Sexuality

Contents - Polyamory

 

 

The Ethical Slut

At some point in their careers most sluts feel ashamed of themselves or guilty about what they like to do regarding sex because they've accepted someone else's generally stilted and stultifying beliefs about what they're supposed to like and do about sex, which is usually quite contrary to their own lighter-hearted, more open-handed inclinations. Consequently, trying to navigate between the Scylla of their own desires and the Charybdis of conventional mores, sluts too often get confused, and behave unethically without intending to do so. The authors want to repair this social problem, first by re-examining the whole proposition that being a slut is a Bad Thing, and then by laying out some groundrules for ethical slut conduct. Early on, therefore, they define the ground they plan to rule:

In most of the world, "slut" is a highly offensive term, used to describe a woman whose sexuality is voracious, indiscriminate, and shameful. It's interesting to note that the analogous word "stud," used to describe a highly sexual man, is often a term of approval and envy....

And then they describe how they plan to rule it:

So we are proud to reclaim the word "slut" as a term of approval, even endearment. To us, a slut is a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you. A slut may choose to have sex with herself only, or with the Fifth Fleet. He may be heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, a radical activist or a peaceful suburbanite.

Reading a narrative that elevates sluts to the higher planes of humanness can free your mind from a history of other folks' constraints.  If you don't want to be a slut, it's almost inevitable that you know some sluts, so reading this book will help you help your friends to live richer, more rewarding, and/or more honest lives. Because underneath the authors' discussions about sex and honesty and communication is a subtext of rather spiritual dimensions. D.H. Lawrence referred to the "aristocracy of consciousness" - for the authors, it is not enough to be a slut, one must be an ethical slut, and to be truly ethical requires not that you follow someone else's set of rules, but that you know and be able to follow your own. Then, as the authors of this charming handbook note, "any sexual pathway, consciously chosen and mindfully followed, can be a positive, creative force in the lives of individuals and their communities."

Polyamory author, on Tantra   -  The intention of Tantra is the transformation of consciousness. Unlike some spiritual paths, Tantra embraces the body as a temple and the sexual energies as a vehicle for transformation. Tantric yoga unites (yokes) sex and spirit. The sacred union of opposites is both the mystery at the heart of tantric practice and a very practical approach to creating fulfilling intimate relationships.
Each culture has its own metaphors for the Sacred Marriage. Some of the most dramatic can be found in the Hindu tradition. The image of Ardhanarishwar where the god Shiva is shown as half man and woman expresses our dual nature. Each man is half man and half woman and each woman is half woman and half man. Similarly, the traditional Hindu altar stone is a symbolic representation of the conjoined male and female genitalia whose purpose is to remind worshippers that the sacred union of male and female principles is the very force that keeps the Universe in motion. When the inner man and the inner woman meet and become one with each other, we are initiated into the process of the Sacred Marriage.   We will be working with breath, energy, psychodrama and conscious touch to stimulate and harmonize the male and female energies within and without.

  • Letting go of conditioning that prevents you from loving and being loved more fully
  • Loving yourself and sharing love with others without losing yourself
  • How to bring more consciousness to your sexual expression and use your sexual energy to become more conscious

 

A crazy little thing called...Compersion
By Eric Francis
http://www.planetwaves.net/compersion.html

.........For Valentine's Day, I have a word for you: "Compersion." It's probably not a word you've ever heard.

.........Compersion begins the first time we are turned on by someone else's pleasure, or the idea of someone else's love for anyone besides us. You may think this is totally out-to-lunch. But for some people it's totally natural. There are those who are not the "jealous type," and then there are those who just love love, no matter who's it is. We all know it's possible. We may have an idea of how good it would feel to dissolve into the safety, freedom and unconditional acceptance of our lovers and all that they are, including the other people that they may love, and how great it would feel to let them experience all that we are, including the other people we may love.

.........This way of being is called compersion.

.........We've all found ourselves in a corresponding reality at one time or another: trapped by love. Loving someone, feeling open and real with them and sensing it could last forever, and then, mysteriously, another soul enters the scene of our lives, conversations develop, minds meet, sexual interests may grow...we know that there's not really a conflict, or that there should not be one...but there is, or seems to be...and we are left with a huge question of what to do, because our present partner will probably just freak out if we tell them about our experience. And the contradiction is that the experience of this new person is so good. It is so real. And yet it threatens to destabilize what we call love.

.........When informed that love is growing with someone outside of a primary relationship, most people are, at first, unlikely to respond with compersion. They may not quite be washed over with joy and tell you that your love for this other person is thoroughly beautiful. Usually, at first, people respond with fear -- usually, the fear of loss of control. And it's that control that we are called upon to give up when we embrace compersion.

