot that would crush the human face forever if we were, en masse, to adopt his “Transformed Lifeforce Way of Living” rather than liberating ourselves by learning to cultivate unconditional self-acceptance.

It is true that all of these social movements have been missing a key ingredient for their success, but that key ingredient is not Griffith’s extreme idealism and bullshit “defence”, it is the cultivation of unconditional self-acceptance so that we can melt away our particular armours and thus be reconciled with those against whom our particular armours dictated that we be in conflict.

Keeping in mind that Griffith’s “defence for humanity” is bullshit that allows him, in his mind, to justify expressing his extremely idealistic criticism or all aspects of human behaviour, doesn’t it sound like he is really talking about himself when he says : “And since the lie they were maintaining was so great, they had to work very hard at convincing both themselves and others of it, which meant they were typically a strident, extremely intolerant, belligerent even fanatical advocate of their position.” You never know, they might even be intolerant of women wearing tights!

Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering individual. Griffith is probably the most selfish person in the world. While there are problems and insufficiencies in the way in which we are trying to address social and environmental problems, Griffth has come to see all of this as despicable because we are addressing ourselves to the world as a whole and not to his personal psychotic problem, which he feels should come first. (Of course that is not how he sees it because he is trapped within that psychosis.) But once we see the way that he is projecting his own situation onto the world, we can see that he is like Oscar Wilde’s selfish giant, not wanting the children to play in his personal garden. Essentially he is saying : “You can’t come into Paradise unless you are selfless.” He wants it all for himself. And that is a sign of how much he must be suffering. No wonder he has been through ten years of chronic fatigue syndrome! By clinging onto the poison of idealism he must have turned himself from William Blake’s Albion Rose to Crouched in Fear. To really understand his world view you have to recognise that he thinks we are all even more fucked up than he is, whereas, in truth, than can be no more fucked up person on the face of the planet than him.

Griffith's second book illustrated with William Blake's paintings - Crouched in Fear and Albion Rose

Burning in Hell

Griffith says : “Moses himself described how ‘The Lord spoke to you [the Israelite nation] face to face out of the fire […fire is a metaphor for the searing truth of Integrative Meaning] on the mountain. [This was only possible because] At that time I stood between the Lord and you to declare to you the word of the Lord, because you were afraid of the fire.’”

And in Genesis 3:24 : “After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.”

Doesn’t this fit with my interpretation of Satan as being a personification of idealism? God (the personification of love and forgiveness) would not be represented by something which burns and destroys, like fire. The fires of Hell belong to the devil.

It would take someone fairly secure in self - fairly self-accepting - to confront the condemning ideals and thus be Satan’s mouthpiece as Moses was. But idealism is both the source of corruption and the flame in which we burn for the “sin” of having been corrupted by it. It is the ultimate negative feedback loop.

Jesus on the other hand was not a worshipper of the Devil like Moses. He was not an idealist. When the idealists tried to stone the woman caught in adultery, Jesus stopped them. He said, “Judge not that thou be no judged.” To judge others is to be an idealist - to hold them up to an ideal standard and find them wanting. Jesus message was a Godly one of love and forgiveness. Love is the opposite of idealism. It is all-accepting. It is the water that puts out Satan’s fire and rescues us from the Hell of idealistic condemnation. Unfortunately, after his death Jesus’ followers turned his healing philosophy into the largely Satanic church known as “Christianity”.

There is controversy now about the Bible’s attitude to homosexuality. Jesus said nothing about homosexuality positive or negative. Condemnation of homosexuality comes from the Satanic (i.e. idealistic) parts of the Bible - Leviticus and the letters of the Apostles. These parts of the Bible preach repression rather than love. Since God is love, those parts of the Bible are anti-God.

Abandoning the Battle to Find Understanding

Griffith says : “Yes, the born-again, pseudo idealistic strategy was both treacherous and extremely dishonest — traits that totally undermined humanity’s search for knowledge — because in campaigning against the battle to find knowledge you were leading humanity towards an extreme state of denial/alienation/separation from the truth/knowledge, when, in fact, humanity had to continue the battle to try to get closer to and ultimately reach the ultimate truth/knowledge/understanding of the human condition.”

