3l. Marriage, Families and Sexuality
A family is the traditional system that benefits consumerism the most. And hereby hangs another tale. Every family will need a house, full of consumer durables like washing machines and fridges and cars which they only use for part of the time. They will often have to pay for childcare services for when they go to work or go out. Each individual living space requires heating and lighting, water & waste disposal services, phones and so on, often provided by a central monopoly for a building often designed to squander these precious resources through inefficiency.
A book by Daniel Pinchbeck, called ‘How Soon is Now?’ describes perfectly the limitations of modern relationships and other possibilities that few of us seem to question. It shows how many of the stories embedded in the socioeconomic unit of the family are flawed. I have edited his sample chapter below.
“Unconsciously, we have been impelling ourselves towards planetary catastrophe. I believe we are doing this to end our alienation and ego-centrism – to reach a new intensity of communion. Because we no longer have rites of passage which create the same effect through intentionally guided ritual, we are inducing it through mass catastrophe. But the disasters we are unleashing could have the unanticipated effect of breaking open the collective heart chakra. Collectively, humanity can realize love and solidarity – universal, unconditional – as the basis for healing our world.
This may seem distant, theoretical and abstract, but I think many people already see reverberations of this process in their personal lives. For some, this is taking the form of a deep questioning of traditional relationship patterns – often, a rejection of them, as they seek to create something new. Culturally, the focus on transgendered people, gay marriage, the endless sex scandals tearing down politicians and public figures is all part of this unavoidable change.
We have inherited a restricted model of romantic and erotic love. Most people still believe that monogamy – exclusive partnership – is the only way to enduring happiness and contentment. Of course, for some people, monogamy is the best option. But humans are not naturally monogamous, and the current system forces many people to act hypocritically, to deceive themselves and their partners, or to sacrifice their truth.
Deep in their hearts, many people feel permanently disappointed, sad, frustrated and angry because they have been unable to satisfy their erotic desires. Men and women lead lives of quiet desperation and compromise. An ambience of disappointment and frustration permeates our society, in overt and subtle ways. People seek false substitutes for true satisfaction. The insatiable lust for consumer goods is – I believe – a result of our failure to satisfy our deeper needs for love, erotic fulfilment, authentic communion.
‘We are at war with our eroticism’, write Christopher Ryan and Calcida Jethá in ‘Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality’. After scouring evidence from anthropology and evolutionary biology, they point out that, Human beings evolved in intimate groups where almost every-thing was shared – food, shelter, protection, child care, even sexual pleasure . . . contemporary culture misrepresents the link between love and sex. With and without love, a casual sexuality was the norm for our prehistoric ancestors . . . human beings and our hominid ancestors have spent almost all of the past million years or so in small, intimate bands in which most adults had several sexual relationships at any given time.
Civilization constructed the institution of marriage, and enforced monogamy, to protect property rights, under a patriarchal regime which demonized female sexuality. The force of our repressed sexual instinct was channeled – or sublimated, in Sigmund Freud’s term – into building civilisation, creating culture and making war.
The curious fact about human nature is that it is not fixed, but changeable. This is something that makes us different from animals: we are the species that can reinvent itself, in many ways. However, some things are very resistant to change. The instinct towards sexual satiation, for instance, is hardwired into our biology. We are also unique among animals due to the incessant force of our non-stop, hair-trigger sex drive.
As Gerald Heard explored in the early 1950s in ‘Pain, Sex and Time’, we possess a tremendous surplus of evolutionary energy, far beyond what we need to sustain ourselves. This energy must find outlets for expression. Like Walter Benjamin, Heard believed we need to channel this force consciously, through ritual, initiation and training in special schools devised for this purpose. Otherwise, the excess energy continues to get discharged, through wars and violence.
‘If our evolution is over,’ Heard worried, ‘if we have no further original outlet to our enormous and fretting energy, then the only choice is slow degeneracy through sex addiction or a conclusive end through homicidal mania.’ The excess energy, the kundalini, driving us reveals something important about our destiny as a species. In other words, individually as well as collectively, we can choose to evolve and deepen ourselves, or decay and disintegrate.
