Can We Find Anything Useful in Christianity?

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There are many who criticise the supernatural beliefs of the religious. I prefer to take a different approach. What useful and valid ideas are there in a religion which don’t depend on such supernatural beliefs? If we don’t believe in the supernatural, we may be tempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater, denying ourselves something profoundly useful because it is presented in a framework which also includes supernatural beliefs. And to take what is not supernatural out and test its effectiveness to bring benefit undercuts the argument that any benefit the religion may confer is evidence for the reality of the supernatural agency or agencies which are believed to lie behind it.

If we look at the philosophy expressed by Jesus in the gospels in isolation from any supernatural belief and outside the context of any particular form of Christian dogma, it centres around the concept of sin as humanity’s central problem and love as its solution.

What is meant by “sin”? This is another word for selfishness. Take the example of gluttony. To enjoy eating is natural and healthy, but if we take more than our share and/or more than is health for us, then selfishness is taking precedence over the interests of others and over our own larger self-interest. Selfishness is not simply self-interest. We are all motivated by self-interest. Our behaviour is driven by our perception of what will maximise our pleasure or minimise our suffering. Selfishness is when our present needs are so powerful that they override our wider self-interest.

What causes selfishness? Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering or threatened individual. If you hit your thumb with a hammer you will have trouble thinking about anything other than your thumb.

While physical suffering can certainly make us self-directed for the period that it continues, it is not the central source of selfishness. The central generator of human selfishness (i.e. “sin”) is guilt. This is because guilt has the ability to form a negative feedback loop. If we feel guilty about our selfish behaviour then the guilt increases our suffering and thus our selfishness.

It was from this dilemma that Jesus wanted to deliver us. This selfishness generating sense of guilt is what alienates us from our basic loving nature.

What is love? Love is something which allows individuals to communicate and cooperate in a way which brings into existence a larger whole. It is that which allows a group of individuals to operate as a family or, on a larger scale, a community. Loving communication is characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. So clearly selfishness is a barrier to love.

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Jesus gave a name to the ultimate possible form of loving community - “the Kingdom of Heaven”. He saw this as something which exists both within and without the individual. It exists within us as our capacity to feel love and around us in the ways in which love is expressed and the potential that exists for it to be expressed further. The terms “Heaven” and “Hell” do not require a belief in the supernatural to be meaningful. It is illuminating to read each as referring to an imagined potential. Heaven is how the world could be if our natural capacity for love is set free and Hell is a vision of the world of suffering which the guilt-driven double bind inflicts upon us. If we look around at the suffering in the world from war, poverty, preventable disease, mental illness, etc., then we can see that Hell is already with us and that there is the potential for it to get far worse.

Love is driven by pleasure. The pleasure-giving chemical Oxytocin is released into our blood-stream when we engage in loving behaviour, thus rewarding and reinforcing it. Negative emotions such as fear or guilt block this from happening. If we view “God” as a personification of love (amongst other things) then the concept that “God forgives our sins” is a way of acknowledging that what is needed to move away from destructive forms of behaviour is to let go of guilt and fear and reconnect with our love of ourselves and, from that basis, our love of others.

While selfishness is the state in which we thinking mainly of ourselves, bliss is the state in which we forget ourselves. We can see this by thinking about the experience of orgasm. The French refer to it as “le petit mort”  or “the little death” because, in the moment of ecstasy, the ego (the conscious thinking self) is temporarily lost or forgotten. This is a good example because it challenges the puritanical stream of Christianity which saw suffering as being good for the soul and pleasure being harmful. Such a philosophy will tend to make the individual more dependent on belief in a supernatural afterlife by encouraging them to make their current life wretched, but it is unlikely to make them any less self-obsessed, and thus any more loving. Sexual lust is viewed as a sin for the same reason that gluttony is. If someone’s appetite for something is so great that it overrides their concern for the interests of others then it is a form of selfishness which stands as a barrier to love. But healthy erotic desires only turn into lust when we repress them for some reason, often because we have been encouraged to feel guilty about them. Sexual intercourse which consists of the affectionate sharing of pleasurable feelings is rightly described as “making love” (it is accompanied by the release of Oxytocin into the bloodstream). Even where sexual activity may take less healthy forms, repression is generally not the solution. Remove feelings of guilt and behaviour naturally moves in a healthier direction without the need for self-denial.