.........If what I hear is true, then a lot of people reading this are already getting nervous. The idea of allowing our partner to be free may seem like a wild concept, the last thing we would ever do. Visions of this person, our very lover, in another person's arms, can burn through us like hot coals. But more to the point, the whole idea of really feeling our feelings without denial or resistance is a daring thing in itself. For so much of what we call love is really about resistance, and hiding who we are, and possessing the other and hence ignoring their reality, and judging ourselves for being imperfect because we are so controlling. Hardly what you could call the divine light of freedom. But many people feel that freedom is dangerous.

.........Now, relationships are complicated enough without adding other people to the equation. Yet these other people seem to somehow add themselves. We notice them in this insanely isolated, fragmented world we live in, especially so because the way we create our relationships is extremely isolating, in a time in history in which we so desperately need community. So when people we really like show up in our jobs and in our email boxes and move into apartments next door, when we pick up on their scent and want to include them in our lives, it's not something we typically want to resist or hide from the world. It's something to celebrate.

.........Having noticed reality, we may feel a need to keep going, to keep exploring. We need to allow ourselves to be free. And this will take work. We need to teach people to love us for who we are. We need to learn compersion for others -- to feel and express the love that loves them for who they are. This is not as hard as it sounds. And taking the journey is all the more appealing if we realize that all the fear and insecurity that emerged when a second love interest entered the picture were already there all along, a kind of festering toxin we were living with in a secret shadow world that always seemed to haunt the relationship. When the light is brought in, and the toxins are purged, and we are seen for who we are, we can really begin living.   [[cf. fasting, MLK on tension]]

.........So one thing you can count on, if you are in a situation where you need to teach another person compersion, is that they may relate to the fact that it's better to be alive than dead. And the only way they can love you is when they are alive. That means really free. Really understanding and aware and loving you, not an image they have of you. And you need to learn to love them, not an image you have of them. It is tricky. It is challenging. But it is possible.

 .........Compersion is an idea that emerged from something called the "polyamorous" culture, a segment of society in which people openly choose to have more than one committed lover. In such arrangements, it obviously becomes necessary to work through jealousy, but in the early days of the polyamorous movement, something else was discovered: once jealousy was understood and hearts opened, great feelings of warmth, pleasure and appreciation became available at the idea of peoples' partners loving others. In other words, the bliss of love and sexual ecstasy would expand in a wave-like ripple. When people drop their guard and just feel, so much pleasure is possible -- more than we ever imagined.

.........Sure, other stuff comes up, but it was already there, and it's as though love is washing it out of us so that we can really be free. And that other stuff -- resentment, anger, fear of abandonment, and the rest -- all needs to come up in order to give the relationship a chance to have life. Swept under the rug, these things are far more damaging.

.........Growing through them is a process. It's relatively easy go get turned on witnessing another human being's ecstasy or erotic joy. It's a lot more challenging to live with the implications this experience seems to have in our relationships, and is part of the delicate walk of negotiating our sense of security in the universe. We don't want to lose this other person who is so dear to us, whether we lose them to another person, or because they can't deal with their fear of losing us.

.........Love, as we often define it, is usually considered to be an exclusive rather than inclusive game. Someone loves you and therefore doesn't love anyone else. But when you add it up, this usually comes out to a loss, because in our short visits to the planet, in a healthy state of mind, we might want to love everyone who is righteous and true, and to return the love of everyone who touches our hearts, and call that safety and nothing else. For living in the constant fear of loss and betrayal is hardly safety; it is hardly the security we say we seek; it is a setup for total paranoia, but strangely, sadly, it's called love.

.........And as for sex -- it's no big secret that we're turned on by many people. But it's only been the "moral high ground" of certain, let's say, social movements, that has instigated the idea anything but strict heterosexual monogamy and sex for reproduction only is permissible. In this world, do we need to live by these ancient codes? Well, not if we are honest.

.........It is true that if one's lover has sex with another person, or even gets close to another person, they may choose to be with that person and not you. And this is a possibility we have to face no matter what. Living the way of compersion brings this to the surface where we can see it and work with it.

.........Yet remember that more often, jealousy has nothing to do with one's partner actually having sex or sharing love outside the relationship. It is about the imagined fear of loss. We can become jealous at the mere idea or suspicion of this, or at our partner's fantasies, and even at the love shared with him or herself. In plenty of relationships people stop masturbating (and creating art or music or writing or taking long walks in the woods) because it's perceived as a threat by their partner. And that is not life.