Keeping in mind the principle of projection, we can see here that, on some deeper level, Griffith is aware that his theory is not the full truth needed to liberate him from his condition, but that, by dogmatically clinging to it anyway, and shutting down his search for a more accountable understanding, he is taking himself into an ever deeper state of alienation, both from truthfulness and from the world the rest of us inhabit.

Jesus

Griffith says : That Jesus “realise[d] that he had to create a religion around his soundness; he had to suggest to people that through supporting and living through his soundness they could be ‘resurrected[ed]’ ‘from death to life.’”

This is the lie created and  perpetuated by the so-called Christian church. Jesus did not want to create a religion. He wanted to liberate the world from the obscene lie that was religion, i.e. deference to idealism, i.e. deference to Satan. His God was not the Satanic “God” of the old testament. Idealism is hatred. The God he preached was love. But the idealists of his day crucified him. He didn’t love the “ideals”. He loved those whom the idealists oppressed and called “sinners”. “Sin” is just another word for “selfishness” and selfishness is just the self-directedness of the suffering individual. It was the condemnation of idealism which made us sinners. So he recognised that the way to help us was to show that God is love, which forgives all, and thus expose the religion of his day as nothing but Satanism. The Satanists couldn’t stand to have their hypocrisy exposed, so they killed Jesus and, eventually, began preaching a new brand of Satanism in his name.

Of course, Jesus words were passed down, so a few rare individuals, such as William Blake, were able to see his true meaning.

Mental Illness

Griffith talks about the increase in mental illnesses in the world, e.g. depression, ADHD, autism… These are a product of a shortage of love, love from parents and self-love, etc. Love is acceptance. What we need is the unconditional acceptance of others, such as our parents if we are children, and unconditional acceptance of ourselves. What has always undermined our capacity for this kind of love, however, has been the conditions imposed by the kind of idealism that Griffith is dishonestly promoting. While we can’t blame our situation entirely on him, he has, for over 25 years, been pumping out his toxic sludge, and now he is looking around and crying about the fact that children are increasingly suffering from a sickness that comes from exposure to just that sludge. Children are not getting the love they deserve from their parents because their parents are not unconditionally self-accepting. And why are they not unconditionally self-accepting? Because they are weighed down with all this guilt about not being perfect parents. Griffith, with his obscene lie that children are born expecting an ideal world and a mother who is as close to the Virgin Mary as possible, is robbing children of love.

On some level does Griffith resent the innocence of children? It is as if he worshipped “innocence”. But when we worship something we split ourselves in two. The conscious part of us clings to that which is worshipped, but to maintain this state we have to push all contrary feelings about what we worship into our subconscious. The subconscious then grows more and more resentful of that which is consciously worshipped. The Catholic Church worships innocence in the form of the “virgin” Mary and the infant Jesus. So is it any wonder that it has generated so much sexual abuse of children?

The Return of the Repressed

So much that Griffth sees as signs that we are headed toward “terminal alienation” are things I see as positives - tattoos, violent video games, pornography, etc.

We have been repressing so much within our armouring. All of these cultural phenomena are healthy ways of letting it out, of opening up to honest free expression. Sure they can have their negatives, like anything. But those who are most frightened by them are those who are most armoured/repressed. They don’t want to admit that they have even more sickness inside them than is on display in these forms of expression.

But what is buried beneath all of this sickness, the seed of which was sowed in us by idealism’s attack on love, is our capacity for unconditional self-acceptance, i.e. love of ourselves, and thus love for all others.

Theatrical improvisation teacher Keith Johnstone says : “Grotesque and frightening things are released as soon as people begin to work with spontaneity. Even if a class works on improvisation every day for only a week or so, then they start producing very ‘sick' scenes : they become cannibals pretending to eat each other, and so on. But when you give the student permission to explore this material he very soon uncovers layers of unsuspected gentleness and tenderness. It is no longer sexual feelings and violence that are deeply repressed in this culture now, whatever it may have been like in fin-de-siecle Vienna. We repress our benevolence and tenderness.”