Creative activity is another example of love at work. While we are caught up in a problem solving exercise or in the creation of a work of art, our attention may be directed towards something outside ourselves to the extent that we forget about ourselves entirely. Only when we are finished do we realise that we are hungry or cold or tired.

The irony is that many turn away from Christianity because all the talk of sin makes them feel more guilty. It seems as if Jesus’ attempt to free us from Hell and admit us to Heaven has largely backfired. But this set of powerful symbols and stories, which has entered so deeply into the collective consciousness of our culture, still holds the potential to guide our transformation if we find the key to unlock it’s potential to do so.

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Selfishness is Self-Denial

The key problem in human societies has always been selfishness. It puts us in the position of competing with each other when cooperation is the way to maximise our creativity and make sure that the needs of all are provided for.

But how well do we actually understand selfishness?

Selfishness is the natural self-directedness of the suffering or insecure individual. If you hit your thumb with a hammer you find it hard to think of anything else. It is a natural process that our attention focuses where there is a need or a threat.

Sometimes we are encouraged to feel guilty about being selfish. This doesn’t help. Guilt is a source of pain and pain makes us more selfish. It’s a negative feedback loop.

We may think that we have to chose between selfishness or self-denial. This is a false dichotomy. Selfishness is self-denial.

The fact that we want pleasure for ourselves is not a problem. It may very well be the solution. Selfishness consists less in the seeking of personal pleasure than it does in lacking the courage to truly maximise that pleasure.

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Think of the society within which we live as a garden. Each of us lives in a hut within that garden. The garden has run to seed. It is a tangle of weeds.

We can hide away in our huts most of the time. We can spend our time and resources putting up new wall-paper, shag-pile carpet, decorating with fancy adornments, buying a new 4K television… Our hut provides us with a place to hide from other people and from looking at the weeds. Sure we have our pleasures, but they are meagre.

With more courage we could learn to spend more time outside of our hut. Instead of decorating it we could be pulling weeds and planting flowers and fruit trees. Instead of being alone we could be doing this with others - talking and joking.

The more we transform the garden and the closer bonds we form with our fellow garden-dwellers, the longer we will want to spend outside.

Eventually we won’t want to return to our huts unless it is cold or rainy. We will wander around tending to the plants, eating the fruit, smelling the flowers, singing and dancing and making love with our neighbours.

And finally we realise that our selfishness was really a perverse form of asceticism. All we were doing was shutting ourselves out from paradise.

What Might Happen If We Weren't So Scared of Sex?

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What is sex when we strip away the sometimes confusing beliefs and emotions which surround it? It can be a reproductive activity, but that is only in the minority of instances. If we only had sex to produce offspring it would be something which occurred no more than a handful of times for most of us and never for others. But sex is also a form of pleasure usually generated by the rubbing of one or more erogenous zones. More often than not the source of pleasure is the genitals. Sometimes this involves the penetration of an orifice by a part of the body, sometimes, but not always, the male genitals. If we leave aside the pleasure which may be experienced, this is no different from picking our nose or receiving a rectal exam from a doctor. There isn't anything inherently serious on a physical level about any of this, unless it results in pregnancy or disease. Of course it is possible to do damage through sexual activity by trying to put something too big into an orifice which isn't big enough to accommodate it. But the physical element of sex, in and of itself, is not serious in the way that violence is serious. Stroke someone's genitals and it is unlikely to do much long-standing physical damage.

