This has been a very helpful approach. Looking at if it’s an urge or a preference. I see now how chasing the ‘high’ that comes from allowing the libidinous drive is very much insanity. It’s a dead-end and goes in circles. It never ends and nothing ever gets solved. However, there is also the feeling accompanying the contemplation of abandoning it that I would “miss out” on something. There’s some inherent belief to libido that it’s needed for something very important in its expression. To keep following it. But it is at root, unintelligent. Now it’s a matter of weakening its stranglehold and drive by declining each time.
I’ve been trying to look at it as sincerely as possible. Even indulging in the libidinous urge to see what is exactly happening. There is a positive hedonic tone and I never found a reason to abandon it before. Seeing it now though the aspect that really stands out is the ‘drive’ of it. It’s simply a race to orgasm. The experience lacks autonomy and is not of a free enjoyment nor of an equitable intimacy. I can also relate to this well:
I must say I have quite a bit of undoing of some habitualistic patterns in this area so now I can fully approach this:
While also bearing in mind:
With all of that said, there are still some feelings of fear standing in the way of it at the moment. I find that this fear again goes with being a ‘man’. It has to do with how men are lauded for their ‘sexual prowess’ and I often feel that I must ‘perform’ to impress. The further fear of it is that my partner will leave me if I don’t follow this belief. I experience this as another dare. If my partner were to leave me because of this, then that is what it is. Although I do find these feelings rather amusing too since she expressed on a number of occasions of how she enjoys the physical proximity and closeness of sex the most.
It has been a number of years now since reading Article 2 of Richard’s Journal and I am able to appreciate and glean more meaning and insight from it. Some writings that stood out were:
Richard: I experienced it as
a bold step when I first started to strip away the layers of the mystique … the
feeling being that nothing would remain and sex would become insipid
coupling … a boring repetition of what is already known. One’s courage
stems from one’s pure intent … and one’s steadfast purpose of dispelling any
illusion, however seductive it might seem to be.
Richard: Whenever we trip over an issue of man-woman differences and find
ourselves falling back into our gender identities we notice, while looking at
each other over a gulf of separation, a marked lack of equity and mutual
intimacy between us. Then again, in our long periods of mutual intimacy, we
experience that neither Authority nor Love plays any role. Can we
contemplate a life together where intimacy and equity are paramount?
Wherein the power of Love and Authority become irrelevant? Any Authority
precludes equity … and therefore intimacy. Any Love precludes intimacy …
and therefore equity.
On a separate but related issue, I noticed at work this past week more clearly how I ‘hold back’ in my interactions with others. Just as in a similar manner as with my partner (with whom it still operates but on a level of lower intensity), I ‘hold back’ from them. I take a step back and basically scan out what’s the ‘right way’ to be with them. This scan of course is composed of anxiety/fear and exemplifies the societal conscience. I’m always on alert of what they are thinking of me and if ‘I’ am playing ‘my’ role properly. Seeing this, I then also allowed myself on the same day to meet them right where they are and I am always delighted at how easy interactions are. People enjoy associating with me when I am enjoying my own association. When this happens, there’s a background feeling of ‘this can’t be’ or ‘something will go wrong’. But I find that even when people may become upset, my remaining in this delighting has a rather conciliatory effect. This time the background feeling is that ‘I will be physically harmed and so I must take a step back again’. It’s a rather strange conditioning but feels very real.
On another separate day, I was reading something Richard writes in regards infinitude where he says that ‘I’ create a center in consciousness and block the experience of infinitude. I started thinking ‘what really is this infinitude?’. ‘It’s a physical infinitude’. ‘Oh it’s this infinite space and eternal time’. Then this thought occurred to me that perhaps that this physical universe is all that there is. There’s nothing other than this physical universe that actually exists. The experience of being ‘me’ is an experience of an ‘otherness’ which is blocking this immensity (which I experience as there on the periphery). I understood for a moment this:
The human eye is, rather, looking into infinity (when gazing deeply into that velvety darkness betwixt the stars) in the sense that there is no limit to its seeing ability other than its own physical capacity due to having evolved on a planet a short distance away, in astronomical terms, from its central star (aka the sun). [link]