3 thoughts on sex and pornography – for SD and anyone else

>>From the viewpoint of a Taoist practitioner,
>>the challenge is the same as when watching
>>any film – how do you keep your energetic center,
>>i.e. keep digesting the experience without losing
>>your center? That is when you decide if you want
>>to be watching a movie with violence, which I feel
>>is far more pornographic than films with explicit sex
>>done just for money, which is a kind of lesser violence
>>done to self by mechanizing sex (unless one has chosen
>>it as one’s artistic form and wants to get paid for it).

In a lot of ways I agree with you, society (at least here
in America) seems to be fairly accepting of violence,
but extremely repressed sexually. In some ways, it really
seems backward–i.e. sex (even if mechanized) should be
more accepted than violence.

HOWEVER, here is what I think is a big difference between
the two:

When I watch violence, it doesn’t activate a desire
in me to do violent acts. However, when I watch sex
it DOES activate a desire in me to have sex and to
be doing the things that I’m seeing. Herein lies the
problem with the sexual. For the most part, you get
all “juiced-up” from the visual stimulation, but
you can’t really do anything with it.

If the sex that you see is really empty of
heart-filled emotion, so much the worse–you feel drained
of energy and the craving for an emotional craving
is left unsatisfied.

HOWEVER, even if it is heart-centered, the problem
is that oftentimes you still get juiced-up from the visual
stimulation, but then you can’t really do anything about it.

Just presenting this idea for debate . . .

Best,
Steven

Steven,
the danger in your thinking is to devalue ALL art that includes eroticism- which is exactly what happens with those buddhists trying to cut off ALL desire as distracting or creating suffering. It is why I raised the issue of porn vs. erotic art originally.

So your argument is essentially the same as those Buddhists holding the all-desire-is-bad argument (note: not all Buddhists hold that view, many hold the middle way). But it too easily leads to suppression of one’s soul force, which is sexually polarized and DOES naturally have sexual desire (as jsun pointed out in the beginning of this thread). Art suppressors may become philistines, it can suppress one’s general creativity.

Without the sexual impulse, humanity is finished. SEX EMBODIES WHO WE ARE. It seems to be a question of more how to best cultivate the impulse, without denying it. The very popularity of sex as perhaps the number one draw on the net attests to its importance – the net is a print out of humanity’s emerging consciousness.

So watching art raises the awareness of aspects of the soul that need to be manifested. If you don’t have a partner, it could raise awareness of issues like, what kind of partner do I want to attract, what kind of relationship do I want to have when i do find one? How can I avoid or at least recognize that empty feeling in my living relationship? “Good porn”, i.e. erotic art – may offer an opportunity to hold the neutral point of awareness which resolves that sexed soul desire even as you are experiencing heighted sexual tension.

That is why I often suggest to Fusion students to go to a movie and watch it from the space of their inner pearl – absorbing the emotional chi in (of the film AND the audience in the theatre) and digesting it rather than being sucked out. That is an approximation of what we have to do in real life, its an attempt to use the artificial life of film as a training ground.

On the internet, the audience is physically invisible, but it is energetically present by resonance. Everyone watching the same film has a unique frequency resonance. so if you transform that act within yourself, you transform everyone else at that frequency. That is how alchemy works. Every alchemist is attracted to different things/people/processes that need transformation. So sexual transformation is just one issue, but it is the most universal human issue.

Ultimately, sexual frustration forces creative solutions, and the spiritualization of the sexual impulse I feel is the highest creative solution. So maybe we should all be recording spiritual love sessions and posting it ont eh net as an act of compassion, of tossing out a seed of our purfied essence. But don’t do it if you are not ready to be energetically seen by the unwashed masses. It will pull on you. Perhaps that is why alchemists have historically done their work in hidden places, i.e. inside their cauldron.

michael

Hello

For the moment I feel both of you are right. In some sense I have had this ambivalence to it. Not liking it and also feel there is something good with it also. Perhaps it’s the way you are using it. Perhaps you can use it in good ways and if not to much of it it is good. For me for the moment recognising an adiction to it I go from this view on it to the one saying for the moment it is bad for me and for me it’s best to stop it.

It is of course interesting on a bigger level as Michael says. Perhaps this subject have beeing a problem beacase there is a rejection of sex. There is not for instance many movies going in to real erotic sex and still be movies with good quality. Beacase you are not serious if you make porn!

In the litterature there is soem authours doing quite good stuf. I was starting reading one of Henty Millers novels. “Tropic of Cancer (1934).” It seems to be excelent art in top class and still wery erotic.

Maybe its the quality of this we shall try to change. Not stopping it completely beacase this would perhaps be impossible. I like Michaels idea to use it to change some energy fields around it and perhaps evolve the humanity. But it seems to be risky to.

Sincerely S D

I agree with a lot of what you said.

To be honest, I don’t watch a lot of violent films.
When I do watch films that contain violence,
they tend to be of the “fantasy”-type, ala
“the Matrix”. Here in such movies I tend
to remain completely detached, and am not
the least bit inspired to do violent acts.

However:
There are a whole slough of films out there
that are extremely violent, yet extremely
popular, and are mostly terrible in my mind.
I don’t watch them.