So if sex has a special mystique for us, it is not an obvious part of the physical act itself. Which leads to the question – Why do we treat genital pleasure differently from oral pleasure? We get oral pleasure from eating chocolates. Why is it socially acceptable to talk about enjoying a delicious chocolate, but not about enjoying an orgasm? If one of our friends gave another a box of chocolates for his birthday we would think it appropriate. If they gave him a hand job we might not. Sex can carry the risk of spreading disease, but so can eating contaminated food. And sex can lead to an unwanted pregnancy. But there are forms of erotic activity, such as mutual masturbation, which are completely safe, and yet we still act as if there is something about these activities which makes them essentially more serious than a hug or a kiss on the cheek.

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One difference is that sex is not always equal and consensual. Coercion or force can be involved. But coercion and force are themselves a problem. If someone were running around grabbing people and ramming their mouths full of chocolate we wouldn't view the chocolate as the problem.

Sexual behaviour and sexual desire can also be a currency for the ego. Some think in terms of “sexual conquests" or “knots on the belt" rather than loving encounters with other equal and complete human beings. And some use their ability to attract the sexual interest of others as a power trip.

What are the consequences of viewing sex as something more than a physically trivial way of giving ourselves or others pleasure?

We live in a society where a man who makes children laugh by exposing his genitals to them may be viewed as a monster but we have no legal way to protect a child from the lifelong trauma which can result from being told by a parent that he might burn in hell for eternity if he masturbates or if he grows up to be a homosexual.

I recently discovered that a friend of mine has lived with crippling shame and fear of the judgement of others for about 25 years as a result of the response of his psychiatrist to a confession that he had engaged in acts of mutual masturbation with a male work colleague and had experimented by hiring a couple of adult male prostitutes. The psychiatrist told him he had done something very very bad. He said that, if his work colleagues knew that he had seen male prostitutes they would ostracise him. And he said, apparently out of the blue, that if my friend had sex with a fifteen-year-old boy he would be put in jail for life and that the other inmates might force him to eat his own faeces. As a result of this event twenty-five years ago, my friend was afraid to tell me about the incident lest I responded angrily like his psychiatrist.

Perhaps the area where our irrational attitude to sex does the most damage is in the area of rape and child sexual abuse. Unpleasant experiences which end when they end in a physical sense are usually not hard to recover from as long as we don't suffer permanent physical damage. Traumatic events are traumatic because, in some way, they put a rent in our relationship with our self or between ourselves and others.

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Non-judgemental communication is love, and love heals. This idea is at the heart of the psychotherapeutic relationship and also the institution of the confessional in the Catholic Church. If something happens to us which causes us emotional suffering or leaves us with desperately confused feelings, it is talking about it honestly and openly with sympathetic people which allows us to recover. But because we treat sex, whether pleasurable or abusive, as something embarrassing if not shameful, and because the consequences of talking about sexual offences can lead to traumatic trials for survivors and a harsher punishment than they may want for perpetrators, especially if the perpetrator is a family member, there is a tendency for them to lie or remain silent about what happened. I think it is the lies and the silence and inability to receive the loving comfort that would come from openness, which is the major factor in the trauma. Without this element, the effects of the event would probably disappear fairly quickly. And this must be particularly true where an individual has mixed feelings about the event, such as the case of an adolescent who may have taken sexual pleasure and emotional comfort from an inappropriate relationship with an adult. If other adults try to deny such an adolescent's experience and insisted that they view the incident exclusively as an act of abuse, then they may be doing more harm than good. Healing requires that our experience by listened to without demands.

Sexual self-control and sexual repression are not the same thing. Sexual repression does not require that we act on our sexual desires, only that we accept them and enjoy them. We might not actually have sex with anyone other than a chosen partner, but, if we are emotionally healthy, we will feel sexual feelings for many other people. To be unrepressed is to allow ourselves to feel such exciting feelings fully. And if we are masturbating we can feel free to fantasise about any kind of act with any individual. There are no consequences in the imagination. If we feel sexual feelings which it would be problematic to act on then we can have a really good time by getting off to fantasies about them in our imagination. There can be a tendency, because of our cultural fear of sex, to think that indulging in taboo fantasies during masturbation will lead to us losing our ability to behave appropriately in real life. The opposite is true. If a man has truly depraved desires, such as having sex with his mother-in-law, he will find that, if he indulges these fantasies during masturbation, his relationship with his mother-in-law will improve because he will not be weighed down by the anxiety generated by trying to hold such desires in when in her presence.

