So...
It seems that the great Goddess of Sex herself chose to focus me in ways different than I had expected, and then Hermes has chosen to lead me there instead. As I have stated, I hope clearly but knowing me, not that clearly, I have hopes that part of what I am teaching myself as I seek to understand my self, my motivations, and my spiritual needs is how to understand my sensual desires. How to accept yet contain that part of me that is decadent in ways that can be harmful to me.
Because I am culturally American, being decadent comes with the territory. We are an empire on decline, a people gone to decadence and, now, seeing the ramifications of that decadence as we move further into the age of discovery, of technology, and as those who are being left behind now fight their way to prominence and, possibly, destroy us from within as has happened in almost every civilization before ours.
But as individuals, there is still much to be said for decadence and what it means to us as people. See, decadence can mean different things to different people, but I boil it down to this, the enjoyment of pleasure at the expense of others. It is selfish decadence. The decadence that can be of use to us as people, however, is that which allows us to explore what it is to be alive, human, and physical beings.
The suppression of our instinctive selves is common in the monotheistic religions, and in some of what are called the philosophical religions of the East, like Buddhism and Hinduism. The idea being that we are physical beings and that to move forward, to go beyond this physicality means relinquishing desire, relinquishing emotions that guide us to excess and debauchery. In essence, living in a way that completely ignores one’s own humanity and what it means to be human.
Breathing, drinking of water, and eating just enough to survive and contemplation are the basics of life, and any action taken should be taken with a view toward the afterlife. I find this to be a most odd way to think. I am not some crazy decadent loon, mind you, I live a rather sedate, calm life, even if I do indulge in some things often enough, but here’s the rub, I don’t believe in an afterlife. I believe that we live, we experience, and we die. Truly die. But this doesn’t mean that life itself is something to be taken to extremes, or that it has no meaning. I have become convinced over the years that what we experience, what we feel, what we desire and how we go about getting it form part of a greater “program”. That when we let our feelings flow and we share them with the Gods and seek their guidance, we share with them something they do not, cannot have in their eternal realm. Things like fear, hunger, true desire the like one feels at the sight of a most beautiful woman, or a truly erotic man. The longings and desires for peace we all feel, and the simple pleasure of physical contact.
Now, I am not saying that the Gods know nothing of these things, rather that their experience of them cannot be like ours. That in their eternal existence that requires nothing, they do not have the needs we do, the desires we do, the sense of urgency we do, and there is the spontaneity of our emotions to contend with. We do not feel or even think things because we want to, we do so because there is a spontaneous event that occurs in our minds that should spur us to action, and that action, the more philosophical minded might say should be to ponder and consider rather than to act upon. But a wise man once said, or if he didn’t he should have, that thinking about doing something is only half of the equation, and that acting upon it is the other half, and that the one without the other is simply either impulsiveness or timidity, and in the end, is that not what being a rational thinking person is about, about melding the two together so that we can experience life in the best way possible without allowing ourselves to fall victim to the sheer drop that is the extreme?
And is not the God of boundaries suspiciously well equipped to help in this?
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