.........Compersion takes us to the next realm beyond. It is about being with and appreciating our partners for their desires, dreams, wishes and their personal journey to selflove. It's about being real, and having relationships as real people.

 .........And how do we get there?

.........Start by telling the truth. This is what we need anyway. Sharing this truth we possess in our hearts, the essence of our being, is supposedly why we got involved with this other person in the first place. It's important to tell the truth gently, clearly and without the fear or the intention of hurting the other person, but not holding back, either. Then, because we are claiming the birthright of love, we must love them through their reactions and responses. This is a commitment it's best to go into the situation with. And we must love ourselves through their reactions, which is to say, not feeling guilty about who we are. So listen carefully, and let your partner own his or her feelings.

.........We must be ready to put love -- real love, which I am calling compersion -- above any given relationship. So we must, on one level, be ready to let go of those relationships in which we cannot be free, if what we seek is the freedom to be who we are. This does not hold just for sex and affection; it holds for those walks in the woods and those paintings that never get painted and the short stories that never get written. It has to do with not living where we want and not following all our other dreams. It is all part of the same thing, and it never ceases to amaze me to what extent sexual freedom parallels all these other freedoms. And freedom means that change is possible; freedom by definition implies change.

.........In the context of a close relationship where these matters arise, it's important to stay focused on selflove. Selflove is the basis of all love anyway. If the process of your relationship is moving toward compersion, what you may notice is that sex with your primary partner was never hotter. Aware of the potential for change, we tend to appreciate what we have ever more. So enjoy these enhanced experiences, and don't expect them to end as long as you're really being honest, because honesty leads to intimacy and intimacy is a good doorway to erotic passion.

.........But selflove is an extraordinarily powerful tool in this process. I suggest you masturbate together, one at a time, without touching. This will assist greatly when both partners are willing to work through a jealous crisis because it creates a very clear picture that the other is sexually independent of us. And it is a fairly easy vision of sexual independence to see the beauty in. Let your erotic energy and that of your partner wash away the fear, the discord, the pain and the insecurity of what you once called love.

.........Feel, if you can, how erotic a jealous experience can be. When you are feeling jealous, swim into the core of the experience. Encourage your partner to do the same. Help them if you can. Right inside the jealous episode is a fiery core of erotic passion. It may surprise you how good it feels, and if you get there, you can be sure you're stepping right into compersion.

.........Last -- or actually first -- ask for help. Talk to understanding friends who you know will not encourage you to lie about your feelings, or judge you for being honest. But if you are on a spiritual path, ask your inner teacher for help. Whether you call this teacher the Goddess, God, the Holy Spirit, angels or by any other name, the only way spiritual agency responds is if we open the door. The movement from jealousy to compersion is one of the most direct spiritual paths there is, because we are learning so much of what spiritual programs attempt to teach: unconditional love, surrender, forgiveness, freedom, safety, and, most important, loving the way Spirit loves us: equally with everyone else. Loving this way may be the only spiritual lesson there is.

.........We know we live in a harshly moralistic society which serves to deny creativity, love and pleasure at every turn. The very fact of being willing and daring to explore another person's sexual responses, ideas, desires, feelings and realities is a challenge to this morality and control. To do so outside the bounds of a one-on-one relationship is even more daring, but, it seems, for many people, to be an inevitability.

Link to Excellent Article on Dealing with Jealousy

Compersion.org

Heidegger contra Nietzsche - post-metaphysical requires healthy relationship with death.

 

Jane Sexes it Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire!

The feminist battles over pornography in the 1970s and '80s left Gen-X third-wave feminists with a complex set of questions, says Johnson. Why do women still settle for unsatisfying sex? What does a thoughtful feminist do about her politically incorrect fantasies? Is heterosexual romance incompatible with female self-determination? While some feminists might tackle these questions without mentioning any body parts, much less their own, the contributors to this racy volume make a great effort to speak honestly about their erotic experiences in intimate, jargon-free essays edited by Johnson, a former stripper with a Ph.D. in English. There are entries from women working as prostitutes and strippers, women into exhibitionism, self-mutilation, muscle-building, girl gang-banging even women working out the impulse toward heterosexual marriage. While no one claims to have definitive answers to the big questions, certain perspectives do emerge. Among them: desire is "both socially constructed and beyond social construction"; viewing sex as a performance a deliberate trying on of other roles can be empowering; anything that defies the traditional heterosexual rules of engagement be it wanting a spanking or masturbating to rape fantasies makes space for different sexualities; and, maybe most importantly, contradictions are okay even feminists don't have to make sense all the time. It's not for the straitlaced, but sex-positive feminists will find this a provocative, important anthology that speaks honestly to the question of pleasure and how to get it. (Mar. 15)Forecast: Jane should please readers of Nerve.com and forward-thinking Camille Paglia fans. Antipornography feminists may want to steer clear.    Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews
1 out of 5 stars severely lacking., June 22, 2003
Reviewer: kot from ann arbor, mi, usa
"Feminism" and "sexuality" seem to be two words that conflict when placed next to each other. so I thought, finally! an anthology that addresses this incongruency!
Somehow i got myself about halfway through the book. at that point i had had more than enough.
I found most of the essays (of the 8 i could actually digest) not to be empowering, but more like therapy for the writer. McLaughlin deals with memories of her childhood that operate in her mind similarly to the effects of her anxiety disorder. Lutzenberger hashes out a rationale for her self-mutilation. Payette works step-by-step through her own issues dealing with marriage and being a "feminist wife." great, thank you for your stories, but i was hoping to get more out of your writing than an in-depth look at your neuroses. maybe a greater understanding of the "feminism/sexuality" conflict? 

