THE CRISIS OF DESIRE

The Crisis of Desire: Our Desire for Desire

Sex Today is Tragic

We must first dare to speak the Sexually Incorrect truth that sex today is tragic. Sex is tragic because there is a Crisis of Desire. Desire itself is our greatest desire. Desire arouses our aliveness. In the throes of authentic desire. In the throes of authentic desire, the meaning of life ceases to be a question and the goodness of life is self-evident. Being in a state of strong desire enlivens us beyond measure. And yet most of us cannot access the sustained experience of desire. Desire is illusive. We lack a compass of desire that most of us are unable to find.

Music and Pornography: Our Two Longings Revealed

There are two massive industries in the world that speak into global culture. Both of them are about our deep and desperate desire for desire. But each speaks of a yearning for desire in different context. All over the world — every second — billions of people are listening to music. Most music is made up of love songs. There is a rare love song about parental love or brotherly love. There is a very occasional song about friendship. But the vast majority of popular love songs revolve around desire and love — yearned for, thwarted, and occasionally fulfilled. Desire is sung as a core quality of romantic love. We want desire in the context of our love. We long to worship at Aphrodite’s altar, so we dance to her music. Aphrodite the Greek Goddess, Venus in her Roman expression, incarnates the qualities of both love and desire.

The second industry that addresses global culture is public erotica; often given the name of pornography. We know of the failed promise and intense pain generated by the pleasures of porn. The problems are legion. They range from rampant porn addiction, to the deadening of desire with actual human beings, to human degradation, to sexual slavery and the list goes on. No matter how sexually open we might be very few of us sign our name triumphantly on our porn. But our point at this early juncture is not to critique porn, although it is self-evidently worth of serious critique on multiple grounds. Later in our conversation we will articulate that critique as well as a new vision of Porn 2.0 — a higher artistic ethos and Eros of what public erotica might look like. Let’s just say that a new vision of public erotica- Porn 2.0- is crucial. But we are ahead of ourselves.

For now, we want to notice that the experience of desire mediated through the erotic encounter with another — as disclosed in both music and pornography — is central to our longing. If you think we are exaggerating then let’s share the recent Porn Hub end year stats.

2018 was a very busy year for Porn Hub users. There were 33.5 billion visits to the site, an increase of 5 billion visits over 2017. Pornhub’s million daily visits exceed 100 million. “If you were to begin watching 2018’s videos after the Wright Brother’s first flight in 1903, you would still be watching them today 115 years later!”

We will return to this dynamic in our section on Vital sexing. But for now, let’s just notice two things. First, like music, porn tells us of the intense yearning to worship at Aphrodite’s altar. She is, for many people, the last remaining portal to transcendent spirit in mass culture. Porn however focuses on our desire for desire independent of the romantic or committed context. Romantic porn is one of the least viewed categories according to porn hub analytics.

It’s also worth pointing out that porn is not –as some have wrongly suggested –a male pathology. According to a study in Marie Claire Magazine exploring modern women’s relationship to porn, one in three women admitted to viewing pornography at least once a week. In another statistic Porn Hub analytics show a full quarter of their viewers to be women in the United States and in other countries, up to a third.

Now let’s put the all of this information together. Our deepest desire is for desire itself. We want desire both in the context of commitment and we want desire as a value unto itself. Our love songs for the most part have a sexual dimension rooted in mutual desire. But we don’t actually know how to sustain desire in our romantic relationships. Hence the first dimension of our crisis of desire. Because we fail to meet the fullness of our desire in committed contexts we are left with a burning desire for desire itself, even beyond those committed contexts, we do not want to live without the aliveness that desire arouses in us. Yet we are- often for good, apparently good reason and motivation, bound by contexts that frustrate desire. But even more deadly we are trapped in narratives that refuse to dignify desire. What emerges is that we long for committed romantic Eros AND we are desperate for the aliveness that is evoked by the raw desire of a charged sexual encounter.

When we are unable to fulfill our desire in the contexts of commitment we seek our desire in a multitude of other platforms, ranging from serial dating, to friends to with benefits, to tinder, to the hook up culture, to porn, to affairs and more. But our desire is left unmet and unsated. Sex is all around us, more accessible than any other time in history and yet our sexing leaves us unfulfilled, shamed and even disturbed. And for good reason. Because we lack a road map for our desire. We a lack a story about our desire equal to the experience of our yearning. As a result, our sexuality is collapsing. All of this is at the devastating core of what we might term an epic crisis of desire.

The Sixties: A Fleeting Moment

The sixties, which we evoked in our first paragraphs, were a fleeting second where we thought that we had love and desire all figured out. We thought knew how to worship at Aphrodite’s altar. But that bubble burst very quickly and there was no sunny day after the dawning of Aquarius. We now realize that we can only get back to the garden by moving forward. By participating in the evolution of love.

