Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

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Woodart
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Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

Post by Woodart »

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power." - Oscar Wilde

I am not sure about the truth of this statement, but it is very intriguing. There are all kinds of power – political, social, monetary, spiritual, etc. How about the power of emotion? The power of love is a prime mover in the human equation. We need love, acceptance, affiliation and contact as much as we need air. The desire to belong and be valued by others is pretty high on the list of basic needs. Our motivation needs a spark to ignite our imagination that guides us down the road.

I think it is fair to say that love is a prime mover in the human experience. Without love life is worthless. Sex is powerful from a physical point of view, but the spirit of love is beyond measure. So we must ask ourselves what is this thing we call love?
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Re: Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

Post by Pelegrin_1 »

Pretty much. Sociobiology explains pretty much all of human behavior, either directly or indirectly. And that pretty much comes down to sex and sexual selection.
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Re: Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

Post by -1- »

Pelegrin_1 wrote:Pretty much. Sociobiology explains pretty much all of human behavior, either directly or indirectly. And that pretty much comes down to sex and sexual selection.
Dreck. I never get to select my sexual selection. How does one do that?

Maybe I need more power.

Power is widely distributed now in the population. We, The People, each have one vote, one life, one wife, one husband, one soul. In the old times it used to be different.

In fact, to aspire to eternity, all you had to do for the longest time was just be a human.

These days if you want your name to live on forever, you have to slay 10,000,000 people or else come up with a cure for cancer. As they say, "It's all in the art. You don't get points just for living."

I am telling you, the world has gone through a LOT of psychobiosexual changes since I first lost my virginity.
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Re: Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

Post by Sy Borg »

"What is thing called, love?". "What is this thing?", called Love. "What is?, this thing called Love. "What? Is this thing called love?". "What is this?", Thing called Love. (from Benny Hill Show).

I reached a point where I simply just gave men up, like quitting smoking, except that returning to the cigs is more tempting. Ironic that thinkers and dreamers who are ostensibly seeking a deeper understanding and engagement with reality are so often possessed by the idea of animalistic thrusting and plunging, grunting and sweaty indignities. Much of the time it's not that comfortable, anyway. Then again, if we thought about what we do as we eat it might not seem so delightful either :)

Whatever, the deeper the love, the less it is acquisitive - including acquiring exclusive sexual access to another individual and the use of their bodies.

IMO it doesn't matter what you love, it is healthful to love something, anything - work, arts, chocolate, pets, nature, sport, God, watching TV, surfing the net, whatever - to be enthusiastic about something. Even without this passion, life is still worthwhile; sometimes a period of relative tumult or dormancy is necessary and one just needs to ride out the low times until circumstances improve.

But yes, sex and power and closely linked. Sex is really about growth, life's urge to grow and expand its influence any way it can.
Woodart
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Re: Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

Post by Woodart »

Woodart wrote:"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power." - Oscar Wilde

So we must ask ourselves what is this thing we call love?

Love is an aspect of consciousness that can be pretty tricky to understand. We all have it, most of us, but what is it? Is love emotion, feeling, distraction, desire, and/or madness? Love seems to be all over the map. Love can be ecstatically happy and mixed up - sad and insecure at the same time. In order to get a handle on love, I have to ask myself some questions. First, do I have love and if so with whom? Are there different types of love and if so what are they? How does love figure into my decision making?

I love my wife and children; my mother and father and my siblings. I love my friends, both male and female. I love my extended family – grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. I especially love my dog – very deeply. I love my tools (a lot), my truck, my house (which I built), and my planet. I love fresh flowers, the sea side, the forest and mountains. I love to walk, garden, build things and talk to people.

I love my wife different than everyone else because I have sex with her. Sex changes a relationship – makes it deeper - different. I have never thought about my children sexually or my mother or father. I have a platonic love with my friends and extended family.

Love seems to exist on a sliding scale in my mind’s eye. Love is very intense with my wife especially when we have sex because we endeavor to be one being. My children are an extension of me in a physical sense and the love is very strong. Love has identification with another - as part of me. It is a bond that says this is me or this is part of me. Or it is a bond that says this is how I want to be. Love sees itself in the other. Love is the bridge between two bodies or “things” that want to be one. There is sexual and nonsexual love. Both are very powerful.