For instance:

1. Films like “Saw”.

Not that I find such films scary; I don’t.
However, I don’t consider watching people
getting tortured, maimed, and killed to be
entertaining or something I want to see.
I find it repugnant. I consider it a
type of “torture porn”, where people who watch
such films get turned on by seeing the
torture of others.

The fact that so many people seem to be
enthralled by it, disturbs me on many levels.
I think that is helping to destroy society.

2. War movies

I think war is horrible, and I have no
interest in seeing more of what is horrible.
I can’t see why people enjoy watching them.

3. “In the hood”-type films; serial killer films

People get killed like this all the time, and
we see it in the news. Why do we want to
see more of it?

At least in these cases–which is in all honesty
probably the majority of the violent movies–
in doing a comparison, it would probably be
better for society if they watched sex videos instead.
It wouldn’t infuse people with a hardened heart and
a desire for cruelty like these films do.

Steve

Below is a article on porn addcition which I found to be a very grounded and honest view on it. My only comment on the whole internet stuff is that, I have worked with many people lately that are totally addicted and have found good foundations and a simple program helps them get pass the addictive cycle. ALl traditions warn us about how the sexual energy is like wildfire and will burn very fast, which will drain you.

I thought wendys comment to be so inline with what so many go through-it draws you away from your center and drains via through the senses. I think internet addiction risks are way to dangerous to play around with. Theres no easy answer/right answer on how to deal with arousal qi, not all practices help all people the same, ideal situation would be someone that deals with tao practices and addictions. You would get the best from both worlds the mind/body/soul connection.

Below is a lengthy article & Link… but well worth the read..SL

Many millions of dollars (or other currencies) were spent to trap you (or your loved one) in this escalating cycle. And many millions of years of evolution unwittingly made the trap possible. So there is nothing to feel guilty about.

Your situation is grave – and calls for a completely new and unfamiliar direction – but it is not as hopeless or ‘unnatural’ as you may believe. Links between sexual arousal and weird things (even dominance, violence, and perversion) are possible because of the neurochemicals our brains produce in response to things that are shocking, risky, guilt-producing, or pain-producing. For example, the common act of circumcision can link pain and victim fantasies to eroticism.

The fundamental problem is that, through a galactic oversight, you were turned loose in a physical body without the instruction manual for how your primitive brain operates. Here’s a copy, so that you can resume command.

The part of your brain that governs emotions, drives, impulses, and subconscious decision-making is known as the “limbic system.” limbic system It does its jobs so efficiently that evolution hasn’t seen the need to change it much since before humans were humans. This is why it’s considered to be part of your primitive brain.

It is not the rational part of your brain, or neo-cortex. The neo-cortex (or ‘gray matter’) is the newer, larger part of the brain, which you will have to harness in order to pre-empt your primitive brain’s frantic signals, and move in a healthy direction.

The porn industry has hijacked a small portion of your primitive brain known as “the reward center.” To regain control of it you’ll find it helpful to learn some things about addiction and sex. Once you understand these things, you’ll see why issues of “guilt” and “perversion” have little to do with your challenge – no matter how…peculiar your tastes have grown. In fact, you want to leave all guilt/perversion concepts behind, because they actually strengthen your addiction, as you will see.

Instead of fretting about what a sorry pervert you have become, think of your circumstances as a nightmare you’re having, from which you can simply awaken – once you work out how to flip on the light switch. This will return your erotic phantoms to powerless cartoons.

Before we explain how you can escape the cycle you’re in, let’s look at what’s going on at a physical level.

Evolution Gone Awry

Although experts define addiction differently from each other, we will define it as an uncontrollable compulsion to repeat a behavior regardless of its negative consequences.

Addiction appears to be a syndrome in which addicted persons become tricked into believing that something harmful is actually beneficial, and in extreme instances, that something harmful is vitally necessary – as necessary as breath to a drowning man. But how is this possible? How can addicts believe that something is helping them when in reality it is destroying them?

Being physically addicted to alcohol means the body has adapted to the chronic use of alcohol to such a degree that in its absence the body can’t function properly or doesn’t feel right. As a result, the alcoholic compulsively seeks out alcohol to avoid the painful bodily sensations of withdrawal. Being psychologically addicted means that workaholics, for example, work compulsively to keep uncomfortable emotions such as depression or anxiety at bay. Thus, psychological addictions are unconscious strategies for avoiding emotional pain whereas physical addictions involve compulsive behaviors to avoid the physical pain of withdrawal. In either case, addicted persons act compulsively to avoid immediate pain.

Generally, definitions that distinguish “psychological” from “physical” addictions fail to mention that all addictions involve changes in the reward center. The changes relate to various neurotransmitters (chemicals your body uses to send the signals that activate your feelings and bodily functions). This means that all addictions are physical, even though they may not involve a substance. Central to these brain changes is a jump in a neurochemical called dopamine. Dopamine has been called “the molecule of addiction.”