I talk about this subject in more detail in my post Sucked Into Paradise.

It is the censorious spirit of the idealist which would ask us to be dishonest about expressing the non-ideal side of our nature and thus remain forever alienated from our capacity for love.

Read Part 19 (The Final Part)

Sucked into Paradise

Grotesque and frightening things are released as soon as people begin to work with spontaneity. Even if a class works on improvisation every day for only a week or so, then they start producing very ‘sick' scenes : they become cannibals pretending to eat each other, and so on. But when you give the student permission to explore this material he very soon uncovers layers of unsuspected gentleness and tenderness. It is no longer sexual feelings and violence that are deeply repressed in this culture now, whatever it may have been like in fin-de-siecle Vienna. We repress our benevolence and tenderness.

Johnstone, Keith. Impro, Improvisation and the Theatre (Eyre Methuen, 1981)

Why would surrendering to the free operation of the imagination lead us through “sick" or disturbing ideas to a rediscovery of our capacity for love?

There is within us a natural pull towards wholeness and healing. What impedes this tendency is fear. We began as unconditionally loving beings. This was a state of faith in love. But at some stage we lost our faith. We gave in to fear and a divide opened up between ourself and others and our own psyche became split. This was the infliction of our defining wound. This is sometimes referred to as The Fisher King Wound after one of the characters from Arthurian legend.

When I was a young child I had an irrational fear which was the cause of much amusement among my family. I was afraid that, if the bath plug was pulled out while I was in the bath, the force of the circling water might suck me down the plughole.

If we cling to dogmatic ways of thinking or in any other way resist the uncensored and unimpeded operation of our own imagination or that of others it is because we can sense that we are being sucked towards the black hole of our defining wound. We fear immolation.

And yet the improvisers in Johnstone's example found unexpected tenderness beyond the cannibalistic fantasies. What lies on the other side of the black hole is our original unconditionally loving self, our inner child.

Why might cannibalism be a key concept surrounding the defining wound? To understand this we have to imagine ourselves in the position of a child who is unconditionally loving and has not yet become wounded and thus selfish. Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the wounded. If we hit our thumb with a hammer, all we can think about is our sore thumb. And if we are wounded, much of our attention will be focused on our wounded self. But how does this look to the unselfish child. The world of adults, as we come to know it more intimately as we get older, must seem to us like a world of cannibals, in which the selfishness of each individual eats away at the life and needs of the others. The free operation of the imagination leads us back through the acknowledgement that we are spiritual cannibals to the point before we acquired the wound which made us such. The door to Paradise looks like the door to Hell, that is why we have been so reluctant to go there. But Johnstone shows how easy it is to negotiate this trip back down the black hole as long as we are in an environment in which we feel safe.

In Homer's Odyssey there is a very famous passage in which the sailors have to steer a course through a narrow body of water which lies between two terrible dangers – the Scylla and the Charybdis. The Scylla is a monster with four eyes and six long necks with frightful heads each equipped with three rows of sharp teeth. Charybdis was once the beautiful daughter of Poseidon and Gaia, but she has become a monster – a giant bladder with a huge mouth which swallows huge quantities of water three times a day and then belches them out again. Later Charybdis came to be viewed simply as as a whirlpool.

This myth is a very succinct description of how we live our lives, caught between fear of the black hole or Charybdis within and the battle against external threats (the Scylla). Often the two threats mirror each other. The need to deny some aspect of ourselves, the acknowledgement of which might lead us down the black hole, can drive us to obsessively fight against the expression of that very quality in others. An example might be a very conservative individual who is obsessed with the defence of freedom by military means but who also is in favour of censorship. Unable to acknowledge to ourselves that we fear the freedom which might lead us down the black hole, we project our internal struggle onto those who express opposition to freedoms we do believe in and fight against them. Our fear of the Charybdis drives us onto the fangs of the Scylla. And yet the way to end the injustices of the world is to lead the way down that black hole and show that it leads not to Hell but to Paradise.