I don’t agree with old Oscar Wilde – he sounds more like Oscar the grouch from Sesame Street. If you’re having sex with someone in order to be superior in some way, gain some advantage – you’re doing it wrong IMHO. Good loving sex is a blessing and ideally mutually enjoyed. Good mutual sex is powerful in a loving spiritual sense. I’ll concede Oscar’s idea of “power” if that’s what he intended, but I doubt it.

Males are ruled by testosterone and as a result they are pretty stupid unless they pay attention. Most males just think of themselves when it comes to sex – it’s all about the climax. This is a colossal mistake; probably the biggest mistake in all of human history. Most of the carnage and debacles in the last 5000 years can be traced back in some significant way to male misguided sexual expression. Males mistake sex with dominating and subduing another. To dominate another psychologically in sex distorts its best meaning. This behavior teaches men that gratification and domination go hand in hand. Then this principle is transferred into the economic and political world. Men have been in charge of the world for the last 5000 years or so. They have not done a good job – quite the opposite.
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Re: Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

Post by Fcacciola »

Woodart wrote:Love is an aspect of consciousness that can be pretty tricky to understand. We all have it, most of us, but what is it? Is love emotion, feeling, distraction, desire, and/or madness? Love seems to be all over the map. Love can be ecstatically happy and mixed up - sad and insecure at the same time. In order to get a handle on love, I have to ask myself some questions. First, do I have love and if so with whom? Are there different types of love and if so what are they? How does love figure into my decision making?

Nice topic.

As in most of my posts here, the following comes from a certain non-mainstream belief system. I'll try to keep it to a minimum but I need certain postulates in order to address the topic.

DISCLAIMER 1: This is a rather, let me say, engineering approach to love, not as it it usually treated.

DISCLAIMER 2: The following contains many propositions which are logically necessary for the arguments being presented, but is out of the scope of this post to justify any of them, so they are simply given. Have in mind, however, that these propositions are part of a belief system, not part of a theory or any other formal system.

DISCLAIMER 3: The entire scope of the ideas presented in this post is rather large, so I'll purposely level down the formality and the details so I can cut to the crux, which is Love, as quickly as possible. However, as a result, any critical review would easily spot problems in this post.

First some background. Please bear with me, this is related to the topic in hand.

According to this belief system...

The thing that we might think of as our inner self, the source of consciousness, the "me" making decisions, is the so-called Spirit, or Soul. And a human being is a spirit temporarily "incarnated" in a biological body through the mind, which interfaces "us" with our brain, so we can perceive the physical reality and indirectly operate on it through our body.

So, each one of us is a spirit (temporarily living a human life). Interestingly, according to this belief system, so is everything else. That is, while *I* am a spirit, my body is ultimately composed of (much smaller) spirit "fractions". So are the clothes we wear, the air around us, the stars, etc...

As you can see, this model isn't classical "dualism", for everything is made of spirits, and is just that some take on a "physical" role, such as the ones making up atoms, and some are not in that "physical" role, such as you and me. And, being all spirits, we DO interact, which is why you and me can link to a body and have, say, our hands lifted (but we need a mechanism to properly communicate and propagate the intention, which our bodies provide, so we can't link to a, say, rock and have it bounce around at will)

But all these spirits (we, the air, the stars, etc...) came from a "Creator". We can call that "God", though this is nothing like the religious God(s). In particular, God only created spirits, not this (or any other) Universe.

There are two fundamental characteristics, or attributes, of any spirit:

(1) we have free-will
(2) we have been created, but we cannot be destroyed and we have all of eternity (we are hemi-eternal)

Having free-will means that individually, we only do what we choose to do.

What I said above doesn't look at all like our human experience, in which "we" do plenty of stuff we don't choose (from breathing, to running like a speedster on the face of sudden danger, even if we didn't even think about it and staying would have been smarter), and we cannot do all we do choose (like flying). What happens is that the statement above refers to one individual spirit (such as the "me" in "ME"), but a human being is not one individual spirit but an organism. As such, the "all of us" that makes up a human being must agree and coordinate a net decision before anything actually happens. We are at the apex of a hierarchy, which is why most of the time, we found ourselves doing with our bodies what we actually wanted, but there are obvious limitations, plus there are actions that our bodies would execute without even asking "us" (which can include a full-range attack on a predator for example)

But, at the level of the individual spirit, nothing at all happens if there is not a conscious choice to make it so.