Fear of the erotic can undermine our ability to enjoy non-sexual pleasures as well. Anyone who has ever gone for a walk on the beach or eaten a delicious meal after having an orgasm knows that sexual release opens up the full treasure chest of pleasures in the world around us.

When we think of the bonobos, those most sexually uninhibited of primates, and their happy, healthy and peaceful existence, one wonders if the root of our aggression, our mental illness and vulnerability to physical illness does not come down to pleasure deprivation. If our lives were more filled with pleasure would we build up the level of frustration which overflows into violence. One of the defining features of mental illness is living more in our head than in our body. And it stands to reason that a body which feels good will work more efficiently to heal.

Now I'm not suggesting that we need to participate in orgies. Only that we take a more common-sense, practical approach to sex, that we be less afraid and more tolerant, and that we create an environment in which sexual experiences, loving or abusive, can be more easily talked about rather than becoming a potential source of life-long trauma.

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Taboos and Fixations

We are sensual beings capable of many forms of bodily pleasure. The giving and receiving of such pleasure is one of the ways in which we can express love. There is no need for our desire or capacity for giving and receiving of such pleasure and affection to be specifically limited to interactions with the opposite sex. If our earliest proto-human ancestors lived in a similar way to our closest living relatives, the bonobos, which seems fairly likely, then their erotic exchanges were not limited according to gender, age or, in most cases, kinship. These erotic exchanges, or genital-genital rubbings, amongst bonobos are not related to mating. Similarly in our own individual history, we began life, according to Freud, with an unbounded capacity for sensual enjoyment in all parts of our body and a tendency to desire sensual contact with others regardless of gender. He referred to this as polymorphous perversity. This is actually not a very good term, as perversity is defined as a deliberate deviation from that which is good. It was actually from this state that we deviated, but Freud began with adult behaviour which was viewed as deviant and tried to explain it as a regression to one aspect of our original state. When we reach puberty we develop a bias towards the genitals in our search for pleasure. Before this happens we are liable to also start developing a bias towards sensual, and later sexual, contact with one gender or the other.

Since erotic contact is an expression of love we come to principally seek it from those with whom we feel the greatest need to bond. Since our historic neurosis has left us with a split psyche in which one part of our nature is lived out and the other repressed, we are most likely to feel an erotic attraction to members of the opposite sex, since it is usually, but not always, the masculine which is repressed in the female and the feminine which is repressed in the male. Judging by the behaviour of the bonobos, this was not the case prior to our neurosis. At that point we were most likely unrestrainedly bisexual. It should also be explained that, in the neurotic state, the sexual behaviour of males can tend to become an expression of aggressive feelings toward the feminine. Sex between men and women is not always a case of affectionately sharing a capacity for bodily pleasure. A desire for conquest or domination can also sometimes be expressed in the sexual behaviour of men or women, but as long as this is consensual it can be part of the therapeutic nature of the erotic. It can be viewed as a cathartic form of psychodrama.

This explains why most of us have a principally heterosexual orientation and it explains why bisexual behaviour would be reasonably common, especially among those who are least repressed. But what of exclusive homosexuality? Here we don't have a case of opposites attracting in the hopes of forming a whole.