All addictions involve release of dopamine in the reward center. The evolutionary purpose of that dopamine is to motivate you (and every animal) to engage in the behaviors that ensure survival as a species. These behaviors include eating, drinking water, mating, taking risks, seeking novelty, and so forth. (Mean Genes – From Sex to Money to Food: Taming Our Primal Instincts by Burnham and Phelen is an excellent book on this general subject, although it offers no advice that is specific to porn addiction.)

This motivational system or reward center is quite similar in all mammals, which means that it has been around for at least 100 million years. Even so, it has some glaring weaknesses:

∑ Although it has served evolution well, it can be hijacked by substances and activities that do not further your survival. For example, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and a compelling attraction to internet porn all turn on the reward center, but they certainly don’t help you survive, or even propel your genes into the next generation. In fact, they can distract you from beneficial behaviors, and destroy your relationship. Nevertheless, at a neurochemical level, these self-defeating behaviors can each register as a definite “go for it!”

∑ Even when the reward center is working as “intended,” its goals do not necessarily improve your individual well-being. This is important to understand. Just because a craving is natural doesn’t make it good for you. For example, your reward center is designed to light up far more for fatty or sweet foods than for salads. The former items are now on every street corner, while our ancestors had to work hard for such treats. One result: a third of Americans are now obese, and another third overweight.

The Cost of Seeking Novelty

Your reward center is also designed to find a mate with whom you’ve experienced ex-President Clinton sexual satiation increasingly uninteresting, while it lights up enthusiastically at thought of a new mating opportunity. Scientists call this phenomenon the Coolidge Effect. In effect, your evolutionary design rewards you when you reproduce – and then move on to another partner to reproduce again. By doing so, you vastly increase the chances of your genes finding their way into future generations.1 This is why almost no mammals are monogamous.

The neurochemical program behind this behavior works as follows: after sexual satiation, dopamine drops – which doesn’t feel good. We then seek novel sexual stimulation to raise it again. At the beginning of a love affair, plain old sex is yummy. Then couples find that they have to add more spice, whether more intense foreplay, acting out fantasies, or watching porn together…or alone. Why does this happen? Their brain chemistry is sabotaging their relationship. Conventional sex, with its post-orgasmic neurochemistry of satiation, is the culprit. This cycle of passion-satiation, or attraction-repulsion, guarantees that satisfaction is fleeting, and frustration nearly a constant for sexually active adults. Ironically, the more passion we manage to experience, the less satisfaction we experience over all. Yet avoiding intimacy also leaves us aching.

These days, the easiest way to cope with this unconscious evolutionary reflex is by cruising the Internet for new sexually stimulating images. Your brain says “yes” to novel porn images because they register (falsely) with your primitive brain as new gene-passing opportunities. (We will discuss why shocking pictures and sexual partners of other races are particularly alluring in Part 3.)

Even though this mindless cave man evolutionary program urges you to pursue sirens – real or two-dimensional – you are actually better off finding an intimate relationship and learning to make it rewarding at a brain chemical level. Why? Relationships are healthy. Trusted companionship, physical affection, and long-term unions decrease rates of illness, prolong life, counter depression, speed healing – and even soothe cravings. According to various traditions, they also have unsuspected spiritual potential.

In short, your primitive brain misleads you when it encourages you to pursue sexual stimulation at the cost of a real relationship. When you forego finding a mate, or abandon your existing mate – whether physically, because you leave or emotionally, by substituting porn images – you undermine your own well-being.

“But why is pornography so addictive?”

The role of orgasm

In order to realize fully why porn and masturbation can be addictive, you need to understand a bit more about how orgasm itself affects the reward center in that primitive part of your brain. Like reaching for a high-calorie treat, orgasm is certainly natural. However, it is closer to recreational drugs than you may think. In fact, a scientist watching brain scans of men having orgasm concluded that the scans resemble those of people shooting heroin. Similarly, Bart Hoebel a psychologist at Princeton University said:

Highly palatable foods and highly potent sexual stimuli are the only stimuli capable of activating the dopamine system [reward center of the brain] with anywhere near the potency of addictive drugs.

Like a drug high, intense sexual stimulation triggers a neuro chemical hangover. You can think of the hangover as an uncomfortable withdrawal period. Dopamine drops, a sexual satiation neuro chemical rises, and testosterone receptors decrease – all of which can radically affect your mood for the worse or even bring on withdrawal symptoms. It is at this point in the sexual cycle that you do things that you will regret later.

Cigarettes might be the closest parallel to orgasms. At some point after his previous smoke, the smoker feels irritable and like he needs a cigarette – even though he would be better off without one. Withdrawal means feeling cranky and anxious until one’s brain chemistry returns to equilibrium. In our experience, sexual orgasm can dampen feelings of well-being for as long as two weeks after the initial buzz. Since few of us normally wait that long between orgasms, we’re anxious a lot.

Moreover, the more intense the passion, the more your body apparently struggles to regain equilibrium by down-regulating (temporarily decreasing) the nerve cell receptors for dopamine in the reward center of the brain. This means that during the withdrawal phase after sexual satiation, you need more stimulation to obtain the same dopamine “hit.” This is the classic addiction cycle that is also behind recreational drugs. In the case of alcohol or a drug, you condition the reward center to need more and more of the substance to get the same buzz. In the case of pornography, you train the reward center to need increasingly shocking or novel pornographic images for the same effect.

