Observing the Thrill to Sin

When it comes to fetishes there is no telling what turns people on. Consider this fantasy, an eighty year old scientist pictures himself finding the Nobel prize award in his letter box. This thought fills him with an incredible adrenaline rush and he masturbates to the idea. You find this result and hundreds of others in Brett Kahr's book "Who has been sleeping in your head?"  You find sexual fantasies as straight-forward ego outlets. In the case of the retired scientist, the fantasized professional award is the  feeling of power and intellectual recognition that his ego gets excited about as he masturbates.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. We always say the homecoming process starts with acknowledging and understanding the "I". We already know from Freud that the sex drive is an incredibly strong energy field. If you repress that in the name of spirituality, expect a few Freudian slips along the way. Perhaps we are a little wiser today than a century ago when Freud developed his theories. We probably no longer presume a "normal" when it comes to sex. Actually the survey results in Brett Kahr's book would suggest there is no normal sexual fantasy. The results were all over the place. You have the traditional  versions, a woman who just wants to have good sex with someone tall, dark and handsome. You have a few respondents who report they don't have any sexual fantasies, and you have the ones that are a little out of the ordinary, like the fantasy of the European scientist. And then you also find a few that many would find pretty extreme, like rape fantasies or other subjects that are kind of out there.

Brett Kahr is a psychoanalyst and he does a good job in explaining where some of these sexual fantasies are coming from. One theme became pretty clear in his book, for  people who have suffered sexual abuse or have experienced other traumas in their childhood, sexual fantasies can become a way to work through these painful events. That of course begs the question, can we actually look down on any of these so-called sexual perversions. If they are just a psychological outlet to come clean with the past, they can be welcomed as a part of the recovery process instead.

We have come a long way in tolerating all kind of sexual desires. Not to long ago homosexuality was called a perversion whereas today few would.  BDSM is  perhaps still considered by many as extreme, but with a little help of the romantic novels "50 Shades of Grey", even that lifestyle has become somewhat of a household name. So what if we have the desire to be bound and spanked a little. If you see your ego in action played out in a sexual fantasy you perhaps have a much better chance to be mindful of it.

We are spiritual writers, not psychoanalysts or sex researchers. So we would say that it is a fine line acknowledging and expressing the demands of the "I" without being taken on yet another ego trip in the name of sexual liberation. But then, who exactly determines whether sexual drives are consistent with our spiritual path or not. If we look down on our sexual fantasies, it's probably still the ego talking, only dressed up in holy clothes  beating up our "darker" desires. Perhaps this ego bashing is actually not helpful for us at all. Perhaps the guilt is standing in the way of expressing some repressed sexual energy that simply wants to come to the surface. So back and forth goes the war inside without ever resolving anything in the name of spirituality.

We advice you  to be mindful of everything you are thinking, feeling and doing; listen to all the voices in your head, and let all the emotions pop up without judgement and you will know what works for your spiritual path and what not. Listening to your fantasies, perhaps even expressing some of them physically might certainly be part of your self- discovery process.

The "hunger for more" can certainly be part of our sex life, you probably have already experienced it for yourself. Expressing this drive is a road to nowhere and the sooner you jump of this train, the better off you will be. Our spiritual community has written about this restlessness already many millennia ago. The hunger for more can be found everywhere: more money, more status, more lovers, more extreme sexual experiences; you fill in the blanks. Just as we are able to observe a divine origin in us, the ability to love, a state of innocence,  the ability to be absolutely still, the experience of connectedness and peace, we can observe the opposite force as well.

 In fact, there is a "thrill" of going in the opposite direction of spirituality, especially when it comes to sex.  The time when you zoom into body parts not people. Getting a high from watching or expressing erotic anger, or pushing the boundaries of what others would consider normal and sane. The spiritual community reminds us what you probably already know: stillness and love can be experienced and enjoyed forever, but lust will never be satisfied, no matter what we do.  Reading some of the more extreme responses in the surveys you definitely wonder whether Robert J. Stoller was onto something when he developed the idea of the " thrill to sin"  in "Observing the Erotic Imagination". He claimed that in sexual perversion the excitement really comes from the notion of sinning.  So the "perverse mind" gets a kick out of imagining or practicing stuff that others consider taboo.

When you think about it, it is very hard to tell what exactly is sexually arousing. Your blood is rushing through your veins, your heart is beating fast, the hormones are circulating.  The chemicals in your brain go into overdrive.  Could the initial kick be stress related, but you mistake the physical symptoms as sexual arousal? The initial stress is related to push the boundaries, in doing something others would find revolting. But you cannot tell what is cause and what is effect. And in the end you don't care, either, all you know us that you are turned on and that you like the thrill ride.

There actually was an interesting psychological study done to illustrate this point. An attractive reporter interviewed two groups of men in a city as well as on a small bridge in a high altitude and gave them afterwards her phone number with the interaction to call her with any follow-up questions. It turned out that a significantly  larger number of men did the follow-up call of the group  interviewed in high altitude. Apparently they mistook their fear of heights with sexual arousal!

So where does that leave us with? Walking the Tao is never about right or wrong, it is about studying the yin and yang that lies behind everything. Who can say what sex practices and fantasies are healthy outlets of our whole being and which ones are knocking us off our spiritual path. Each spiritual path traveler has to make that call for herself. Perhaps one signpost could be stability, the absence of restlessness. The above quoted European scientist claimed that he had masturbated to the same fantasy for decades, so chances are one day he will just grow tired of it. In the "thrill to sin" the boundaries always have to stretched otherwise the experience will get boring. It is also highly addictive  because that is how the hunger for more always works. When you observe this restlessness inside there is really only one practical solution: get off the treadmill and there will be peace.