This is where it is important to examine the nature of taboos. A neurotic society brings with it the establishment of taboos, some for practical reasons and some having their basis in neurotic insecurity. An incest taboo serves the useful function of impeding inbreeding. But many sexual taboos originate in the neurotic's fear of the anarchic potential of unchannelled erotic desires. Such is the case with the taboos which grew up around same-sex erotic exchanges. These most likely began when the neurosis of males reached such a level that we were compelled to institute the oppression of women and the establishment of a patriarchal society. There have been some patriarchal societies, such as ancient Greece, where there was no taboo against homosexuality, but in many it has been particularly strong. Since our basic nature is to be bisexual, the neurotic heterosexual adult male is prone to fear of his repressed homosexual side and to feeling hostility towards those who express this potential. This can also be the case for the neurotic female, though the problem is generally less severe. Men are less likely to be troubled by homosexual behaviour amongst women, but may feel that it is a threat to their control over them. Women whose neurosis has led them to look to patriarchal males for a sense of security may feel the urge to mock homosexual men.

Taboos tend to contribute to the formation of fixations. A fixation is a response to an inability to accept something about ourselves. More often than not this is a learned response. We perceive that someone else doesn't accept something about us, and so our attention focusses on that thing in the same way that our tongue keeps going back to a sore tooth. A simple way of understanding this is to look at the situation of a young boy who is caught by his parents experimenting by dressing himself in his sister's dress. If they are shocked and punish him, then he may feel that they don't accept that part of him which led him to try out female attire. If this becomes a fixation he may, in adult life, be a transvestite, someone who gets a special satisfaction in dressing up in female clothes and spending time with those who accept this behaviour. This isn't the only thing which can lead to transvestism. Some boys are dressed up by one of their parents in girl's clothes against their wishes and end up becoming transvestites. The only thing which is needed for a fixation to form is for there to be a sense of not being accepted for what we are. The behaviour arising from the fixation can take the form of defiance of the lack of acceptance or an obsessive need to seek acceptance through submission. The boy caught in a dress is following the first path and the one forced to wear a dress is following the second.

Given that our state during childhood was one in which sensual enjoyment and attraction was unbounded, any kind of sexual or sensual desire is liable to pop into our mind. If we accept it, then our mind will just flow on to something else unless it seems to be a desire which is practical to act upon. But if we don't accept such a desire, either because we have been taught that it is taboo, or because we tried it once and were punished, then we may become fixated on it.

Fixations can take two forms. We may develop an obsessive fear that we will act on the desire. This is a common form of obsessive compulsive disorder and may lead us to avoid situations in which this would be possible. On the other hand we may feel compelled to act on the desire as an expression of defiance of those who have told us that it is a part of us that is unacceptable. So a fixation can be either passive or active. And if it is active, it can take a dominant or submissive form. The transvestite who wears a dress in defiance of his parent's lack of acceptance is being dominant, which the transvestite who wears a dress in an attempt to retrospectively earn the acceptance of a parent is being submissive.

The behaviour of an infant is clearly not sexual behaviour, but this is an age when we often are taught that aspects of our behaviour are unacceptable. We might eat our own shit, we might piss on somebody, we might fiddle with the genitals of the family pet... If the lesson leaves us feeling strongly rejected rather than simply corrected, then we may develop a fixation. When we reach adulthood and become fully sexual beings the fixation can become an erotic one. Thus some adults have a sexual desire to eat their lover's faeces, to urinate on each other or to have sex with animals. There are also various things which give us comfort when we are infants. If we feel generally unaccepted we may fixate on something which we associate with a time when we were accepted. The second transvestite is an example of this. Other such elements of infancy which can be fixated upon and eroticised during adulthood include : shoes (since our mother's shoes accompanied us when we crawled around on the floor), breast-feeding, diapering, spanking, and being tightly held (which in adulthood can take the form of a fondness for bondage).

To get back to exclusive homosexuality. In a society which has a taboo against same sex erotic activities, a fixation on such activities is bound to occur very commonly. This is not to belittle exclusive homosexual relationships. Sex is therapy and the sharing of sexual pleasure and the healing that comes from it is love in practice. The only disadvantage of having a sexual fixation is if it leads us to engage in destructive or self-destructive behaviour or if the practicalities of satisfying it undermine the potential for a healing relationship with one's sexual partner. While, as Woody Allen pointed out, bisexuality doubles one's chances of a date on a Saturday night, homosexuality, of all the potential fixations other than exclusive heterosexuality, holds the greatest potential for a healthy loving relationship.