This is not just a personal phenomena. Culturally we are in the midst of an improvisation similar to that described by Johnstone. Censorship of artistic expression was one form of cultural armouring we used to keep ourselves from being sucked down that black hole. Fifty years after the banning of Lady Chatterley's Lover was overturned in Great Britain and the United States, 50 Shades of Grey has taken the world by storm. And in the cinema we have moved from a time when all films in countries like the United States, Great Britain and Australia had to meet a restrictive code in which the length of a kiss had to not exceed a certain length to a time in which films depicting extended scenes of graphic torture and dismemberment are considered acceptable entertainment at the local multiplex. Allow artistic freedom and at least some of the expressions will tend to circle down to the most primal of material, that which leads through the black hole to Paradise. And what are the obsessions of our time? Flesh-eathing zombies. Vampires. Incest. Acknowledgement that our wound turns us into a living dead creature which sucks the life out of others. Zombies and vampires don't begin as zombies and vampires. They have to be bitten by someone who has already turned. They have to receive their wound. And, as Freud pointed out, the unavoidable rejection of our initial incestuous desires is one of the most common forms of psychic wound. Hence, in the world of erotica, pseudo-incest, and in some cases genuine incest, are all the rage. Allow freedom and we go back to our origins.

Fear is an important factor in how we view this collective improvisation. There are some who become very fearful and view it all as some dark Satanic conspiracy. Such individuals may claim that the Illuminati have conspired to create popular television characters who are homosexuals to brainwash us into accepting homosexuality, etc. It is easy enough to understand how a frightened individual can fall into this manner of thinking, because an improvisation is much like a conspiracy, but it is an unconscious one. It is an expression of what Carl Jung called “the collective unconscious" – a kind of group mind which exists beneath the level of consciousness, joining us all together. In an improvisation this group mind manifests itself externally. Feel a part of it and it seems magical, but feel isolated and frightened and it is the very stuff of paranoia.

It is important to remember that Johnstone's students didn't actually become cannibals and eat each other. They acted out scenes in which they were cannibals pretending to eat each other. Some are afraid that if we allow depictions of depravity and sadism in our books and movies then we are encouraging people to become depraved and sadistic. But going down the black hole requires only that we remove the impasse in our thinking and feeling which originates in fear of re-experiencing our defining wound. Our culture is a place to collectively renegotiate this passage and realising that we have nothing to fear will make this easier.

I know a good deal about this process because I've experienced what is now called bipolar disorder. It used to be described as manic depression. Bipolar disorder, in its more extreme manifestations, is a tendency to be repeatedly sucked down the black hole of one's defining wound and then spat out again. And, as with most forms of psychological disorder, fear is the key problem. In the manic phase one touches Heaven, one reunites with the inner child and the inhibitions of adult neurosis are abandoned. But there are two problems. One is that losing one's inhibitions and behaving like a child leads to trouble. Just because the neurotic adult state may be unhealthy in a way we may identify with cannibalistic zombies, doesn't mean that a grown man running around naked in a hospital emergency room were people have serious problems that need attending to is not just as, if not more, of an unhealthy manifestation within the social system. The other problem is fear. The descent into the child state is generally precipitated by a serious crisis – often some kind of double bind situation in which we are damned if we do something and equally damned if we do not (see Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972). What we are looking for is reassurance. Simply being dumped back into our childlike state does not provide that reassurance. It happens too quickly. And we have to remember that when we were a child we were particularly prone to fears. We might feel the need to check under our bed for monsters. And because the process of being sucked down the black hole is one of cycling through opposites – yin, yang, yin, yang, yin, yang – a prediction of that which is desired is likely to quickly be followed by a prediction of that which is to be feared. A classic example from my own major episode was when I was in the emergency room. I thought a bunch of sexy female nurses were going to drag me off into some shower room for an orgy. But that was immediately followed by a sense of terror that, when they were finished having sex with me, they would eat me alive, beginning by biting my fingers off one by one.