Quantum Love: a Beginner’s Guide to Polyamory

by Emily Nagoski
(01/22/03)

For me, it started with a guy at a party. He was so stylish and so smart and so glitteringly charming and so obviously flirting with me, I just had to have him naked in my bed. I'm sure you know the (tingly) feeling. I approached him confidently, chatted him up just like a pro, and half an hour later we were sitting in each other's laps, tongue wrestling.

"Come home with me," I smiled through his lips.

"Yes," he growled back.

"I'll go get my coat"

"I'll go tell my wife."

Now, I've never actually had a bucket of ice water chucked directly into my lap, but if I did, I bet it would feel just like that.

"Yergonnawha?" No longer capable of coherent speech, I sputtered at him and extricated my limbs from his.

"No, no, it's okay, last I saw she was hooking up with a very sexy young lady, she's probably looking for me right now too."

You know that noise that cartoon characters make when they shake their heads in confusion? I made that noise.

In short, I did not go home with this fella that night -- I was too preoccupied recovering from the metaphorical splash -- but that was the beginning of a remarkable, educational, and eventually profoundly erotic relationship.

See, I had all the same initial responses that lots of folks have to polyamory -- I feared the betrayal, the rejection, the pain that must be inherent in seeing your lover love someone else. Don't you get jealous? Don't you get resentful? Aren't you afraid you'll get abandoned? Aren't you afraid you might fall in love with someone else and want to end your current relationship and it'll all just get really messy and painful and difficult, and won't it generally be all those things that we hope to escape when we settle into blissful, happily-ever-after monogamy? How can you ever feel secure?

It's difficult, was the essential answer. Yes it's messy and painful sometimes. Yes, relationships end and yes, people get hurt. But (and this is where my mind-fuck came) people get hurt anyway, right? They make messes of their relationships, they fall in love with new people, and relationships end. That's humanity, not polyamory. It's monogamy, it's heterosexuality, it's homosexuality; it's religious and secular bonds, it's legal and non-binding binding contracts; it's life.

When I'm in a poly relationship, I have permission to mess up, to be complicated, to be human, and above all to love and be loved, even though I feel all those "imperfect" things.

Moreover, in polyamory, there is no social construction to rely on, no pre-written script to validate my emotions. So I am thoroughly me, with a responsibility to be honest with myself and with everyone else involved about my passions, resentments, needs, desires, my history and my dreams.

Honesty is really hard. It's hard to tell someone that I want to end a sexual relationship when I haven't got, "Well, we just shouldn't be doing this, it's not Right" to fall back on. I have to say, "I'm not into being sexual with you now. I've really enjoyed it, but it's not what I want now."

And it's hard to hear that the man I love wants to spend all weekend with someone else, when I was hoping he would mow the lawn -- and I can't spit, "You're going to spend it with that woman, I just know it." First of all, he already told me what his plans were, and second of all I've met "that woman," I really like her, and I love the delight she brings to my lover's eyes. But that doesn't lessen my desire for him to mow the lawn. This is very hard stuff.

In the relatively short time that I've had this way of looking at love, I've learned more about myself and my heart than I learned in years of monogamy. I've taken on a far greater sense of responsibility for my feelings, and I've learned, amazingly, not to take responsibility for other people's feelings. I'm liberated from the constraints of monogamy -- and as a consequence I'm less secure, I'm constantly at risk, constantly changing. I work much harder, and I get much more from my loves than I ever did when I only loved one at a time.