Have in mind that, again according to this belief system, our "thoughts" and "feelings" are not a direct expression of our intentions, desires and inner decision making. These are just things going on in (and often for) the body, which we can perceive, just as we can perceive the hands moving or the body temperature dropping. Thoughts and feelings are just a mental perception (a sort of reflexion) of whatever we and the rest of the body senses and do. You might think of "the mind" (and all mental processes) as this Internet forum: it does express what we think but not directly. It's contents needs to be explicitly constructed and stored; and, it reflect all of us, not just my words.

Let's try to imagine that point in time when we were just "created", that is, as "free spirits" not linked to any organism yet. This is way before the Universe. As "free spirits", we don't think, feel, do and communicate in the way we humans do it, but we do all that nonetheless, in its more "natural" or primordial form.

If free-will means that we only do something we choose to do (we free-spirits, not we humans), then, why would we choose to do anything at all to begin with?

Well, according to this belief system, the Creator didn't create spirits with just free-will and eternal life,

(3) we have drive: a reason to act, to choose to do something rather than nothing.

Having the free-will, that is, self-causation to only do what we choose to do, and the drive to have a reason to do anything at all, we just need one last essential characteristic or attribute:

(4) we have cognition: the ability to gather, retain, process, use and communicate information, which we use to choose what to do in accordance to our drive.

One fundamental consequence of the fact that spirits have free-will (self-causation) is that the Creator (or God is you prefer) cannot determine or cause any event upon a spirit (such as you, me or a glass of water). That is, he cannot have us do what is right instead of what is wrong, and we are almost left to our own devices.
[Notice that I mentioned before how everything, not just the "human soul", is made of spirits, so, the Creator cannot determine nor cause anything at all, including the behavior of nature for both "animate and inanimate objects"]

But why did I said that we are almost left to our own devices?

First, that we have free-will, meaning that we only do what we choose to do, that is, that we drive ourselves and "God" cannot drive any of us, does not mean we are unguided. He is constantly guiding us, so that we can keep the freedom of choice, but have a chance of ending up in a place that makes sense, even if on the very very long term.

Second, we choose what we do, but we don't choose the impact of our actions.

Remember that we are imagining the situation when we are all free spirits, not linked to any organism. That is before there was a universe at all, before matter itself. In this context, there are no forces of nature, so what we do does not have the impact of moving objects, heating matter, lifting, carrying, etc... reality is just us (there is no matter yet) and all we do is interact with each other. So, what is then, the impact of what we do in this context?

Imagine the Creator, or God, or however you want to call him, created one and only spirit. One single spirit would still have free-will, drive and cognition, so he would be able to do whatever he chooses to do, but, what would that be? well, he would experience things. The whole point of having these 3 attributes (free-will, drive and cognition) is to have experiences, to have a life if you will. Now, how do we experience anything at all? by doing something from which we draw an experience. So, a single lonely spirit would just do things in order to experience things, and that experience, that perception, that awareness, not of what he is, but of what he is doing, is the impact of his actions.

Thus, according to this belief system, built-in within our Drive attribute is the permanent pursuit of experiences.
The second we were brought into existence (which does not refer to the moment of human birth but that instant we have been created by God as a spirit or soul, which even happened way before the Big Bang), we are a blank page and we know nothing except our own existence and the primordial awareness of our Drive, this impulse to do things in order to experience things.
The impact of whatever we do (that is, the experience we draw from doing) is a feedback loop. If we liked it, we would more or less repeat the action, otherwise we try something new. Our intrinsic drive, complemented with free-will and cognition, start us on a path of self-caused action->impact->action->impact...

Now let's imagine that God created two, not one spirit. Would there be any difference between the self-impact of their individual actions and anything done together? As it turns out, yes, there is a difference. And is not a small one: the depth and extent of the experience drawn from the actions of any individual spirit is less than that of the combined actions of two (or more) spirits.

That is, when two or more spirits do something together, their individual experiences extend. It is in this extended experience where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. We are intrinsically drawn to experience, but God created us in such a way, that the experience drawn from joint actions is deeper and larger than that of any individual action. This "extended joint experiences" is a gathering mechanism that is built-in.