Often however when considering deep human truths, it is by looking backwards that we can move forward. Santayana was not wrong when he said; those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The promise of sexual liberation made by the sixties was not fulfilled. What went wrong?

Every Great Liberation Movement Promises Sexual Liberation

The promise of sexual liberation in the sixties was not new. In reality, it was another iteration of the long-politicized promise of free love. Almost every great liberation movement knew that for the revolution to be realized it needed to be accompanied by some form of sexual revolution. The correct axiom of utopian movements has always been that there is no liberation without sexual liberation. Every great attempt at social revolution understood that our experience of the sexual needed to be transformed. Because all transformations are doomed to failure if we cannot transform the sexual. Think about the Cathars in medieval Christendom who were the forerunner of modern romantic love — or renegade Sufis in Baghdad and Beirut who produced the likes of Rumi and Hafiz challenging Orthodox Islam. Or think about the Sabbatian movement which was deemed heretical in Judaism. Think about Mormonism founded in upstate New York of all places in the mid 19th century — which has emerged as a powerful world religion. Think about the Kibbutz movement in Israel. Think about early communism. None of these movements were libertine but each of them called for some form of liberation of the erotic sexual as part of their inspired call for transformation. Wilhelm Reich was among many western intellectuals to join the communist movement before it’s cruel face was revealed.

In a 1931 film by Sex Pol an organization founded by Reich whose aim was to defy what they termed as repressive psycho- sexual political and social control, begins by saying “A Human Being averages four thousand orgasms per lifetime. Do not turn off this pulsating motor of joy and life energy”. The film goes on to say “The subjection to social disciplines may cause gastric ulcers, respiratory, coronary and vascular diseases- Comrade Lovers for your health sake Fuck Freely!… The communist movement fights for the liberation of man’s natural impulses and joy of living. Four thousand liberating orgasms in every woman’s and man’s life are four thousand explosions of liberating life energy!

And yet neither Reich nor the sixties that he informed nor any of the other aforementioned movements succeeded in their goals of sexual liberation.

Sex Without Narrative: Frameworks Are Foreplay

Why did none of the sexual liberation movements fulfill on their promises? The simple answer is that none of them provided a new sexual narrative and none of them created a new set of compelling distinctions around sexuality. None of them articulated a
framework for our freedoms in the realm of the sexual.
And because there is no sustained desire without distinctions,
desire was gradually diminished into degradation.

Let’s feel into what this means by just listening in for a moment into our own inner conversation around Sex. For many of us there is a somewhat confused, hurt and even bewildered voice saying — What the Fuck? WTF?

Why does my desire seem so desperate? WTF?

Why does sex demand that I constantly give up control in ways that often feel dangerous? WTF?

Why do I want it so much? WTF?

Why is sex exponentially more powerful then virtually any other force that moves in me?

Can sex really be just be an outmoded procreation survival code? WTF?

Why does my desire for desire seem to be so at odds with my self perceived dignity? WTF?

Why does the Power of Sex cause me to want to Ravish or be ravished? WTF?

Why am I aroused by that which I would never admit would arouse me? WTF?

Why can’t I find a relationship- where I can be met in the full power of my sexuality? WTF?

What do I do with the urgent sexual pain of unfulfilled yearning that lives so deep in my most intimate heart that I barely know how to talk about with anyone including myself? WTF?

All of these questions are ones that live inchoately inside us and never get addressed. The classical narratives about sex from earlier periods do not even begin to address them in a way which is true to our experience today. The result of our inability to find our way in this most essential thicket of our lives is a disaster.

Language is the road to dignity but we lack a language around the sexual. We have failed to articulate a sexual narrative or set of distinctions that might make sense out of the jumble of our complex and contradictory needs, emotions and desires in the Sexual?

I intuitively sense the dignity of my desire! But where and how can I locate it in my heart, my mind and my body? Please God, Universe, Please- somebody, speak to me of the dignity of my desire!

The Failure of Frameworks Creates Shame

And when no voice answers our desperate plea we are gradually suffused with an insidious but deadly SHAME. And that shame create crisis on all levels.

It is a crisis of desire.
It is a crisis of shame.
It is a crisis of sexual acting out.
It is a crisis of power.
It is a crisis of identity.
It is a crisis of #metoo.

Many of us grew up thinking it was our personal stuff. We thought it was our mother/father issues. We went to therapy. We worked on our attachment issues. Some of us got more deeply involved in our religions. We might have joined a neo-Buddhist or other eastern meditation community. We went to Burning Man. We might have joined a fundamentalist church. We took personal development seminars to be successful. But none of it quite worked. None of it took away the lingering sense of being broken. Of not being a good child of the universe. None of it took away the hidden shame.

