Being paranoid about sex has been really depressing and restricting and held me back. — Andrew4Handel
But I am puzzled as to why I feel convinced something bad will happen after sexual release because it seems irrational. But the evidence I use is that if something bad happens the day after I attribute it to that. — Andrew4Handel
Are you able to clear your mind into like a 'blankspace" to achieve sexual release? For me even if I can clear my mind, thinking comes rushing back in usually before self release. It's frustrating as fuck and I cannot get past it. Concentrating on my breathing was one suggestion but it didn't work. — ArguingWAristotleTiff
Because therapy can help a lot in changing beliefs like this.
It's just a matter of how much you want to change and whether you can accept help or not. — Terrapin Station
Why the fuck are people telling Andrew4Handle that he needs to see a therapist? — Wallows
I don't mind people suggesting that. — Andrew4Handel
It's just a matter of how much you want to change and whether you can accept help or not. — Terrapin Station
Do you have any other OCDish sort of behaviors--like needing to count certain things, or preferring certain numbers (for example, in a numbered parking lot, maybe you'd only park in spaces with odd numbers, and preferably ending in a 7 or whatever), or needing to do things in a certain order, where otherwise you're a bit uncomfortable? Anything like that? Those sorts of things are very common, and they're very similar to superstitious thinking. — Terrapin Station
Yeah; but, my point was that it denies you the possibility of hearing out other opinions as if there were some authority on masturbation or sex... — Wallows
but this was like free pleasure. — Andrew4Handel
Some countries or societies approach mental health as a public responsibility and try and help the person in the community with diverse community input. — Andrew4Handel
It's just a matter of how much you want to change and whether you can accept help or not. — Terrapin Station
I believe in freewill to some degree but I am not confident about my ability to change in any fundamental way. — Andrew4Handel
I lived in such a country. Basically they kick the mentally and/or emotionally problematic people around. The community gives them the scraps of everything in life, and some have to stay up all night to take the contents of the septic tank in buckets to the river and dump it there — god must be atheist
Just curious how far past your teen years you are. I would guess that time might be the cure here, but if you're already in your mid 40s or something, then that might not be the case.
Just like when we acquire motor skills, the acquisition of beliefs changes our brain structure, and just as with motor skills, some affect brain structure in a way that can be hard to "erase." So simply realizing that a belief is bunk isn't going to do it. You need to more systematically work on changing beliefs over a period of time. As mentioned above, therapy can help a lot with this. — Terrapin Station
And in about three months to a year (my average has been 6 months) you fall out of it. It's called "honeymoon phase", and it's nature's (evolutionarily developed) way to catch you in a legally and socially binding relationship. During which in our evolutionary past you got married, irrevokably, and that was binding, so much so that when the honeymoon phase fizzes out, you are still stuck there with your wife or husband. For life. — god must be atheist
However this topic is not just about sex but my "superstition" and the failure of my rationality when I have a degree which involved complex thorough reasoning and psychology. — Andrew4Handel
Some countries or societies approach mental health as a public responsibility and try and help the person in the community with diverse community input. — Andrew4Handel
The truly blessed life involves the proper cultivation of both activity and passivity, working in harmony and mutuality. A horror of passivity lies in the condemnation and hatred towards openness. This will lead to a life impoverished in value and knowledge.
As a consequence we must attempt to seek what I would like to call the spirituality of everyday life. An experiential basis for qualitatively ranking the pleasures seems to be necessary to not let go to waste such openness for the transcendental. For that reason those pleasures like gluttony, which “fat [us] like hogs” (Richard Hooker or Antiphone?), are qualitatively inferior to those which accrue from aesthetic delight or contemplative ecstasy.
An immovable hierarchy is not what is suggested here though. Pleasure and beauty are complex: moments with relations to other moments, previous and future experiences. Just as the untrained ear has difficulty enjoying certain classical music, so is it with others experiences of pleasure. As a consequence it is a personal hierarchy, which has as its imperative prerequisite: openness. Openness to new experiences and to learn and place those experiences in their rightful place.
I am also not talking here about extremely esoteric matters; one simply needs to recall Abraham Maslow’s expression “peak experience” to grasp what I suggest. A peak experience may be the result of seeing a sunrise on the desert, or being “hit” by a line from T.S. Eliot, or of hearing Beethoven’s second movement of the Moonshine Sonata. And also, the pleasure derived from intimate sexual union with the ascent of the soul to spiritual ecstasy and mania.
This vision of a transcendental form of love is of course not in any way new. The famous simile of the ladder of Eros, proceeding from its first rung – the physical love of a beautiful young body – to the highest rung, the love of the divine ground, is but an example. However, perhaps it is time that we assess our spiritual freedom to turn from the Nietzschean nihilism of the “culture of desire” and recapture a new balance. We have the freedom to find our way through the chaos of competing sexual lifestyles and to take our bearings from a more paradigmatic expression of our humanity (whether gay, lesbian or straight).
The paradigm I think should be sought in a joining of sensibility and sexuality, the passionate sexual union is a metaphor for the soul’s ecstatic spiritual union with the divine. The aesthetic dimension of Eros is paramount, for the lover sees in his beloved a reflection of divine beauty. The entire experience is suffused with tenderness. Eros embraces and nourishes the whole soul; it is far from being a merely physical act.
It is clear that today we often confuse sexuality with genital sexual union. Of course we must include genital sexual union in the love relationship, but the love relationship should be above all and primarily a sensibility or state of consciousness. Humour of a particular kind is very much part of that sensibility. Such humour should not repress but affirm and extol sexuality. It is fun and funny to be in love.
We should therefore defend the richness of lovers’ play, reminding us that this receptivity expresses itself in jokes, puns and laughter as well as in the shared pursuit of wisdom. The openness in such relations should be an openness to transcendence or to how the being together of lovers encourages them to seek in their consciousness for the immutable ground of human mutable love and for the reality of Beauty in which every beautiful thing in the Between of human life participates, to the extent that it is really real. Surely ordinary experience suggests that the reason two people would be joined over time in such an intimate complete relationship is that their union suggests more than it contains and opens to them the Being in which they live and move.
This lover’s play also encompasses tension between opposites and character. This tension creates excitement, where the other is just out of reach and where she or he also remains, because as close as two people get they never become one. And yet this opposition creates understanding and in a sense knowledge of the other is revealed through disclosure of limited aspects.
Another message in this regard that I find important is the one carried by the existential reality of death. Dying to the world’s priorities, including the pursuit of power and money, is the prelude to loving the things that matter. Due to, for instance, Plato’s intense love of the beautiful body (in this case male) he was able to conceive of divine reality in erotic analogy. And what could be more divine in temporal existence than the body of one’s beloved?
Sex without love is empty, anonymous sex violates the very principle of encountering the other as partner in a spiritual quest and sex motivated by violence is a violation of true Eros. A long-term, meaningful, relationship is consistent with this view and above all, tenderness must be the norm and beauty the animating spirit.
In the final analysis sexual union is at the same time the union of two different substances, two different irreconcilable entities. A divine union that is at the same time an unholy loss of self and of everything that makes us human. Sex is such a spiritual thing, because it is in every respect a union of opposites, whores in the temple and nuns with orgasmic experiences seeing a figurine of the saviour. The saint and the voluptuous are one.
Of course, not everyone can be a spiritual mystic and attain to the vision of the Good (in Plato’s words) but we can all partake in some measure in the journey from the sensual love that joins true lovers together to Dante’s “love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Nevertheless, fortunate is he, who finds his life partner and shares with her (or him) a fusion of sexuality and spirituality.
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