“I can’t be bothered.”

The uncomfortable withdrawal period after orgasm has been a part of your life for so long that you don’t even recognize it as a separate phenomenon. You may think that life, or those around you, are making you feel bored, fatigued, hyperactive, irritable, depressed, discouraged, or any of a host of other symptoms. To comfort yourself, you may reach for some dopamine-elevating substance or activity like alcohol, junk food, or gambling. However, one of the easiest “fixes” is another orgasm. The dopamine blast of orgasm will temporarily stop the discomfort – just like another cigarette stops the smoker’s discomfort. However, far from solving your problem, it ensures another uncomfortable withdrawal period just ahead.

If you have a partner, you may be motivated to use your partner to self-medicate by having orgasmic sex. An intimate connection with another offers more benefits than a sexual encounter with your computer screen. However, when making love during a sexual hangover, one tends to ‘scratch an itch’ rather than profit from the potential for love or closeness. For example, under the influence of withdrawal, he may tend to be grabby and particularly hungry for climax, while she is likely to be hard to please. Unfortunately, the issue isn’t simply one of technique. The truth is: while you’re not “right” at a brain chemical level, whatever you do in bed is not going to feel right, even if it offers a fix.

While feeling depleted (low dopamine), no lover is inclined to nurture a partner with generous, caring lovemaking. Raw sex encounters – however “hot,” and whether on your computer screen or your kitchen table – are less deeply satisfying for both partners, probably because oxytocin (the bonding hormone) drops as dopamine does following orgasm. Lovers can feel drained or needy in the days following such encounters. As a result, they tend to perceive each other as overly demanding (naggy), or selfish and uncaring. This is how intense passion creates disharmony over time.

The more you are hooked on orgasm, the more porn can seem to offer the cheapest, most hassle-free relief for your constant state of uncomfortable withdrawal (frustration). If you don’t like this downward spiral, you have to do something differently.

If you have a partner, you have two possibilities. You can make love only when your neurochemistry is in balance (and then wait out the uncomfortable withdrawal periods), or you Psyche and Ero scan learn to make love a lot, but without orgasm. This is the solution that this website addresses. Sages from various traditions have taught it for millennia. It soothes cravings, improves health, increases the harmony between mates, and heightens spiritual awareness.

With balanced brain chemistry, you will find that generous lovemaking is more deeply fulfilling than your primitive brain’s proposed solution: a series of addictive highs that leave you unsatisfied, yet lethargic or jumpy.

Masturbation and evolution

Are you on your own for the moment? You might find a few facts about the biology of masturbation interesting. Scientists surmise that masturbation serves an evolutionary purpose by ensuring that “fresh,” i.e., more fertile, sperm are always at the ready – especially in enthusiastic young men. The human race owes much of its success in overpopulating the earth to the fact that evolution favored reckless teenage pregnancy. According to this theory, when we lived in tribes, grandmothers raised the kids while young people engaged in casual sex. Evolution, after all, cares about sheer numbers of genetic vehicles to move genes into the future, not quality of life for parent or offspring.

As sperm age in a man’s reproductive tract, they break up. In other words, the longer a man waits between ejaculations, the less likely he is to impregnate his partner during the next ejaculation. (This means that when you learn to make love without ejaculation you will increase your ability to prevent unwanted pregnancy.)

Another interesting masturbation fact that is that after orgasm with a partner, you produce 400% more of the sexual satiation neuro chemical prolactin than you do after orgasm on your own. In other words, sex with a lover “knocks you out” more than sex with yourself. Biology clearly wants us horny until our job (fertilization) is done.

Some argue that a high-prolactin “knockout” (after penile/vaginal intercourse) is evidence of deep satisfaction, but high prolactin is the neurochemical behind PMS (pre-menstrual syndrome). High prolactin has also been associated with some unpleasant symptoms in both sexes: loss of libido, mood changes, depression, weight gain, and so forth. While neurochemicals certainly play multiple rolls in the body, it’s not clear that deep satisfaction after sex is a function of a post-orgasmic rise of prolactin.

Addiction to sex

Evolution wants us addicted to sex to meet its goals – which are not necessarily ours. Our reward center is designed to urge us to pursue drug-like orgasms, suffer a withdrawal afterward, and go for the next one. As a Dutch scientist who does research on sex and the brain explained,

We are addicted to sex as you know, as everybody is. [It is the] orbital frontal cortex that is controlling whether we can do it or not. And, for example, people that don’t have this part of the brain – and these people exist – these people really go for [orgasm] all the time.

The belief that sex, porn, and masturbation are “sinful” is nonsense. However, it does not follow that the mainstream media is behaving responsibly when it blithely promotes the benefits of orgasm, sexual enhancement drugs, and masturbation – as opposed to lovemaking itself, which is healthy.

For example, if the media is correct that masturbation is a good idea, then it follows that looking at sexually stimulating images must be positively healthy. Yet this implied endorsement of pornography is misguided because it ignores both the addictiveness of porn and the hidden costs of intense passion. If the media were right, porn addicts would be the happiest people on the planet.