Sex energy radiates through every lament of our social structure. ‘Sexuality is a superpower,’ writes Dieter Duhm, one of the founders of Tamera, a ‘free love’ community in Portugal. ‘Our attractions and repulsions, sexual signals and links, hopes and disappointments go through all of society like a nerve system, permeating every office, every shopping mall, every art exhibition, every conference, every group, every company, every political party.’ He believes that any attempt to suppress this superpower only leads to negative outcomes – as with those Indian gurus in the 1970s who claimed to be transcendent masters, but couldn’t resist the charms of their Western female disciples.
Duhm was the leader of a group of German radicals who tried to understand why 1960s leftist efforts to build a utopian alternative to capitalism ended in failure. He realized there were core issues around love, relationships and sexuality that people could not fully address yet or bring into their consciousness. ‘The healing of sexuality is perhaps the most revolutionary step in the present healing work after thousands of years of suppression and neglect,’ he writes. Because these issues were not addressed, the idealistic efforts to change the world imploded, instead. Communities and movements kept falling apart. Sex and love were the deepest political issues society could not confront or integrate.
‘The most intimate questions of sex, love, and partnership, of faithfulness, trust, and community, of jealousy, competition, and fear of separation are political questions with global implications’, Duhm writes. He and some like-minded people decided to step out of society to establish a community as an experimental laboratory. Their modest goal was world peace. They realized that peace on Earth would be impossible until we established peace between the genders – until we found peace in love. They courageously broke apart traditional structures and conditioning, seeking a holistic redesign.
I remember from my early years, my adolescence, how the cultural ambience around sexuality had a dark, shameful feeling. There was no sense that boys and girls – or men and women – might seek to collaborate for each other’s sensual pleasure. That we might enjoy taking care of each other – that we could learn to be generous, compassionate, with each other. Eroticism was not part of our education. It was not something to be explored or studied, even as an afterthought – certainly not with the same kind of analytic rigour we brought to maths or physics, even though sex would be infinitely more important to our future lives than these academic subjects.
Our civilization applies tremendous reserves of intellect and capital to construct killer drones, virtual reality devices, surveillance systems – instruments of death, alienation and fear. Yet we believe that love and sexuality are not worthy of our conscious attention. We act as if they are outside the realm of logic, forethought and social design.
‘Whereas the cerebrum is applied in war technology, in love man lives and thinks out of his spinal cord,’ Duhm points out. When we channel more of society’s intellect and resources towards the exploration of love and eroticism – freeing these areas from an antiquated and unrealistic morality – we will make rapid strides.
Just as we lack rites of passage to introduce us to transpersonal or visionary experiences when we are young – when we long, with our whole being, to experience a deeper intensity of communion, to access something greater than ourselves – we also lack for cultural traditions that would help young people to embrace their sexuality as something wonderful, as a great gift they can explore and share responsibly. We are still a subtly pleasure-denying society, despite Tinder, OkCupid, casual sex and the hook-up culture. Sexuality is considered a private matter, relegated to dark places like nightclubs and bars, which have an underworld ambience.
Sexual hunger is quite different from the hunger for food, which is easily satisfied by a good meal, or even a mediocre buffet. Russell Brand became a raging sex addict who slept with up to eighty women a month at the height of his mania, or so he claims. Not only is Russell extremely charming and charismatic, he would also enlist people to help him in his quest to be ‘shagger of the year’, a title he held several times in a row. Eventually, he realized that this almost unbelievable expenditure of sweat and sperm was bringing him no lasting contentment, so he checked into rehab.
Russell may have gone a bit overboard. But my admittedly controversial perspective is that there is nothing wrong with having an abundance, even a super-abundance, of lovers and sexual partners – whether for men or women – as long as this is done honestly and without coercion. Unfortunately, in our society, the pursuit of sexual desire tends to require all sorts of miserable deceits, lies and hypocrisies. Also, it is totally unjust and wrong that women still get put down for the exact same behavior that society approves in men.