©2003 by Emily Nagoski

http://www.cleansheets.com/articles/nagoski_01.22.03.shtml

The Boston Phoenix
October 15 - 22, 1998

Free love grows up

Free love might sound like a euphemism for group sex, but to Boston's polyamory community, it's just like marriage -- only bigger

by Alicia Potter

On a crooked street in Somerville is a purple house that no doubt raises eyebrows every few Thursdays. That's when it becomes a meeting site for Love Without Bounds, a local organization for young believers in free love.

On a recent evening, members of the group arrive in boisterous trios and hand-holding twosomes. They greet each other with deep, lingering embraces -- no air kisses here -- before plunking onto pillows or curling up together in corners. If ever a crowd spelled "orgy," it's this one.  But two hours pass, and the gathering fails to erupt into any sort of carnal acrobatics. At least the conversation is provocative, but again, not in the way you might think.  

It feels like a big book club, with slightly different topics of conversation. The members talk about how to ask someone out if you're married. How to fend off jealousy if you're living with your lover and his lover. How to deal with a world of pairs when you're part of a trio. In short, they talk about what it's like to be polyamorous.

Poly lingo

fluid monogamy -- An agreement to confine the exchange of bodily fluids to a closed group that has been screened for sexually transmitted diseases.

polyamory -- The philosophy and practice of loving more than one person at the same time.

polyfidelity -- A synonym for polyamory, implying that the relationships are committed.

triad -- A polyamorous relationship in which all three lovers are involved with one another, sometimes without hierarchical distinction.

V -- A polyamorous relationship in which one person has two lovers but the lovers are not involved with each other.
Polyamory is the philosophy and practice of loving more than one person at a time.  The possibilities are endless; as one 32-year-old man, married, with a child and a lover, puts it, "You don't have to end a relationship to start a new one." Some polyamorists share a household with two or more common-law spouses; others have one "primary" partner, often a legal spouse, and one or more secondary relationships beyond that. There are triads and Vs. (See "Poly Lingo," right.) The only requirement is that all involved agree on the ground rules.

Polyamorists will point out that the practice has been around for much, if not all, of human history; in the Book of Genesis, for instance, Sarah lets Abraham beget children with her maid Hagar. Our own culture is steadfastly monogamous, but statistics hint that humans and monogamy can be an uneasy marriage: 25 to 60 percent of American men commit adultery, as do 15 to 40 percent of women. Half of all marriages end in divorce. Fourteen percent of all weddings include someone who's tying the knot for the third time.

Ask people why they became involved with polyamory and you won't hear much about spouse-swapping or other libidinal adventures (though, yes, threesomes and foursomes do occur). More likely, you'll hear love stories. Complex love stories.  "There are two people who I think are really special, who I want to spend a lot of time with," says a 32-year-old man who's involved with two women. "It's wonderful to have a way to do that."

Sean Sullivan, 26, agrees. He's been involved for four and a half years with Tamara, whom he met as a freshman at Amherst College. That same year, three of his friends entered into a polyamorous relationship, a triad made up of two women and one man. Their closeness intrigued him: currently, he's involved with one of the women, while Tamara has recently started dating a second man. Soon, Sullivan hopes to house all the relationships under one roof.

A whole lotta love

A selection of polyamory resources

Books

The Ethical Slut, by Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt (Greenery Press)

Loving More: A Polyfidelity Primer, by Ryam Nearing (PEP Publishing)

Polyamory: The New Love Without Limits, by Deborah M. Anapol, Ph.D. (IntiNet Resource Center)

Web sites

Family Tree

Love Without Bounds

Love Without Limits

Loving More magazine

The Polyamory Society
There doesn't seem to be a "typical" poly relationship. Triads and Vs are popular among the polys I spoke to, with a long-distance lover here or there. Foursomes -- say, a relationship with two married couples -- are reportedly the hardest to pull off: first, both spouses must find a couple they like that much, and second, the intensity is difficult to balance (the husband may be smitten with the other woman more than his wife is smitten with the other man, for example). In the poly world, four really can be a crowd. But when the relationships work, whether with three or four or (in Sullivan's case) six, there's a payoff.

"Poly can be a marriage plus more," says Sullivan. "It can be a lifelong partnership [in which] people live together, help raise children together, grow old together. All of the things people speak of when they speak of family values apply even more to polyamory."

Idealistic? Sure. But perhaps no more so than the talk of heart-eyed romantics bent on finding "the One." Data show, too, that Sullivan's vision isn't all that deluded: Arline M. Rubin, of Brooklyn College, has conducted a 20-year study of polyamorous couples and has found that their relationships last just as long as supposedly monogamous ones. Among Family Tree's 75 members are polyamorous grandparents who enjoy not only 40-year-old marriages but also secondary relationships spanning 15 years.