The Impact of any action only comes after the action, so any experience that results from an action freely chosen might be negative, relative to the agent making the choice, in the sense that what was experienced (after the action) might not be what was intended (when the action was decided). Thus, one can classify choices (actions and experiences thereof) as good or bad along the natural path of learning. According to this belief system, there is a feedback mechanism built within our cognition and drive by which we always seek to match the expected impact (the experience we wanted) with the actual impact (the experience we got). Whatever we do makes us "feel good or bad", relative to our own expectations, and is that perception which feeds back into our learning, shaping our future choices.
The fundamental trait of this feedback mechanism is that is always relative to ourselves. It measures self-impact. One can "make mistakes", in the sense of getting an experience that was not expected, over and over and over, but this is within the normal course of progression. We have free-will and cognition to learn from such mistakes, otherwise, God would have created us such that we only do we he determines, or with infinite wisdom to only do what is right.

However, even though free-will entails the impossibility of external causation (spirits only do what we decide to do), decisions have only a degree of self-determination. A decision can be entirely self-determined, on one end of the spectrum, or entirely coerced, on the opposite end. Therefore, self-causation (the essential attribute of free-will) doesn't necessarily translate into self-determination, for we can accept coercion. That is, we only do what we choose to do, yet we can choose to do what we rather wouldn't.

The impact of an ideal self-determined action might be good or bad relative to the deciding agent, and this is the normal course of progression and the point of having free-will, cognition and drive. However, the impact of coercion, even though is ultimately self-supported, goes always against the point of having free-will.
In consequence, according to this belief system, there is also a tension mechanism built within our cognition and drive by which we always seek to have self-determined actions instead of being coerced. In other words, coercion universally (as it is a builtin mechanism) "feels bad" (in proportion to the degree of coercion).

That is, there are two complementing regulation mechanisms at play: feedback and tension. The first regulates the learning feedback loop so we can eternally choose what to do, but progress and not just exist. The second regulates the coercion perception so we are aware that we are doing, and we are experiencing, but we are not directly learning since there is no explicit matching between what we expected would result from a choice and what actually resulted (that is, the feedback mechanism doesn't kick in when we just do as we are told)

Granted, coercion still leads to actions, actions have always an impact, and impact is experience, so even under coercion we do learn, but is not the direct, first hand learning that we get when actions are self-determined.

Now,

Since we have the builtin drive to seek joint experiences, and our actions are always placed somewhere between totally self-determined and totally coerced, there are two opposing paths to follow to get a joint experience.

One is the path of coercion where some parties drive the net-decision so the extended joint experience aligns with their preferences, but not with the preferences of the other parties. Since coercion is self-supported (free-will as self-causation is still there), in the case of coercion, both parties are on this path.

The other is the path of finding matching decisions so that we can have a joint experience yet maximizing self-determination of all involved parties.

Let's call the former the path of Power, and the later the path of Love.

Notice how both Power and Love can be seen as opposing strategies to the same goal, which is to have a joint experience.

Keep in mind that we're still referring to the "world of free spirits", not human beings. So, this characterization of our drive as Power vs Love is universal and primordial.

If both Power and Love are strategies to the same goal, are they somewhat equivalent? Of course not. The "problem" with Power is that is uses coercion, but as we've seen, we have a builtin mechanism against it. Power can take us far, but no further, since the builtin tension mechanism would eventually disrupt the "system". The joint experience that comes from Power, even though it is an extended experience, is unbalanced since not all the involved decisions are self-determined. Power is always unstable due to the imbalance of self vs coerced decisions. Love, on the other hand, has no limits, for it provides a balanced joint-experience with no internal tension as it displays a net decision that is composed of self-determined individual decisions.

In practice, Power and Love as described here are the ideal extremes of a spectrum, and we constantly apply degrees of one and the other at every step.

Let us now move a up from the dynamics of free spirits (not linked to a biological organism) to human beings. According to these believes, a human being is a system, and "we" are a spirit at the apex of the system, effectively driving it. However, the rest of the system is also composed of spirits (fractions of spirits to be precise). Some of them are in a "physical" role (quarks, molecules, cells, tissue, etc...), following (on their own free-will) the so-called Laws of Nature, while others are not, and "parallel" the physical parts with a sort of non-physical "para-system". In a human being, the physical subsystem has the brain at the apex, the para-physical subsystem has the mind at the apex (which is a non-physical organ parallel to the brain), and on top of these two subsystems, is "us".