I suspect some readers will feel I am promoting a hyper-masculine mode of sexuality. Of course, men are more biologically prone to seek multiple mates, but women also have the need to pursue various sorts of erotic adventures. In ‘Sex at Dawn’, Ryan and Jethá review studies that suggest there is an evolutionary explanation for why women make louder sounds during intercourse than men. These noises had a function in our early hominid days: the female was calling out to other males in the area to have sex with her in succession. In this way, the child’s paternity would remain unknown. Also, sperm competition would occur in the uterus. The female orgasm also has a reproductive purpose, as the contractions of orgasm pull the sperm deeper into the womb. The male who elicited the most powerful orgasm would be the one most likely to fertilize her egg.
When it comes to sexuality, we have to accept how humans truly are, rather than how they are supposed to be, according to some imposed ideal. ‘Monogamy is not found in any social, group-living primate except – if the standard narrative is to be believed – us,’ write Ryan and Jethá:
If you spend time with the primates closest to human beings, you’ll see female chimps having intercourse dozens of times per day, with most or all of the willing males, and rampant bonobo group sex that leaves everyone relaxed and maintains intricate social networks. Explore contemporary human beings’ lust for particular kinds of pornography or our notorious difficulties with long-term sexual monogamy and you’ll soon stumble over relics of our hypersexual ancestors.
The planetary mega-crisis is directly related to the problems we confront as a species in this area of love and sexuality. One primary urge driving many men to seek success – wealth or fame – is sexual access. Men – Alpha males, in particular – will do almost anything to attract women. The economic system tends to reward sociopathic behaviour. To succeed, people must climb corporate ladders, sell wasteful products, manage investment funds that transfer resources from the poor to the wealthy, promote vacuous fashion trends and so on. The system forces people to compromise their ethics and principles, or renounce them altogether, to get what they want.
My anthropological observation is that people – young people above all – waste an unbelievable amount of their life energy in the quest for sexual satiation. This energy that people expend in the incessant pursuit of sexual fulfilment is exactly the energy that we, the human community, need to redirect, channeling it towards our awakening, using it to enact social change and regenerate our planet’s ecosystems.
Sex itself is not the problem. In our culture, for many people, the act of sex only consumes a tiny fraction of the energy expended in the pursuit of it. Also, sex can be nourishing, physically and emotionally. If there was no need to pursue erotic connections, to compete for mates, we could use that squandered energy to confront the ecological crisis we have unleashed as a species, and bring about a rapid cultural evolution.
If we can understand, and then fix, the flaws in our social design, our stale ideology and antiquated cultural programming, we will liberate a huge amount of productive energy for building a regenerative society. We will take a massive leap forward as a species. And we will do it quickly.
I don’t think the answer is to restrict sexual behaviour, which will only lead to more frustration, repression, resentment and deception. I believe the solution is to consciously liberate Eros – not just Eros as it gets expressed through sexuality and romantic love, but also the various forms of love that bind communities together, including caring for children and old people. We must understand that the Eros that gets expressed through sexuality is not just an individual problem, but has a very large-scale social and political dimension. Men and women must be willing to cooperate for each other’s happiness if humanity is going to have a long-term future on Earth.
Hollywood and the media idealize the nuclear family, which is the basic economic unit of our society. When individuals merge into couples, and particularly when these couples have children, they tend to direct all their energy and resources towards themselves. They lose interest – if they ever had any – in helping the collective. Instead, they seek to amass resources, playing the competitive capitalist game.
The problem in our culture is the atomization which forces individuals, as well as nuclear families, to fight for their own success and personal survival. We can now see that this system, enforcing self- interest as a survival mechanism, is not sustainable for the planet as a whole. It needs to change – since it won’t change on its own, we need to change it.
‘Deep conflicts rage at the heart of modern sexuality,’ write Ryan and Jethá: Our cultivated ignorance is devastating. The campaign to obscure the true nature of our species’ sexuality leaves half our marriages collapsing under an unstoppable tide of sexual frustration, libido-killing boredom, impulsive betrayal, dysfunction, confusion, and shame. Serial monogamy stretches before (and behind) many of us like an archipelago of failure: isolated islands of transitory happiness in a cold, dark sea of disappointment.