Gregory Bateson

So highs can be scary and the disruption they cause to our lives can be extreme. For this reason there is a tendency to pull back from them to an extremely repressed state – that of depression. At some stage though, for our own healing, we have to return to the creative maelstrom of mania. What I've come to realise over time is that the key to managing this process is to replace fear with understanding and acceptance of the process. There are four things which can lead to problems for a person in a manic state – fear, reckless behaviour, taking thoughts too literally and talking too freely. Fear drives the excitement level and makes it hard to get enough sleep or to restrain one's reckless behaviour. The thoughts of the manic state are prophetic, but not to be taken literally. They have to be interpreted. The thought that we should be naked should not be seen as a rationale for shedding our clothes in public but rather as an inducement to shed our neurotic armouring. And it is not necessary to talk about our experiences if we think that those around us will interpret what we say as a reason to impose unwanted psychiatric care upon us.

I once read about a man who believed himself to have a fish in his jaw. (The case was reported in New Society.) This fish moved around, and caused him a lot of discomfort. When he tried to tell people about the fish, they thought him ‘crazy', which led to violent arguments. After he'd been hospitalised several times – with no effect on the fish – it was suggested that perhaps he shouldn't tell anyone. After all it was the quarrels that were getting him put away, rather than the delusion. Once he'd agreed to keep his problem secret, he was able to lead a normal life. His sanity is like our sanity. We may not have a fish in our jaw, but we all have its equivalent.

Johnstone, Keith. Impro, Improvisation and the Theatre (Eyre Methuen, 1981)

By understanding the process of going back to that childlike state, I now find that I don't suffer from depression any more and that I go to that state more often and find it a less volatile place to be. The process of improvisation is the best way to understand that place – one of openness in which we see that those who are closed off are closed off because they are fearful and long only for us to give them permission to be free. What keeps us from Paradise is the feeling that we don't really deserve to go there, and there is no more powerful way to have this false belief challenged than to have the door opened for us by someone who is already on the inside.

Fantasies and Sexual Healing

Our erotic desires are a pull towards healing. While bodily pleasures are appealing in their own right, our specific emotional needs determine the focus of our sexuality. Intercourse with the opposite sex may be the most natural way to procreate, but most of our sexual behaviour is not about breeding. A desire for a healing of the psychological tear between the masculine and the feminine underlies heterosexual behaviour. Exclusively homosexual behaviour in males might be driven by a desire for a healing between the individual and the patriarchal society. Lesbians seek healing away from the more troubled masculine psyche and in bisexuality we may see a less neurotic, less fixated, form of sexuality in which the sharing of sexual pleasure is not restricted by the gender of the participants.

Often we also have sexual fixations around particular situations or kinds of activity. The erotic is like an ambulance crew which goes straight to the spot where we are most wounded.

I'll first use myself as an example. During my early adolescence I developed a strong sense of shame about masturbating. This can't be attributed to any messages I picked up from my parents, but may have been a response to the way that other boys joked about the act as if anyone who did it was pathetic. The point is that I went for about six months without masturbating and felt that a black cloud of shame was hanging over my head. Eventually I talked about this with my parents and they reassured me that masturbation was perfectly natural and that I had done it when I was a baby. So I went back to masturbating, but in later years I still felt uncomfortable about how women would view me if they knew how much I did it.

Later, as I began to explore my sexual fantasies and eventually began to write erotica, I found that one of the things which gave me intense pleasure was the idea of a woman watching me masturbate. Here we have an example of the erotic as a process of healing. What was most erotic was a sexual transaction which reassured my deep-seated fear of rejection.

I recently read an account by a woman, who had been raped and who writes erotica, of how writing a rape-based story helped her to take back ownership of her own sexuality. And another woman who suffered a similar trauma has told me of how rape-play with a sexual partner is extremely erotic for her as long as she feels safe.

This fits with the idea that erotic desires and erotic fantasy represent a process of healing of our deepest wounds.

But does our society facilitate or hinder such healing?

Trauma lies not so much in the things which happen to us as in the way we think about those things. Many individuals go through very scary or painful experiences and then more or less forget about them as soon as they are over. Giving birth tends to be very painful and I'm sure it can be a frightening experience when it occurs, but once the mother has a healthy baby in her arms it seems to be quickly forgotten. What makes for trauma is on-going questions like : “Was it my fault?", “What will people think?", etc.