If, as a human, we are the drivers of a hierarchical system of spirits (fractions), which is our body, everything we said before implies that the second we are linked to this (at inception), we are engaged in a primary "relationship" with our body, for it is a community of "conscious, sentient and free-will agents, such as we are". Being "incarnate" corresponds to a specially-designed, super amplified "joint experience". Unlike the more distant relationships with other people, or with other spirits in the case of free ones (say before we incarnate), a single human being is itself a "collective" providing a mechanism through which the joint experience is maximized to the point that we effectively experience our body as if it where directly our own experience, even though is not.

The interplay of Power and Love in the relationship with our bodies, that is, driving this specially amplified joint-experience, somewhere from coercion to self-determination of all involved parts, is the very first thing we start learning when we incarnate. We have needs, but so does the different parts of our body, so there is a constant pull on both directions. If our body needs resources, we feel hunger or thirst, but is up to us to do something about it, so we get a chance to learn that in order to sustain the joint-experience (in this case, to stay alive) we need to align our self-determination with that signaling from our body. Because of the way the human system is designed, if we disregard those needs, the body takes over through Power and we find ourselves coerced. However, this interplay can be of Love instead, and we can agree to attend those biological needs without being coerced. Likewise, since our body is itself a collection of spirits (fractions), it responds to our own self-determined decisions (like wanting to walk up a hill) in the same way, that is, somewhere between being coerced by our own Power (which we perceive as a physical struggle), or by aligning to our needs (which we perceive as being full of energy).

Though our body can to a large extent heal itself, when something is wrong, it needs to communicate that to us, so it signals the problem to our brain, which in turn sends that to our mind so it can be encoded into our own spiritual language (which is not the human language from which thoughts and emotions are constructed) and relayed to us. Then we become consciously aware of the problem. However, since being linked to our body in the way we are leads to a specially amplified joint-experience, that perception of a body problem, which is in itself effectively external, feels like "pain", and not just information about something on the outside. This feeling of pain because of a problem with our body, which ultimately are just other spirits (fractions in this case), best exemplifies what joint-experiences are about, and the depth and extent of the joint. The opposite case, that is when our body is all right, is also communicated all the way up, providing us with the joint-experience of pleasure instead of pain.

As humans, our body is the first and foremost playground through which we learn how to link to others in order to have a joint-experience. We feel pain or pleasure depending on how bad or good our body is working, even though that body is effectively somebody else(s). The reverse is also true, and our own inner-self state is signaled down and reflects directly in what the body "feels".

This learning about bonding and joint-experiences starts with our body, then extends to other people, and the basic principles still apply: since we are bound by an intrinsic drive to seek joint-experiences, we get together (family, friends, society), and then being together, we learn how to gauge from coercion (power) to agreement (love). Since power is unstable and unbalanced, as we evolve, we lean towards love instead, as it is stable and balanced.

Our body coerces us--by a mechanism mixing degrees of pain and pleasure--into following certain behaviors. The primary ones are related to immediate survival: drinking, eating, sleeping, etc.... Eventually, however, procreation becomes fundamentally important and we experience sexual attraction. Sexual attraction, however, is special in that it pulls us into binding with other people, by which we can extend the joint experience further away from our own bodies. That becomes the next step into learning how to link with others (which is one of the primary purposes of having a human life), thus, our body experiences sexual attraction specifically in order to amplify the interplay of Power<->Love that is always at the core of any joint-experience, only this time with respect to another person. Ideally, we would learn how to gauge from power to love in that new relationship.

Thus, "falling in Love" which is a feeling generated by our body, is an experience whose purpose is to let us play with binding to other people much more closer than we do with family and friends. Falling in Love is experienced as a pull precisely to coerce us into the linkage, but then is up to us to learn from it and shift to Love instead of Power.

If "falling in Love" (being sexually attracted) is a playground, to Love is the ideal outcome. In itself, Love is a verb, not a feeling, and in its ideal form, refers to the pursue of joint-experiences that preserves self-determination of all involved parties. In practice, when we humans "love" (so to speak), we do purse joint-experiences but with any varying degree of coercion<->agreement, that is, we gauge from Power to Love as we evolve. We often refer to love as a feeling because said joint-experience is, like any other experience, perceived. That is, we are consciously aware of having a joint-experience, and is that what we refer to as "the feeling of Love". However, the most important thing about it is to learn that is an action, not a feeling (even if we feel the act when doing it).