Religion taught us that it was our failure of faith. Meditation taught us that we were stuck in our personal story. Psychology told us that it was about attachment issues. We medicated, meditated, and tried all manner of other strategies. There was value in all of it. And we were damaged by some of it. But we still feel broken inside.

What we did not understand is that there was a fundamental failure of frameworks. The most essential Sexually Incorrect truth and the core of the new frameworks and distinctions that we will unpack in this volume are three words.

We Are Desire
Desire is our Essence.

Our desire participates in the larger field of field of desire which is essential core and evolutionary driver of reality itself.

Desire the animating energy that that sources all that is good true and beautiful.

Desire generates the radical aliveness that makes life self- evidently worth living. Desire is a mystery and not a commodity. Desire is the current of the cosmos. It is nectar not poison, divine elixir and not devil’s brew.

Sexual Desire is an expression of the larger Eros of Cosmos.

Desire is your charismatic divine endowment, the elixir of your aliveness, the pulse of your radiance and rapture.

Desire creates life and is the very current of life itself.

Desire creates life, in manifold forms, on myriad levels of manifestation, heart, body and mind, because desire is the current of life.

Desire is your heart’s desire.

Desire is love desire. Desire is love in the body.

Love Desire

By love desire we do not mean ordinary love –the love that is disassociated from the larger current of love desire that animates, and drives all of Cosmos. Not love that is alienated from what Erotic mystic Solomon, in ancient Jerusalem referred to when he said, “its insides are lined with love. We do not even mean merely human romantic love of the conventional variety.

But rather love desire is Outrageous Love, Evolutionary Love, and the pulse of Cosmos itself. Clarify your Desire. And then, trust your Desire.

Desire is the face of God Goddess is Fuck, awake and alive in you.

Desire is Ethics

A distortion in the prism through which we understand our desire twists our actual experience of desire. Our very essence is disfigured. Clarified Desire suffuses all of reality and animated the good life in every one of its ethical and sacred dimensions. But it is even more than that. One we understand our essential identity with desire, the next two steps becomes almost self- evident. Every human being has a primary need to be desired by another conscious being. And because the need is so elemental and primal, the need to be desired translates into the right to be desired.

The Right to be Desired by another conscious being is an elemental human right. The way we have structured society today, only the very few are desired. All of our desire aggregates around a very minuscule group of mostly powerful or talented men and or beautiful and talented women, women who are the objects of our desire.

One of the great realizations of the more mature and accurate visions of evolutionary psychology in the first part of the new millennium is the realization of the centrality of Love Desire in driving the evolutionary process. New school evolutionary theorists like David Loye and Geoffrey Miller have pointed out that it is simply untenable-in light of the evolutionary facts — to talk about natural selection and the survival of the fittest as the core evolutionary drive. Both Miller and Loye resuscitate Darwin’s vision of sexual selection. In a word, the masculine’s love desire for the feminine, and the masculine’s love desire to be loved and desired by the feminine drives- evolution. Ethics, art, humor, and much more are explained by Miller — not as survival –natural selection but rather as the impulse of love-desire driving the Cosmos. Miller is pointing toward what we call the Universe: A Love story. This is not a naïve or romantic meme but rather speaks to the core structure of reality –what we alternately term the Cosmo-Erotic Universe. Loye in particular writes extensively on Darwin and Love, pointing out that in Darwin’s descent he talks about Love some 95 times and about natural selection twice.

That is a big set of claims which we will unpack, demonstrate and validate throughout this work based on the interior, exterior and evolutionary sciences. When we do not have an accurate framework — an accurate narrative — an accurate set of distinctions — around our desire then we are fucked. Our desire gets twisted. Our very psyche and soul becomes contorted. We can only find clarity again by clarifying our frameworks. We can only make souls and psyches sing by evolving our frameworks, by evolving our narratives. That is what it means to participate in the evolution of love. That is how we address the crisis of:

Desire
Shame
Sexual Acting Out
Power
Identity
#Metoo

That is the only true meaning of the apotheosis that lies at the core of Cosmo Erotic humanism. We live in a Cosmo-erotic universe. Reality is Eros, all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain. Unconscious Evolution awakens as Conscious Evolution. Outrageous love- Eros –awakens to itself consciously — in the human being who is aroused to Outrageous. It turns out that to awaken as conscious evolution and to awaken as an outrageous lover committing your unique outrageous acts of love — is one and the same. This understanding and all of its implications –across all domains of reality –is what we mean by Cosmo-Erotic Humanism. A core refrain of the new story. Homo Amor is the Cosmo Erotic Universe in Person.
This is one core of Cosmo–Erotic Humanism.