Richard Harvey
connecting psychotherapy and spiritual growth for human awakening
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Pornography and Masturbation
Richard Harvey answers questions on pornography and masturbation
What are your insights on pornography and masturbation? I have read the first part of your book Your Essential Self and understand about going through permanent change. I have gone through this change of who I am, but I disagree with pornography and masturbation. Yet as I try to fight this urge through sheer willpower, meditation, and inner work, old habits kick in. My view on love is very true, however when these habits kick in I feel as if I am being mentally twisted and re-wired. I feel that pornography dehumanizes us by making human beings into objects with no feelings or emotions, there just to please others or themselves. Porn isn’t real; it gives only temporary relief and stops you from completing your dreams by providing a means of escapism, making you feel empty, weak, more horny, and evil inside. If I thought of women as porn does, I would not deserve love. I feel that change beyond this must be possible. I have a really high sex drive and I respect women. However, often I feel I need sex. What should I do? I have tried to stop and lasted two months. I am afraid that my animalistic instincts will kick in sooner or later and overpower my sense of true love?
We live in sexually repressed times. Sexual energy is an inward reality, an outward reality, and a cosmic force. The flow of this life-force should be honored as the source of all earthly life. Sexual desire comes from either a deficit, a lack in you, or from an overflowing of energy because of the constriction of the energy flow in your organism or bodymind. Learning to understand our internal energies as well as the inner realms in their entirety is an aspect of true wisdom practices.
Sexual Energy and Love-making
In the present culture men tend to have dislocated their energies around the heart. This means that the sexual center, the genitals, and the pelvis are disconnected from the mental and personal will centers (fourth and fifth chakras). Therefore men are more able to have sex and fantasize about sex without emotional engagement.
Women tend to crave intimacy, closeness, acceptance, and loving contact, which may or may not lead to the sex act itself. Some women want to please men to the degree that they adopt the male viewpoint and seek acceptance and “love” from sex acts. They may also be out of touch with their energy and its flow.
To be with another in love and affection, compassion and sincere consideration, to make love whereby the points of contact between you and another disappear and you are unaware of where you end and they begin is a profound aspect of sexual activity and love-making.
Masturbation may be performed with a similar consideration and love directed toward oneself. It may also be a way of familiarizing yourself with your energy flow and not merely a physical release through orgasm or ejaculation.
Our Inability to be Intimate
The political, societal, relational implications of sexual pornography are vast. But the statistics tell us that without doubt there is a huge appetite for it. This is essentially a manifestation of our inability to be intimate, to share our bodies, and to be aware and participate in bodily, psychic, emotional, energetic, and spiritual relationship.
Any sign of this present era’s spiritual malaise is negative and positive—negative in the sense that we can see how humanity is contracted, limited, and resistant to the true gift of life. Yet positive since every—absolutely every—manifestation of the repression of the life-force reveals the way forward, shows how we may grow toward change, transformation, realizing our capacity and potential, and most crucially developing our spiritual destiny in the most expansive, growthful, and blessed way.
Our Belief in the Lie of the Self
Sexual pornography is really like music, literature, “art,” food, entertainment, recreation, lifestyle, aspirations, life-orientation—all has been fundamentally polluted by the belief in the lie of the self and this belief in the lie of the self has brought with it the great fallacy that life is somehow about us. We believe that as separate small beings we stand in the middle of a confluence of natural, cosmic, elemental, industrial, commercial, technological, imaginative, conceptual, even magical, religious, scientific, physical and emotional forces conspiring to give rise to events and spectacles for our amusement, for our satisfaction, for our benefit. But the truth is that the small separate self is of no spiritual significance whatsoever—absolutely none! Its only role is rather like a package, an envelope, a discarded skin, merely a chrysalis for incubation before the flight of the spirit. There is no place for the small separate self in the world of Reality, in the spiritual world—and not even in the worldly, so-called reality. The ego-processes are merely garbage that must be thrown out and thrown out as soon as possible before the rubbish begins to stink!