What is needed to heal trauma is self-acceptance – the realisation that what happened can't be changed, that whatever one feels is always all right and a trust that the mind knows the way towards healing. Erotic fantasy need not be a part of that, but for some of us it is, and this needs acceptance.

Prevalent social beliefs can work against this process. In the case of rape or child molestation an emphasis on the need to condemn the act and the perpetrator can lead to a feeling that the survivor of the abuse should remain in the role of victim. The act of finding healing and renewed confidence through fantasies which eroticise the experience may be viewed as a retroactive condoning of it. But really this has nothing to do with the fact that the abuse was wrong and can be criminally prosecuted.

When it comes to trauma resulting from sexual abuse part of the suffering is bound to come from the sense of shame which accrues even to the victim in a society which still carries a deep-seated fear of sexuality. We often think differently about someone who has been raped than we do someone who has been stabbed, and yet both are violent acts in which the body is invaded.

It might seem strange to say that our society has a deep-seated fear of sexuality when we look at what shows on television and the easy access to porn on the internet. But sex is not treated simply as the pleasurable physical act which it is. In polite society you can say you just drank a really nice cup of tea, but try saying you had a very satisfying masturbation session last night. Why should the two be any different? Only because we live in a society founded on the repression of sexuality and which, thus, rightly fears the power of sexuality to disrupt it. In and of itself an act of sexual intercourse is like dancing, a pleasurable physical activity involving intimacy between two or more individuals. But you can dance in public and you can't have sex in public. And in the media, nudity and even loving sexual behaviour are treated as if they were more offensive to our deeper selves than violence is. They aren't. Loving sexual interactions, heterosexual or homosexual, are perfectly in harmony with our deepest nature which is to be unconditionally loving. Violence runs against that nature, but its depiction in the media plays an important cathartic role in our neurotic society. The reason why nudity and sex, when not aggressive or abusive, are treated as something dangerous is because these things are dangerous to our neurotic selves. They are not dangerous to non-neurotic adults or to children who have not yet become neurotic. But it is those who are particularly neurotic who impose the fear-driven rules of society.

It is important to be understanding about this fear of sex. Someone who is homophobic has no more choice about the fact than a arachnophobe has about being scared of spiders. In both cases they can learn to be free of fear, but it requires sensitivity on the part of those who are trying to help them.

And, of course, sex can have a dark face when combined with neurotic armouring. There is nothing wrong with enjoying fantasies about raping people, but to do the thing itself is evil. And some adults use their position of authority over children to satisfy themselves sexually. This is only the most socially-unacceptable form of abuse of adult authority over children. Being indoctrinated into a religion, being forced to perform in child beauty pageants, being told they are expected to go into the family business - any of these things, and many more, can have as big a detrimental effect on a child's life as an adult as sexual abuse. In general, to teach a child to obey authority because it is authority (“You'll do it because I say so.") is to lay down the conditioning which can make the child a future victim of other authority figures, be they dictatorial politicians or sexual predators. Once again, it is our society's fear of sex which leads us to concentrate our outrage on the sexual abuse of children and ignore or even condone other forms of abuse.

If our sexual fantasies are leading us toward healing, then what is the meaning of the current popularity of fantasies revolving around bondage, discipline and sado-masochism? These fetishes are nothing new, but the bestselling novel Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James (which I haven't read) is taking the world by storm, indicating that these kinds of fantasies are now a part of the mainstream.

One way of looking at the erotic appeal of bondage and discipline is that, if someone is fearful of their own erotic desires, the sense of safety that comes with being in bondage or submitting to another's discipline, allows them to explore those desires without danger of a scary loss of control.

But maybe there is another interpretation which can be put on this kind of fantasy. If the erotic offers a path out of shame or trauma, through returning to the source of shame or trauma and eroticising it, then perhaps we eroticise bondage and slavery as a path to freedom from the bondage and slavery of our neurosis.

You can also find this post on the How to Be Free forum here. You may find further discussion of it there.