Sullivan discovered polyamory through Fallway, by Paula Johnson, a novel in which six humans are raised in an alien world where group marriage is the norm.  It's science fiction, most notably Robert Heinlein's classic Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and Robert Rimmer's The Harrad Experiment (1966), that polys credit with sustaining polyamory beyond the Aquarian Age. Both novels uphold multiple commitments as the love life of the future.

Polys talk about "relationship orientation" -- a propensity for handling multiple commitments that varies from person to person, like the spectrum of sexual orientation. Some people are monogamous; most are in the middle; some are hard-wired polyamorous.  "It's who I am. Even if I were only in one relationship and following monogamous rules, that doesn't change me, just like a bisexual person can be in a relationship with any one person and yet still be identified as bisexual."

Anthropologist Helen Fisher, author of Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray (W.W. Norton, 1992), says we're all potentially polyamorous.  "You would think that more people would be [practicing] polyamory, because, evolutionarily, we're built to have multiple relationships," she says. "We're built to fool around."  Anthropologists now believe that, at the most, 2 percent of all species are completely faithful sexually (among them the Nile crocodile, the American toad, the dung beetle, and some desert wood lice). In her book, Fisher points out that anthropological studies of 853 human societies showed only 16 percent practicing monogamy as we typically define it. And, as we know, even monogamy doesn't guarantee fidelity; in many of the monogamous cultures, researchers discovered covert or tolerated affairs.

Fisher has an explanation for our longings: she says that our brain circuitry has evolved so that the chemical reactions associated with different kinds of love -- attachment, infatuation, lust -- function independently of one another. In other words, we can find comfort with an old lover, flirt with a cute coworker, and fantasize about that beautiful stranger -- all in the course of an hour.  "However," Fisher cautions, "we're not built to share. We get jealous. That puts the human animal in a pickle."  Polyamorists, she says, have found a way out. "They're honestly dealing with the fact that we're not built to be faithful," she explains. "They accept that inevitability and channel it in ways that minimize pain and maximize joy. They attempt paradise."

This paradise, though, can be very unfamiliar territory. Take this scene, for example: Rob Mohns, 25, nuzzles his girlfriend Aileen, 22, while two feet away, knitting a scarf, is his fiancée, 26-year-old Megan O'Neal. As Mohns and his new love practically roll off the couch, O'Neal's face is serene.  "I don't usually get jealous," says O'Neal. "And when I do, it takes me by surprise. It's kind of good, because it usually means that something in this situation isn't working for me, that I need to figure out what it is and go talk to the person."  Spend some time with polyamorists and you realize that communication is what keeps their relationships alive. Polys talk about everything: who they want to go out with, what they do on their dates, how their relationships are progressing.

Americans, says Fisher, are "wedded to the notion of lifelong pair bonding and fidelity. We'll see more divorce and adultery rather than an attempt to channel our urges in an honest way. The majority of Americans will not endorse polyamory -- ever."   In other words, our allegiance to the idea of commitment will far outlast the commitments themselves.

"I don't think it's necessarily pathological, but [multiple relationships] still break a bond and prevent the deepest possible connection."

decorating their desks with, yes, pictures of both their primary partner and their lovers.

Alicia Potter can be reached at apotter@tiac.net.
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http://www.bostonphoenix.com/archive/features/98/10/15/POLYAMORISTS.html

Devil's/Monogamist's Advocate (me)

Alicia Potter's article states:
Such commitment is possible, polys say, because their lifestyle diffuses a lot of relationship pressures. Banish the concept of "my one and only," and you lift the burden of meeting all of a lover's emotional and intellectual needs. In essence, polys are free to choose their paramours as most of us choose our friends: as complements to different sides of their personalities. One lover may share a spiritual outlook, another an ironic sense of humor, another a passion for horror movies.  Says Sullivan: "It allows for stronger emotional bonds than I'd have otherwise. I think if I was in a single relationship there would probably be aspects of myself that I wouldn't really be able to share with just one person. Additional relationships mean there's more of myself I can express."

Do you need polyamory for this?  Is this need not satisfied by monogamy plus friendships?

Questionnaire:
* Are you into polyamory just because it's different and you're trying to carve out a unique identity, to individuate and be seen as interesting and free-thinking and courageous and purposeful?

The only thing free love is free of is love.

The Simple Guide to Relationships 
© 2002 Edward Martin III
www.petting-zoo.org/Relationships02.html

****** Introduction:

Life and Love
I firmly believe that life and love should be much simpler than they're all made out to be. I run into people who have told me, many times, "It's not as easy as you think it is." Each time I explain, as patiently as I can, that I said simple. Not easy.