Sexual pornography might be said to be in the center of the illness of the small separate self; the present day disease of human contraction and its secondary symptoms of violence, prejudice, callousness, self-centeredness, bigotry, racism, and misogyny. Porn’s emphasis on objectification and dehumanization, its divorce of the emotional from the physical, its self-conscious deferring to titillation and base thrills, extremism and shock, its literalizing of fantasy (which is the death of fantasy)—all is a testament to the paucity of our relationships to each other and our relationship with ourselves.
The arguments for porn through the appeal to pillow books, the primitive images of goddesses, and fructifying nature iconography, not to mention the pretence of counterfeit neo-feminism with the absurd claims that women may choose porn as a “profession,” lose sight of the fact that the world is no longer spiritually sacred, neither are people aware anymore of how they choose anything. Indeed humanity is fundamentally asleep and in a world of self-separation and division and the belief in personal identity which overrides all objective sacred or spiritual realities, the spectre of human beings withdrawing into a self-sufficient, self-absorbed, isolated, alienated, schizoid condition has become a possibility that anyone can opt for.
The Hunger for Stimulation
Porn proffers the thrill of visual spectacle and self-stimulation as an easy, accessible, emotionally negating form of sexual release and fantasy indulgence that may seem preferable to complex interpersonal relationships that are often dynamically impenetrable, emotionally exhausting, and psychologically challenging.
Porn isn’t “real,” but neither is very much today. The very basis of modern life has torn free from its foundational roots in the spiritually sacred world. Meaning and futility, despair and purpose, fear and hope, walk a fine line and perform a dangerous dance in the personal quest for meaning and hunger for experience and stimulation. Truthfully we have numbed our capacity and ability to feel, to empathize, to resonate with experience—our own or another’s. Over the last thirty or forty years we have increased our appetite for spectacle, shock, and surprise, stimulation and excitation. Look at movies, video games, leisure park rides, extreme sports: Are these exciting new developments for our continued entertainment or are they sad proofs that we have anesthetized ourselves so fully from life that death, murders, cruelty, violence, rapid and accelerative overwhelming stimuli are simply a stop along the road to further thrill seeking, the vacuous search for stronger stimulation, and life-negating insensitivity.
On social media, in the news footage and movies that entertain and distract us, we can witness vividly and in fine detail the rape and subjugation of women, torture and the recorded deaths of children, young people and people from our own and different cultures, the systematic torture and death of live innocent animals prepared for processing as foodstuffs that are served on our tables, clothes for us to wear, or experiments that benefit the pharmaceutical industry and ensure our protection from illness and disease and give ultimate longevity to our lives. All these visual and verbal images and presentations are pornographic in the sense of being obscene and offensive and therefore they are further forms of pornography.
But pornography was always associated primarily with sex, porn meaning prostitute and by extension prostitution or buying and selling originally associated with slave trading.
Religion and Sexual Repression
The patriarchal religions have been notorious in creating sexual repression. The matriarchal societies and religions, the nature religions, pleasure itself and natural innocence have all been fuel on the fire of religious conviction and zealotry. In religion the relationship between sex and the spirit has been dislocated and suppression, guilt, and shame ignited in the human psyche.
The harm incurred by religious indoctrination on the issue of sex is incalculable. The relationship of sex repression to violence, war, rape, the subjugation of women and children, isolationism, partisanship, prejudice, narrow-mindedness, and political power in all its obscene, putrid, pornographic forms should stand as an eye-opening lesson to everyone on how to manipulate the masses and control humanity. Mental pathology, perversions, confusion, depression, the idiotic creation of taboos of all kinds, a vast array of fetishes, moral ignorance, distancing, and alienation are merely some of the social collective malaises through which humans are disempowered, maladapted, forced into submission, and rendered ineffective in making decisions, rendered harmless and unable to challenge the edifices of power that stride over them in obscene subjugation.