In short, whether today’s sexologists would define your behavior as sexual addiction or sexual sobriety is largely irrelevant. You’re a member of the human race, and sex is naturally addictive. It is not calculated to lead to lasting satisfaction. In fact the more you scratch, the more you itch.
harem
______

“I have a confession; I’m in love with another harem.”
______

Sex has created problems for man kind for a long time, but it probably wasn’t as big a problem for our distant ancestors for several reasons. First, who succeeds in passing on their genes most frequently? Those with high libidos. In other words, evolution has unwittingly been selecting for sexual passion/frustration for a long time. So if you’re hypersexual, blame all the fun your ancestors had.

Second, our distant ancestors had fewer opportunities to pursue their sexual urges due to stressful conditions and small tribes. Thus they had fewer opportunities to throw themselves into an addictive cycle, and probably spent less time in withdrawal.

Finally, their lifestyles revolved around mutual aid and close relationships with extended family or familiar faces. Relationships with others and selfless service actually soothe cravings – and balance neurochemistry. Think how good you feel when you help someone voluntarily, or feel grateful for another’s help. Today, many of us lack these close relationships and opportunities for helping those we love. At the same time, advertising philosophy is based on stimulating our dopamine cravings, urging us to please only ourselves by buying things. The computer offers plenty of “pleasure” only a few clicks away.

Surprising as it may seem, we can tap a lot of the same benefits that tribal life once offered – and on which our brains thrive – by learning to make love generously and affectionately with a partner. By avoiding the addictive cycle of ups and downs associated with orgasm, we remain mutually attracted and balance our brain chemistry. This increases feelings of well-being – once we’re through the withdrawal period of the cycle. In fact, by the roundabout route of porn addiction and recovery, we may actually end up discovering enlivening potential in our intimate relationships that our ancestors rarely stumbled upon.

“But I’m drawn to REALLY outrageous images

“I must really be a pervert!”

Before we discuss why disturbing images can be such a turn on, let’s consider why porn sites so often feature sexy individuals of different races. Evolution favors diversity in mates, which means that evolution has designed you to find partners who appear to be very different from you exciting. The more different the parents of a child are, the more diverse the child’s inherited immunities. In general this guarantees stronger immune systems than in the offspring of genetically closely related parents. Interestingly, men appear to distinguish diversity visually, but in a research experiment women preferred the smell of men whose genetic make up differed most from theirs.

Needless to say, if you are seeking a life companion instead of a breeding opportunity, this particular evolutionary program may make your task more challenging. Looks and smell have little to do with emotional or intellectual compatibility.

There’s also a reason that you may find kinkier and kinkier images riveting. In fact, it’s the same reason that you’re feeling worse and worse about yourself.

Not only does your primitive brain reward you for novelty, it gives you a similar massive assault neurochemical jolt for “shocking” “painful” and “risky.” Outrageous images excite the brain in a way that images of cuddly affection do not. This is why so much television programming revolves around sex and violence. Such images put you in an altered state that makes you more susceptible (to advertising in the case of TV, to sex addiction in the case of porn). They produce cravings because they raise dopamine.

Porn sites don’t just cater to bizarre tastes, they create bizarre tastes – by exploiting our natural tendency to move from one shocking image to the next because of their stimulating effects on the brain. So it’s not unusual to start out your porn career with an image of Jennifer Lopez’ fine butt – and weeks later find you have “progressed” to girls with goats or sado-masochism…without a clue as to how you suddenly became a pervert.

Whatever is most shocking or guilt-producing for you will have an allure in part because your primitive brain also rewards you for taking risks. So for example, if you were raised around the belief that homosexuality was a ticket to hell or scandal, then homosexual images will produce a very strong neuro chemical reaction in your brain. Does this mean that you are homosexual? Not necessarily. Often even men who regularly engage in homosexual behavior (which can be exciting for the same reason that same-sex lovemaking images are exciting) say that they are not gay. They may believe they are just more broad-minded than they thought, but they may actually be unconscious puppets of doggy pornthe brain’s primitive reflexes.

So if you are turned on by strange permutations of human and animal mating behavior, violence, pain, or, alas, even child pornography, understand that it may be because you actually find those things so shocking that your brain has given you a “risk/shock” buzz.

As you now know, that buzz is made possible by dopamine, and a neurochemical blast of dopamine is addictive. Voilà ! Now you may be hooked on something precisely because it is deeply repugnant to you. Or because of some erratic link that your primitive brain made between erotic and God-knows-what (the pain/ sexual stimulation of circumcision, for example). This randomly-created inner conflict may strike you as tragic, but in a sense it’s more of a bad joke played upon you by your primitive brain.
Raising the voltage

There are two things that add to the intensity of a porn addiction. The first is orgasm itself. If you respond to an initial arousal reflex triggered by a shocking image by climaxing, you reinforce the addictiveness of the experience. (Scientists now speak of junk food and mating behavior as “natural re inforcers” because they raise dopamine.) Orgasm is the biggest blast of dopamine that your brain produces naturally. You’ve just “rewarded” yourself for finding some bizarre thing exciting. Your primitive reward center registers this activity as something very worthwhile – even though your rational brain would rather forget the whole incident.