This is not to say that it can't be easy, too.  Being easy's great.  Trust me on this one.
But simplicity, ah, simplicity's about a 9.8 on the I-Want-O-Meter.

Sometimes, the simple things are also the difficult things. I have found that it's worth the effort. Keeping your life and love simple pays off and the more you do it, the more you can do it. After a while, you hardly ever think about it. Until you overhear someone complaining about how complicated life is.

Go ahead -- change your life.

Exceptions
Sure, they exist. Your situation may be one. But start out thinking it isn't and look -- very hard -- for a simple answer. You'll probably find it.

*****  The Basic Assertions

These basic assertions may simplify your life.
  • Every relationship is unique
    This means every single one. There might be common points, but that's only surface resemblance. Look, even the relationship between the same two people can change over a period of days, weeks, years (unless you're being held captive by a psychopath who whispers "don't ever change" in your ear every night). You'll simply be a lot happier when you start thinking: "It's just different."

    Enjoy the differences. Enjoy the similarities.
  • Anyone has the right to form whatever relationships they wish
    This is a lot more power than most people are comfortable with in a relationship, but most of the reluctance to accept this assertion stems from the idea that relationships are property, or that the other person might abuse this power.

    As far as the "property" thing goes, maybe some people like it that way. Good for them. I'll pass.

    Anyone afraid of having this power lorded over them should reconsider their choice of partners. They would also do well to master communication skills. Also, keep in mind that this -- as with all sorts of things in this little document -- is completely reversible. On one hand, you can all maintain a balance of terror. You can also maintain a balance of pleasure. Whatever you want.
These two assertions are very useful in dealing with jealousy and the fear of being replaced. The first helps reduce the fear of being replaced. The second suggests that different relationships might even complement each other, particularly if there is a perceived need.

Crazy, huh? Yeah, I thought so, too.

***** What you must Always Do

Remembering to do the following things helped simplify my life tremendously.
  • Believe your partner
    It's possible they're lying, but it's also possible they're telling the truth. It's safest to decide they're telling the truth. If they are, you'll be a saint. If they aren't, they'll catch themselves in the lie later, or feel really bad and possibly even apologize. Maybe buy you a milkshake.

    If you're absolutely sure you're being lied to (I mean, really sure, as in photographs and signed testimonials), then ask your partner to explain the discrepancies. The important thing here is that you're still willing to listen to them, to hear and understand what they know.

    If you find you can't depend on your partner, that you simply can't believe them, or that believing them results in trouble for you, then your trouble is with that partner -- not with the act of believing.
  • Be Sincere
    If you are sincere when you talk or otherwise deal with your partner, it becomes easier to accept their sincerity.
  • Apologize When You Screw Up
    It doesn't have to be elaborate, but if it's not sincere, don't bother -- you probably won't fool anyone.

    To combine the above two things, when your partner apologizes, accept it. You might be incapable of knowing whether they're sincere or not. In which direction would you like to make a mistake?
  • Tell the Truth
    You might be surprised at where it gets you. Here are some excellent reasons to tell the truth:
    • You might actually get what you want, instead of what you think you can get away with asking for.
    • You won't have to remember which lie you told to whom if you always tell the truth.
    • You're supplying your partner with the best information you can.

    If you don't want to tell them anything, consider doing the courtesy of explaining why. You don't have to, but you might discover something new right then and there.

******  What You Must Never Do

  • Never lie to a partner.
    I actually prefer applying this to everybody, but that's too tough a leap for some folks.

    I thought this was pretty simple, but I found out that when asserting it, there is rarely a person who agrees right away. Most immediately start to hem and haw. Here's the trouble with that -- the first thing you're doing when you're hemming and hawing is looking for excuses to lie so you can have an escape route. We all want escape routes; no one wants to be held captive by having to say an unpleasant thing. But we shouldn't have to escape -- if we remember that of all the people in the world, our own partner is probably the least likely to be "out to get us".

    Nothing leaves people feeling more annoyed, more used, and less valuable than finding out they were lied to. If you don't have that stuck in your head, re-read this paragraph.

Everyone Wins
by
Shel Silverstein

I will not play Tug O' War,
I'd rather play Hug O' War;
Where everyone hugs, instead of tugs,
And everyone giggles and rolls on the rug.
Where everyone kisses,
and everyone grins;
everyone cuddles,
and everyone wins.