Truth and Reality
Sex is power, empowered people are sexual, sexual energetic people do not need to capitulate to the forces of commercialism or bow to the paranoia of conformism, or look toward leaders—whether political, religious, “educational”, moral, or academic—to proscribe their inner sense of truth and reality.
Reality and truth exist independently of outward convention and the person who has not yet reached the edges of their personal empowerment and attained the state of self-referring, true adulthood has not the remotest chance of realizing, practicing, or succeeding in developing transcendentally or spiritually.
At the root the very source of porn lies in our repressive upbringing. And this repression lies in the teachings of the religious establishment. Children should be allowed to see their parents and family members’ nude bodies. The human body should not be a source of embarrassment and shame. Bathing, summer days, walking around the house, allowing children’s’ natural curiosity to see and ground themselves in the world. The beauty of the human body would soon displace the sexual sensational association with nudity and porn would disappear.
Compassion and Enlightenment
In the meantime, until that time of sexual, physical, and sensational enlightenment, be compassionate to yourself. You and I have been born into a world that is not merely sexually unenlightened, it is also physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually unenlightened. Perhaps conditions will change even a little in our lifetimes. But for now we must be compassionate with ourselves and each other. Encourage others to practice inner exploration and question how they think and feel as they do, what their assumption and expectations of life are, how they live and love. Masturbation is by no means the worst fetish in the world! Self-pleasuring through genital stimulation is supremely natural and occurs in the cot and has even been observed in foetal activity in the womb.
However, the spiritual path of ultimate attainment does proscribe an inner morality pertaining to sexuality, orgasm, ejaculation, masturbation, sexual stimulation and love-making. We don’t have space to go into that in any detail here. In any case it is largely irrelevant until we have understood, celebrated, and mastered our desires, sexual energy flow, and the nature of attachments and clinging in advanced states of psychological inner work.
The Undifferentiated Self
Here are my encouragements—take them lightly, work with them if they feel right, and develop your sensitivity and awareness as you deepen further in these practices. Let everything be about beauty and wonder. Love should not be simply your apprehension of the awe-inspiring universe (both inner and outer), it should be in your everyday feeling awareness of the world about you (both inner and outer). Let your senses engage with the world and through your energy flow and via the sensuality (sight, sound, touch, feeling, fragrance, taste, and I-ness) of your soul meet the world and its many and varied forms, events, circumstances, and relationships.
See the beauty and the wonder in all things and allow yourself to deepen in intimacy until the other is you and you are the other, until there is no difference, because truly the world is filled with arising forms of the same conscious life, the same abundant love, the same all-pervading wisdom, awareness, and light. Let this be not merely a thought, a teaching, or a doctrine—live this! as a practical reality, as Truth itself.
As you practice this (constantly in your life, both inner and outer) and a human being enters your field of meeting through thought, sight, imagination, touch, or a mixture of these, meet that human being with the same full-bodied awareness, sensuality, spirituality, empathy, and wise resonance as you would a wondrous sunset, a field of colourful flowers, or the rich experience of the sight, sounds, smells, and sensuality of the great ocean—let it all in, let it mingle with you in your non-difference, the undifferentiated Self, the spiritually transcendent apperception of real relationship in which the other and yourself merge, as the droplet of water returns to the flowing torrent of the river.
True Love
Masturbation is not the problem, not the real problem, neither is pornography the real problem. The authentically real problem is humankind’s separation from its real Nature, its poverty of spirit, its loss of the sacred. Bring these back into your life and you can no more harm another (or yourself) than you could out of love and compassion be cruel or callous or violent to any manifestation of being in this world.
At the end of your question you write, “I am afraid that my animalistic instincts will kick in sooner or later and overpower my sense of true love.” How can they, truly? When your animal instincts are aligned, through sacred awareness, breathing practice (deeply observing the vital breath as it passes in and out), and your cultivating of un-differentiation as I have encouraged you to do, your instinctual nature will be subordinated energetically to the higher intuition of your spiritual nature and you will experience the true love which you sense.
Thank you for your question.
(See also this Q&A, Why are we sexually repressed?)