The second thing that adds to the intensity of the addiction is guilt. If an image makes you feel guilty, it’s registering as very risky, and is a much more addictive experience at a neuro chemical level. sex guiltPorn sellers know this.

Worse yet, the guiltier you feel about the excitement, the worse you feel after your orgasm. A “guilty” orgasm is a more intense (exciting) experience, and the hangover afterward is more intense, too. (It appears that the higher dopamine rises, the more it drops afterward, as your body down-regulates the nerve cell receptors for dopamine.)

As explained, the more painful the withdrawal symptoms, the more likely you are to seek instant relief from how miserable (and guilty) you feel…often by repeating the very behavior you condemn in yourself because it offers a dopamine surge. See the parallel with drug addiction? You may be floundering in a downward spiral of shocking material, interwoven with intense periods of self-hatred.

“Honestly, I’m actually a nice person.”

Innocence to the rescue

Have you noticed that your “mea culpas” and your criticism of your bad behavior (or the worse behavior of others) have not helped to free you? This is because guilt and blame make sexual addiction stronger, as explained in the previous section.

Try something new. Understand how innocent you are (and how innocent everyone one else is). The differences in the content of the images people become addicted to are not important. The link between arousal and content is capricious. However grim the resulting addiction, the cause is simply that someone inadvertently tripped a primitive switch in the brain that was designed for an entirely different function than making porn compelling. This is cause for correction, not condemnation.

Perhaps someone warned you that porn was a bad idea before you began. However, you surely had no idea that it could subvert your will. If someone had predicted that you would find whips and chains enthralling, you would have laughed. After all, you hadn’t received your Instruction Manual for the Primitive Brain.

The sooner you see how innocently anyone can wander down this path, the less emotional charge the whole challenge will have for you. Without guilt in the picture, your withdrawal symptoms will be milder, and the naughtiness of whatever you find so riveting will begin to evaporate. When you escape the orgasm cycle, the material associated with it will have no more power over you than a cartoon.
Why me?

It’s true that you first have to shed your addiction. Believe it or not the biggest gift of your addiction is that it is a severe addiction – one with which you will not be able to reach a comfortable compromise. To move beyond it, you may have to stop the fertilization-driven cycle of sexual highs and lows, and make a giant leap upward. To experiment with this, you would have to give up the search for “normal” (addictive) sexuality. This step gradually clears spiritual vision and restores the clarity and sense of direction one had as a child.

After you have made this leap, you may discover that you likely put yourself on a collision course with sexual addiction precisely so that you

1. could not get comfortable with sex used in the ordinary and traditional ways
2. would have to rediscover the mystery of sacred sexuality, and
3. would be able, ultimately, to become a living example of how humanity can rapidly awaken spiritually.

Esoteric spiritual traditions hold that fertilization-driven sex is humanity’s biggest spiritual impediment. This is not because normal sex is “sinful.” It’s because of its effects on the brain. Sex used for physical gratification clouds spiritual perception.

If you’re a porn addict, you may currently have a severe case of this clouded perception, but even the average person’s milder case is a very effective spiritual anchor. This is why many spiritual paths advise celibacy to gain spiritual clarity. Celibacy, however, will not permit mankind to tap the full potential of sacred union. Nor is celibacy easy to stabilize while the planet is quivering with sexual-indulgence – as many priests and gurus have demonstrated.

Sex has a higher purpose than the world suspects. Perhaps you were determined to remember this…whatever it took. To ensure that you didn’t end up muddling along in one of the uneasy sexual compromises the world prescribes, perhaps you came back with a lot of sexual energy. Before your mission you knew that you would – without an instruction manual – get it all terribly wrong for a time.

Why would anyone do this? Perhaps you foresaw that humans were headed into a rapid downward spiral because they were about to take the healthy, vital, and long overdue step of disconnecting sex from sin – but with an unhealthy ignorance of how and why casual sex is addictive.

Are you an energy transformer?

Alcoholics Anonymous works because recovered alcoholics serve as examples – and support others in giving up alcohol. As you recover, you can perform a similar function for the human race. Become a living example. Show people that no matter how deep an addiction to sex is, a person can overcome it and reach for the heights.

Never mind preaching, or explaining how destructive or degrading pornography and sexual addiction are. This makes others’ “sins,” and your own, more real. Simply show them how to locate the light switch and put an end to their bad dreams – by putting an end to your own.

The world has been unable to use sex for a spiritual end because it believes sex to be only for procreation or recreation, or else “dangerous” or “sinful.” Most traditions that contain echoes of sacred sexuality are almost as hampered as the Abrahamic religions because they have lost the vital concepts of mutual nurturing and mutual self-control.

In order to tap the sacred potential of sex, we can’t deny sexual desire, or marginalize it by trying to ignore it in between orgasms. The key is to use it only for a single purpose: reunion with our Source. In our experience, there are two ways to go about this.

* One can begin in a relationship devoted to controlled intercourse. This gradually shifts the couple’s priorities away from material goals toward the desire for union with Source.
* While celibate, one can get clear that union with Source is so important that one is willing to give up orgasm to clear one’s spiritual vision. Then one connects with whomever the Divine may designate in order to achieve reunion with Source.