[... there is much more to say but this post is already way too long...]
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LuckyR
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Re: Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

Post by LuckyR »

Woodart wrote:
Woodart wrote:"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power." - Oscar Wilde

So we must ask ourselves what is this thing we call love?

Love is an aspect of consciousness that can be pretty tricky to understand. We all have it, most of us, but what is it? Is love emotion, feeling, distraction, desire, and/or madness? Love seems to be all over the map. Love can be ecstatically happy and mixed up - sad and insecure at the same time. In order to get a handle on love, I have to ask myself some questions. First, do I have love and if so with whom? Are there different types of love and if so what are they? How does love figure into my decision making?

I love my wife and children; my mother and father and my siblings. I love my friends, both male and female. I love my extended family – grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. I especially love my dog – very deeply. I love my tools (a lot), my truck, my house (which I built), and my planet. I love fresh flowers, the sea side, the forest and mountains. I love to walk, garden, build things and talk to people.

I love my wife different than everyone else because I have sex with her. Sex changes a relationship – makes it deeper - different. I have never thought about my children sexually or my mother or father. I have a platonic love with my friends and extended family.

Love seems to exist on a sliding scale in my mind’s eye. Love is very intense with my wife especially when we have sex because we endeavor to be one being. My children are an extension of me in a physical sense and the love is very strong. Love has identification with another - as part of me. It is a bond that says this is me or this is part of me. Or it is a bond that says this is how I want to be. Love sees itself in the other. Love is the bridge between two bodies or “things” that want to be one. There is sexual and nonsexual love. Both are very powerful.

I don’t agree with old Oscar Wilde – he sounds more like Oscar the grouch from Sesame Street. If you’re having sex with someone in order to be superior in some way, gain some advantage – you’re doing it wrong IMHO. Good loving sex is a blessing and ideally mutually enjoyed. Good mutual sex is powerful in a loving spiritual sense. I’ll concede Oscar’s idea of “power” if that’s what he intended, but I doubt it.

Males are ruled by testosterone and as a result they are pretty stupid unless they pay attention. Most males just think of themselves when it comes to sex – it’s all about the climax. This is a colossal mistake; probably the biggest mistake in all of human history. Most of the carnage and debacles in the last 5000 years can be traced back in some significant way to male misguided sexual expression. Males mistake sex with dominating and subduing another. To dominate another psychologically in sex distorts its best meaning. This behavior teaches men that gratification and domination go hand in hand. Then this principle is transferred into the economic and political world. Men have been in charge of the world for the last 5000 years or so. They have not done a good job – quite the opposite.
Stereotype much? I assume that the above is derived from your personal experience, which is perfectly reasonable. But you are out of your area when describing others, especially others from different eras to your own.
"As usual... it depends."
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Re: Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

Post by Steve3007 »

OP:
I am not sure about the truth of this statement, but it is very intriguing.
I think that's probably true of lots of other Oscar Wilde aphorisms too. They're funny and witty and sound as though they pithily summarise a deep truth about life. But probably don't really. This reminds me of the part in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when the mice are trying to think of an Ultimate Question to go with the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything (42) and settle on "How many roads much a man walk down?" because it sounds deep without tying itself down to actually meaning anything.
Woodart
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Re: Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

Post by Woodart »

Well, all I can say is that when it rains it pours. This thread has been sitting neglected for weeks and now I have 3 responses today – thanks.
Fcacciola wrote: (2) we have been created, but we cannot be destroyed and we have all of eternity (we are hemi-eternal)
Fcacciola - I like your thinking very much and I think you have a fine mind. Much of what you say sounds like Panpsychism to me. However, I take exception to your second attribute of spirit – hemi-eternal. I do not think we know our destiny beyond this life. I feel God speaks but very subtly.

Fcacciola wrote: Let's call the former the path of Power, and the later the path of Love.
What you call power and love – I call volition and emotion. I think they are very similar, with different nuances.

I try to be practical in my philosophical thinking. I try to assert only that which I can be sure of now. I don’t want to speculate about tomorrow; what God is or is not. I do not know what I will become or where I am going after this life – if anything. This “now” is enough. I know what love is because I can feel it. I have volition and the will to love. This is the essence of my consciousness. This life is magical and mysterious and it leads me to feel the equation of God. The equation is much greater than I can comprehend – but I can see and feel it.