If this thesis is correct then the irony is that homophobia gave birth to homosexuality rather than the other way around.

But this theory about the relationship between taboos and fixations holds serious implications for one of our most serious social problems, that of child sexual abuse.

Sexual attraction of an adult to an infant (nepiophilia), a pre-pubescent child (pedophilia) or a pubescent child (hebephilia) and the acts which sometimes arise from such attractions is perhaps the most severe taboo of our society. A fixation on such feelings can have disastrous results. And anything which causes harm to children naturally is a source of strong condemnation. But if a lack of acceptance of a thought or a desire is the cause for it becoming a fixation, then here we have a very dangerous potential for a negative feedback loop in which the horror with which society views this phenomena makes it more likely that we will develop a fixation on any thought or desire of this kind which our mind throws up. And this seems to be happening. Everyday we hear of another child porn ring being cracked and large numbers of respected individuals being exposed as child molesters. We also have seen a change in how these issues are viewed. When Stanley Kubrick made his film of Lolita in 1962 it was considered controversial but it was generally accepted and a popular success. When Adrian Lyne's Lolita came out in 1997 it had trouble finding a distributor and was held up from release in Australia for 2 years due to claims that it was pro-pedophile propaganda. Similarly, while nude photos of children or adolescent girls were common on the covers of record albums, etc. in the 1970s, in Australia in 2008 an installation of decidedly non-sexual nude photos of adolescent girls by Bill Henson led to a hysterical response from many community figures including then Prime Minster Kevin Rudd who referred to them as “absolutely revolting". We have gone from a time when the issue of pedophilia could be artistically examined to a time when the unclothed beauty of young bodies can no longer be celebrated for fear that this might turn us into child molesters. This social phenomenon is often referred to as “moral panic".

If a fixation of this kind is acted upon it can, once again, be in one of two possible forms. In the submissive form, the adult seduces the child. This is a plea for the child to accept those desires of which he himself is ashamed. The dominant form is rape, in which the man angrily attacks the object of the desire which has robbed him of the ability to accept himself.

So what is the answer? It seems to me that the negative feedback loop could be broken if we were to treat child sexual abuse the same way that we do murder. We have a no tolerance policy on murder. Murderers are jailed. But most of us are happy to admit that at some time we have felt like committing murder. We read books full of descriptions of murders and we watch movies in which murders are simulated in gruesome detail. Because we accept thoughts about murder and even the admission of sometimes having the desire to commit it, the incidence of individuals so fixated on the act that they have an addiction to committing it (i.e. serial killers) is thankfully relatively rare. The problem with our taboos about pedophilia isn't that we condemn the action, but that we also condemn the desire to commit the action. We don't allow ourselves the possibility of simply having the desire and realising that it would not be a good idea to act upon it. Like with so many evils, the fight against it is the driving force behind its very growth. Two things could reverse the trend. One is to understand the psychology of fixation, and the other is to stop teaching children to obey authority. A child who has been trained to do what their parents and teachers tell them, rather than to make decisions for themselves based on the information and suggestions provided by adults, is liable to also obey the authority of a child molester, especially if that individual is a teacher or their parent.

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

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.

Materialism is Masturbation

Materialism is masturbation. It is something which can make us feel better when we are on our own.

“Am I a worthwhile person?” we ask ourselves. “Well a worthless person wouldn't live in a big house and drive a fast sports car, would they?” we answer. But the fact that we are asking the question means that, in a very real sense, we are alone. We are trapped in an ego, the insecurity of which keeps us turned inwards, keeps us obsessed with physical evidence that we are loveable, while cutting us off from any possibility of really loving or being loved by anyone.

But this doesn't mean that materialism is a bad thing. The route to our liberation is through learning that we are worthy, and, if material goods give us that message then that is a good place to start. We shouldn't feel ashamed of our materialism any more than we should feel ashamed about masturbating. In fact, to the extent that materialism is an addiction, it is a sense of shame associated with it which is the driving force of that addiction.