To maintain their relationships, many people find themselves forced to lie about or suppress their true desires. The vast majority of men I know who are in long-term partnerships have confessed they either feel an intense desire for other sexual contacts or have secretly satisfied some of those desires, through affairs or prostitutes – feeding the horrific global sex trade. Other people learn to dampen their sexual drive, but I don’t find this a great outcome either.
I don’t think it is an accident that so many creative artists and geniuses have been fascinated with eroticism and sexual love, pursuing the muse as she expresses herself in many embodied forms. Erotic love is a kind of fuel that makes people feel alive and inspired. Ideally, don’t we want everyone to be as inspired and turned-on as they can be? Wouldn’t we prefer a social system that supports everyone in exploring their deepest capacities for love, for erotic and ecstatic experience, as long as they are causing no harm to others?
There is a direct relationship between our corrupt politics and our failure, as a society, to handle love authentically. When people find themselves forced to lie to or deceive the person closest to them – their partner – about their desires, they are conditioned to accept corruption and hypocrisy in society at large. They can accept the half-truths of politicians and pundits because they are compromised themselves. We fail to care for the world as a consequence of our inauthenticity. After all, why would we want to protect and safeguard a world that has betrayed us at its core?
Taken from the sample chapter of a new book by Daniel Pinchbeck, called ‘How Soon is Now?’ available from http://howsoonisnow.info/
This article was found at: http://www.ecohustler.co.uk /2017/01/29/sexuality-superpower-can-unleashed-heal-world/
Parliament Must Die contains quotes from: A. Greenburg, M.D._Abraham Maslow_Albert Einstein _Alnoor Ladha_Andrew Gwynne _Anneke Lucas_Arthur Koestler _Arundhati Roy_Asgeir Jonsson _Barbara Max Paul Hubbard_Bertrand Russell _Bill Mollison _Buckminster Fuller_Calcida Jethá _Caroline Lucas_Charles the Great_Chief Arvol Looking Horse _Christopher Ryan_Copernicus_Daniel Christian Wahl_Daniel Pinchbeck_Darwin_David Edwards_David Holmgren _David Icke_Dieter Duhm_Donald Worster_Donnachadh McCarthy_Doreen Massey_Doris Lessing_Dr A Bartlett Giamatti _Dr Claire Wordley_Dr Jay Cullen_Dr Kathy Sykes _Dresden James_E C Lindeman_Eckhart Tolle_Edgar Cayce _Edward Snowden _Ethan C Roland _Ewen MacAskill_Galileo_Galtang and Ruge _George Monbiot_Gerald Heard _God in Genesis_Greta Thunberg_Gudrun Johnsen _Guido Dalla Casa _Gustave Le Bon_Guy Fawkes _Henry Cloud _Henryk Skolomowski_Isaac Cordal _J Eliot_Jack D Forbes_Jack Forbes_James Gordon M.D._James Lovelock _Jeremy Lent_Jeremy Rifkin_John Cleese _John Hammell_John Hilary_John Trudell_Jon Stone_Jonathan Bartley_Julian Assange_Karl Marx _Karlos Kukuburra_Ken Ward _Lee Williams _Leonard Higgins_Lierre Keith _Lord Strasburger_M Knowles_Maddy Harland _Marianne Williamson_Mark Boyle_Martin Kirk_Martin Winiecki_Masanobu Fukuoka _Matthieu Ricard_Mogens Herman Hansen _Nafeez Ahmed _Nanice Ellis_Neil Dawe_Nikola Tesla_Noam Chomsky_Olafur Hauksson _Osho_Paul Hawken_Paul Levy_Peter Joseph_Peter Macfadyen_Pope Francis_President Franklin Roosevelt _Rabindranath Tagore _Rene Descartes _Russell Brand_Safa Motesharrei _Seyyed Hossein Nasr_Sigmund Fraud_Silas Titus _Simon Mitchell_Sir David Attenborough_Sir Isaac Newton_Sir Joshua Stamp_Skip Sanders _Steve Kent _Sting_Terrence Mckenna_The Dalai Lama _Thomas Berry_Tom McKay_Tyler Durden_Walter Bradford Cannon_Wendell Berry_William Derham_Yaneer Bar-Yam
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