LuckyR wrote: Stereotype much? I assume that the above is derived from your personal experience, which is perfectly reasonable. But you are out of your area when describing others, especially others from different eras to your own.
I see the world in the last 5000 years ruled by men. The reasons are very complex, but a large part of it comes from men’s sexual habits and views of women as sexual objects. This is a very complex subject and I tossed it in to try and stimulate conversation. I am happy to talk about in detail, if, you or someone else wants to engage. I await your serious enquire – there is enough here now for you to give me a rebuttal. Just to say you do not like the idea or that I do not know “others from different eras” is not very much to go on. Tell me why – please?

Steve3007 wrote: I think that's probably true of lots of other Oscar Wilde aphorisms too. They're funny and witty and sound as though they pithily summarise a deep truth about life. But probably don't really. This reminds me of the part in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when the mice are trying to think of an Ultimate Question to go with the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything (42) and settle on "How many roads much a man walk down?" because it sounds deep without tying itself down to actually meaning anything.

I was just trying to excite some thought. I agree it doesn’t say very much – like your quote. I hope you have more to say.
Steve3007
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Re: Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

Post by Steve3007 »

I was just trying to excite some thought. I agree it doesn’t say very much – like your quote. I hope you have more to say.
I wasn't criticising. Just an observation. And you have succeeded in exciting some thought.
Woodart
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Re: Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

Post by Woodart »

Steve3007 wrote: And you have succeeded in exciting some thought.

Not very much ....... unfortunately.
Fcacciola
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Re: Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

Post by Fcacciola »

Woodart wrote:
Fcacciola - I like your thinking very much and I think you have a fine mind. Much of what you say sounds like Panpsychism to me. However, I take exception to your second attribute of spirit – hemi-eternal. I do not think we know our destiny beyond this life. I feel God speaks but very subtly.
Fair enough.
There are a number of extremely fundamental ideas that deeply depend on that postulate, and I thought I would address one of them in the post, so I added it.
But, in the end, I didn't, so the postulate is unnecessary in the current conversation (and unnecessary speculative postulates really shouldn't be mentioned at all)
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LuckyR
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Re: Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

Post by LuckyR »

Woodart wrote:
LuckyR wrote: Stereotype much? I assume that the above is derived from your personal experience, which is perfectly reasonable. But you are out of your area when describing others, especially others from different eras to your own.
I see the world in the last 5000 years ruled by men. The reasons are very complex, but a large part of it comes from men’s sexual habits and views of women as sexual objects. This is a very complex subject and I tossed it in to try and stimulate conversation. I am happy to talk about in detail, if, you or someone else wants to engage. I await your serious enquire – there is enough here now for you to give me a rebuttal. Just to say you do not like the idea or that I do not know “others from different eras” is not very much to go on. Tell me why – please?
Well, a declaration like: "Males are ruled by testosterone" is bold sounding yet a stereotype at best, likely a gross oversimplification to the point of limited utility and at worst a groundless insult to half the population of the planet. Now if you have noted that you personally are ruled by your hormones, then that is a valid observation useful for the understanding of exactly one human. But your experience drops off dramatically to the observation (from the experiential) once you move from something you know well, yourself, to the guy standing next to you, let alone folks who lived a couple of millennia before you were even conceived.

Instead of painting the species with your broad brush, if you want to say that organized (and even unorganized) aggression has as it's basis hormonal effects, then that might be true, though others would cite greed and envy more that straight aggression. Perhaps that is the discussion you were seeking.
"As usual... it depends."
Woodart
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Re: Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

Post by Woodart »

LuckyR wrote:Perhaps that is the discussion you were seeking.

What do we know for certain? Have men ruled the world in the last 5000 years? I say yes, men have dominated politics, economics, religion, education – philosophy. Can we agree on this point?
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LuckyR
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Re: Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power

Post by LuckyR »

Woodart wrote:
LuckyR wrote:Perhaps that is the discussion you were seeking.

What do we know for certain? Have men ruled the world in the last 5000 years? I say yes, men have dominated politics, economics, religion, education – philosophy. Can we agree on this point?
Glad to see you agree with my point (that humans are complex and their motivations don't lend themselves to bumper sticker declarations). Yes, I think most agree that the public face of leadership in most areas through history has been male. Others would point to the power behind the power, but that is a nuanced issue.
"As usual... it depends."
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