Neither path is better or faster. Both accomplish the key goal of placing spiritual awakening before all other goals for sexual desire.

“That’s very sweet, but I can’t get to sleep unless I have an orgasm.”

Giving up the payoff

Leaving all guilty feelings behind will make it easier anxious man to move out of the sexual addiction cycle. However, you may believe you are helpless to resist the pull of pornography. If you haven’t succeeded in the past it may be because you tried to find a compromise – such as frequent orgasm without porn, or less frequent masturbation with porn.

Orgasm produces a hangover that can last up to two weeks – however it occurs. During that time the discomfort of withdrawal can easily pull you right back into your addiction. In other words, you end up in a repeating cycle of withdrawal symptoms, which never allow you to experience balanced brain chemistry and a natural sense of well-being.

You may get better results by going through the misery of withdrawal once, and not going back into the cycle. This sounds impossible because as you read this you are in a withdrawal period and believe that your happiness depends upon your drug of choice (orgasm). However, after you get through the first two weeks, you will find that it gets easier. At that point, if you have a partner, it is possible to stabilize. You can make love frequently, without orgasm, and therefore without slipping back into the cycle of highs and lows that drove you toward addiction in the first place.

One of the gifts of this practice is that your addiction to pornographic images will fade naturally. Those images are a powerful turn on because they lead to the “payoff” of orgasm. If you know you are not going for a climax, they will swiftly lose their hold over you. Honest! Try it.

A ritual is not exciting without an addictive (high dopamine) destination. Thinkcouple reading in bed about it…would you find it exciting to get dressed up for a night out – knowing that you were actually going to spend the evening quietly at home?

Here’s a second gift: because you’re not going for orgasm when making love, you will find that you can focus on the many other aspects of lovemaking that are rewarding: the sensual touch, the laughter, the mutual comforting, the intense intimacy, and, ultimately, the deeply fulfilling sense of soul connection that the experience potentially offers. The neurochemistry associated with these activities is not the same neurochemistry as the dopamine cycle. Companionship offers more profound, lasting satisfaction.

If you don’t have a partner, you may find that cutting back on orgasm actually helps you attract one. All that sexual magnetism you are currently emptying from your reservoir can often draw a partner to you if you store it.

To summarize, two courses of action can help:

∑ Stop berating yourself and you will find it easier to avoid seeking the comfort of your addiction.

* The more seldom you orgasm, the weaker your addiction becomes because, if your orgasms are more than two weeks apart, you spend less time in the discomfort of withdrawal.

Not a piece of cake

The goal is to use our analytical minds to rise above our animal instincts. Otherwise, the future will continue to show us just how ill suited our inherited genetic make-up is to modern life with its constant flood of erotic images.

But how? Fighting one’s survival programming is tough – and harder in the case of sex than food. An experiment on rats demonstrates why.

In a experiment, a rat is learning how to push a lever situated at one end of a long cage, in order to obtain a brief electrical stimulation of its reward center. The rat must cross through an electrified grid in the cage’s floor, in order to press another self-stimulation lever situation at the other end of the cage. The rat can endure a strong painful electric shock to its paws for the sake of this electrical stimulation to its reward center. However, normal rats, even when starving, will not take the risk of crossing an elctrical grid in order to reach food.

An orgasm is a lot closer to electrical stimulation of the reward center than is eating, due to the respective amounts of dopamine accompanying orgasm and eating. No wonder the threat of burning at the stake, didn’t stop adultery in the Middle Ages. We are designed to value the passing on of our genes more highly than our own continued existence. In other words, a sexual control program is doomed if it relies on mere force of will, peer pressure, or threats of an uncomfortably warm afterlife.

Those who wish to outwit biology in the bedroom may want to consider another strategy. Its merits are, again, suggested by an experiment involving food. Scientists studying binge eating in rats found that rats become addicted to sugar within 10 days of bingeing on it; if they don’t get their fix, their teeth chatter and they shake. However, researchers noted that the dips in dopamine behind the addiction cycle don’t occur when “meals are moderate and regularly scheduled.”

This suggests that “moderate lovemaking, regularly scheduled” is the key to coping with our ancient design in a modern world. But first there’s the challenge of withdrawal.
The pain of withdrawal

Just as the tobacco industry wanted us all to think that cigarettes were harmless, the billion-dollar porn industry – and even many of today’s experts – want you to think that sex addiction is harmless. To be sure, some people can smoke and still die of something other than lung cancer or emphysema – and no doubt some people can watch porn or masturbate frequently without getting hooked or depressed, damaging their relationships, or becoming vulnerable to other addictions. If you’re reading this, however, you are probably not one of them.

Most Porn-off grap of us aren’t. See this light-hearted, yet serious, look at just how addictive pornography is. A hundred porn viewers tried to stop viewing porn for two weeks. Over half were honest enough to admit that they failed.

Unfortunately, to shed your addiction and move toward balanced brain chemistry, you have to ease through an uncomfortable withdrawal period. Here’s a segment from an ‘Oprah’ program on porn.