Addiction occurs when we need more of something to achieve that same effect, when the appeal of something wears off. No matter how right wing our political beliefs may be it is very hard to escape an underlying sense of guilt that we have luxuries while others are starving. But this sense of guilt doesn't help anyone, because the more it undermines our sense of worth the more material luxuries we need to compensate. So we are less happy and more addicted, and the starving are still starving.

Now we could adopt the form of idealism known as voluntary simplicity in which conspicuous consumption is eschewed and greater material generosity shown to others, but if this is another way for the insecure ego to prove its worth then we are still not healing where we need to heal and we may be contributing to the sense of guilt of those still trying to enjoy their materialism. It may just be another form of selfishness if what matters to us is how we are perceived and the net effect on the social system around us does not concern us.

The road out of addiction, whether it be an addiction to materialism or an addiction to idealism, is to enjoy it more and thus need it less. If the purpose of our materialism or our idealism is to convince us that we are worthy, then let it carry that message unadulterated by the guilt that may accompany materialism or the sense of superiority that might accompany idealistic acts. Pleasure is healing, and the more we are healed the more available we become to be a healthy part of the wider social system, and thus the more others benefit. Of course pleasures can carry a price, and it is better to chose a pleasure which doesn't do us physical harm. Taking heroin may be pleasurable at first, but the price of physical addiction far outweighs any temporary psychological benefits arising from that experience.

Masturbation is a healthy activity, an easy risk-free source of pleasure, but it carries an association of loneliness and accepting a substitute for what we really desire. And this is why I make the connection between it and materialism. We find our meaning, and our deepest opportunities for pleasure, in our relationship to others. Even when someone like Thoreau departed from human society for a couple of years to live in the woods and find himself, he found himself in relation to the natural environment, and that experience only achieved its full significance when he wrote about it and communicated his ideas to others.

Just as meaning is conveyed by a letter of the alphabet only when it takes its place in the context of a word, our meaning derives from our relationship to the whole of which we are a part. This is not to say that we should submit ourselves to that whole in the way that forms of idealism such as communism or various forms of religion would have us do. To submit is not to be a part of something but to be crushed by that thing, to cease to be a healthy part. We can only be a healthy part of the whole by being fully and completely ourselves. If discipline is required then we are not there yet.

Self-interest is the motivation for all human behaviour. Even in the case where a person may lay down their life for another, that individual has a belief system which makes death preferable to a life of knowledge that they were not true to that system. So we should not feel uncomfortable about making decisions based on what is in it for us. This is inevitable. If we think that we are placing someone else's welfare above our own then we are fooling ourselves. We may be following the dictates of our conscience, but it is our conscience and the suffering it might inflict on us which we are trying to avoid. The real question is how enlightened our self-interest is. Eating fatty food may give me a sense of comfort, but if I'm on the verge of a heart attack that comfort may be short-lived.

Jesus placed great significance, at the Last Supper, on the bread and wine which was being shared. Clearly what was important was the act of sharing. If we use the term God to describe the universal system of which we are all a part then anything which is healthy and is shared - such as bread or wine - is the flesh and blood of God. Any living system can only continue to live if the stuff of life continues to flow through it.

Of course it is possible to share something which is not good for the system. Lies, gossip, addictive drugs, disease - all of these things can be shared from one person to another and poison the social system. So, when seeking to find our meaning through sharing, it does matter what we are sharing.

Information is one of the things we share. The collective enterprises in which we engage, from playing a board game to running a multi-billion dollar corporation require the sharing of information. Factual information is the blood of the system, while lies are poison and wisdom is medicine. What spreads through the communication networks of the social system, such as the internet, effects the health of that system.

And pleasure is a key to healing. Where pleasure is shared significant healing is taking place in the fabric of the social system. If we want to be a part of a healthy system then our best chance is to find activities which help others while also giving us pleasure.

If materialism is masturbation, then sharing is an orgy!

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