Now that he’s stopped looking at pornographic websites, Josh’s body is suffering from withdrawal symptoms. For the last two weeks, Josh says he’s been getting headaches and feeling irritable and anxious. “You wouldn’t expect this because, you think, ‘It’s material that you choose to look at,'” he says. “But, I mean, drugs are things that you choose to take.”

One of the biggest impediments to recovery is the belief that others are having great sex lives, and that you would be missing out if you didn’t look after yourself sexually. In fact, you may not be missing much if you’re comparing your situation with most relationships based on conventional sex.

Here is Leo Tolstoy’s account of his honeymoon:

Tolstoy Love was exhausted with the satisfaction of sensuality. … I did not realize that this cold hostility was our normal state, and that this first quarrel would soon be drowned under a new flood of the intensest sensuality. I thought that we had disputed with each other, and had become reconciled, and that it would not happen again. But in this same honeymoon there came a period of satiety, in which we ceased to be necessary to each other, and a new quarrel broke out. It became evident that the first was not a matter of chance.

And here is his conclusion:

ninety-nine families out of every hundred live in the same hell, and … it cannot be otherwise.” “But… all, like myself, imagine that it is a misfortune exclusively reserved for themselves alone, which they carefully conceal as shameful, not only to others, but to themselves, like a bad disease.…

Don’t settle for half a loaf! See what storing your sexual magnetism will yield. What have you got to lose? Pass up your orgasms for a few weeks and see what happens.
Rechanneling your sexual energy

Yoga, martial arts, meditation, spiritual contemplation, service to others, group activities, doing something that offers a sense of accomplishment, massages, petting and caring for your animal, laughter with friends, and hugs all help with periods of celibacy.

Socializing is essential when you’re on your own. Contact with others gets some oxytocin flowing, and oxytocin has been shown to ease both addiction and withdrawal symptoms. Isolation doesn’t help, unless you use it for some higher purpose, like connection with the Divine, strengthening your resolve, or doing something fulfilling.

no need to be lonely A friend in Italy found that when he cut out masturbation, women approached him within weeks, and other friends have found the same thing.

Be willing to try a daring solution for your addiction. After all, compromise (fewer orgasms or orgasms not based on porn) hasn’t worked. There may be an excellent reason for this, which you will only discover when you reach for clarity without compromising.

Many wish there was a “magic bullet” for contented singlehood. Yet if there were one, then we humans would never rediscover the potential that lies in our intimate relationships. Go for it!
If you are blessed enough to have a partner, you have a way to make your withdrawal and recovery far less uncomfortable. By carefully approaching your partner with less passion and more nurturing affection, you can produce more of the hormone (oxytocin) that eases cravings holding handsand makes any type of withdrawal easier.

However, the risk is great that you will fall back into conventional sex as soon as your sense of well-being returns. Your primitive brain will then soon persuade you that you need variety in your love life, and you’ll be right back where you are now, more discouraged than ever. Read about the Coolidge Effect, to strengthen your resolve. Remember, your goal is not sexual sobriety as the world defines it. It’s lasting well-being, harmony, and, perhaps even greater spiritual awareness.

To understand what we’re recommending, have a look at our article, “Discovering healing and transformation through intimacy.” Also recommended: the exercises in part two of Peace Between the Sheets.
I think I’m with the wrong person

Changing partners will not solve your problem. First, your happiness is not dependent upon more orgasms or sexual stimulation, remember? Even the most loving partner can’t truly nourish/satisfy you that way. If your partner keeps giving you your “fix,” or if you masturbate on your own, you will remain an addict.

Any current frustration with your partner is very likely biology at work, driving you to leave one mate and create a new family with another. Do you want a mindless biological reflex making your decisions? No, because you will simply repeat this pattern with your next partner.

As your perception clears up, you will be in a better place to figure out whether you and your mate belong together. Make no decisions while under the influence of your addiction. You are not seeing each other clearly. For now, make mutual healing your sole priority.

Help!

This seems pretty comprehensive and could be useful
for those trying to combat porn addiction.

I think the basic message is to strive for moderation
and to avoid seeking the orgasm.

Although I do have to agree with SD somewhat in that
the article seemed to focus a little too highly on
demonizing the orgasm. I don’t think that there
is anything wrong with the orgasm. Sure it is a high,
but it is a gift of one of the pleasures of life.

Personally, I think that truly understanding the “chocolate
cake” analogy I gave earlier can go a long way toward
combating porn addiction. At least for me, when I had that
realization a long time ago, all desire for porn
disappeared and I currently have no interest in it.

Of course, I don’t think there is any “moral” reason
for avoiding it necessarily. Sex in any form I don’t
think should really have any judgements cast on it.
If anyone has an interest in it, have at!

Personally though, I think it is, for the most part,
pointless. Any such motivation in that direction
I think would be better satisfied by seeking a real
partner with which you can develop a true emotional
(and sexual) bond. Then the possibility of real
satisfaction can be had, rather than something that
will ultimately be unsatisfying.

Steven

The ‘moral’ has to come from those who buy and watch it, each individual needs to develop his/her responsability. So instead of blaming the makers, we have to look into our own heart first. You can blame the makers for not having good taste though 😉

The more the heart lives the more it wants beauty, the less it is attracted to violence and bad heartless sex.