JUST ME, JUST ME
by
Shel Silverstein

Sweet Marie, she loves just me
(She also loves Maurice McGhee).
No she don't, she loves just me
(She also loves Louise Dupree).
No she don't, she loves just me
(She also loves the willow tree).
No she don't, she loves just me!
(Poor, poor fool, why can't you see
She can love others and still love thee.)

Jealousy and the Abyss

This is the full article.  Read a more concise version.

by William Pennell Rock
From the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring 1983, 70-84
Copyright ©1983 by the Association for Humanistic Psychology

Reprinted by permission of the author at www.PlanetWaves.net

Summary. Relationships -- and jealousy in particular -- provide an opportunity to come to a fundamental understanding of the self. Jealousy is the eruption of attachment. It can be transcended only through awareness. As we move with awareness into the core of this phenomenon, we pass through ungrounded expectations and beliefs, projections and delusions, envy, guilt, the loss of self-esteem, and the threat to security. The core is an existential problem; it has to do with illusion and the essentially fearful nature of the ego. In possessiveness, ego defends itself against nothingness. When we come to know and accept the nothingness at the core, jealousy and the pain of obsessive attachment cease.

Imagine this: You're very much in love with someone, and you have to go out of town. You know your lover's habits; you know he or she likes to go to bed fairly early, and that he or she gets up and goes to work in the morning. So you go away on your trip. You're gone for about a week, and then one evening you call, and there's no answer. Awful pictures rush into your mind. With great forces of will you stop them. The next morning, you call at eleven in the morning. His or her roommate answers the phone and says, "Gee, I'm sorry, She's not up yet, She's sleeping late." Oh god. Something is fishy. Something's going on. You don't know what it is, but your stomach is starting to churn. You're jealous.

What do you do when you're jealous? In a fever, you may try to find out if your lover has been with someone else. If he or she has, you go into a rage, a frenzy of blame.

It's an immediate response. You are angry. You feel violated. You want revenge. You want to stop what is happening, control the situation, manipulate whatever is necessary to protect yourself.

If you can cool down, if you can get hold of the internal automatic reactions that accompany jealousy, you might find out that you can indeed fix the situation. Often, what comes up as jealousy can be eradicated by simple communication. "I need to have more time with you." "When we go to a party, I don't want you to be with anybody else." "I need to have sex outside the relationship." When we leave these needs unspoken, they lie in wait until a situation exposes them. It is essential to get very clear and explicit with your partner about your needs and expectations.

Such solutions of diplomacy are important, but they remain superficial. A deeper opportunity is missed. Things are happening in this odious passion that present the possibility of entering new levels of self-understanding, to see who you are and what is the source of suffering.

The first step is to clarify what you are about in the relationship. If you and your lover want to evolve into more awareness; if somehow, somewhere, the glimmer of enlightened consciousness attracts you and you want to move in that direction, then you can make an important choice. What you choose is not just to increase your pleasure together, not even necessarily to protect the relationship or to secure it in some way, but to use the relationship as a means of coming to a deeper and more fundamental understanding of what is so.

RELATIONSHIP FOR TRUTH

How you see the relationship will affect matters from the beginning; for instance, what you share with each other about your realities. If both of you are there to create a safe and secure relationship, you will tend to conceal anything that might threaten it. Many couples come to live completely mendacious lives together. Gradually, they smother themselves in compromises. Love energy -- eros -- cannot pass between two lives lived in lies. Only truth is erotic.

If the relationship is seen as a means to knowledge, the paradigm shifts: The discipline is to learn to live uncompromisingly in your truth and to love the other without qualification. No easy task, but there is no higher. What you are loving together is truth: Everything real has to be shared; everything else has to be dismantled.

Here is a simple test to see where you are in this matter of relating. Write down all the things you have not shared with your partner. Contemplate this list, and there you will see the limits you place on the relationship, the degree of your commitment to the way of the lover.

LOVE AND ATTACHMENT

Now, on the path where relationship is a means for coming to self-understanding, it is necessary to clarify the difference between loving and being attached. This is a most basic distinction, because so much of what we experience as attachment, we call love. In fact, most of the institutions around love, such as marriage and family, are actually ways of protecting our investment in attached situations.

Loving someone is glorifying who they are in their uniqueness. Consider a flower. You see a flower that is really beautiful to you. You want to glorify that flower in its own natural setting, or else you want to pick it and possess it. Those are two entirely different ways of being. Love creates a thankful glorification of the flower. You love the other ­ you want to see the other thrive, enjoy, and grow. You want to see them become more of who they are, no matter what that entails. That's the truth of love. It is unconditional.

Attachment is quite different. You want to pick the flower, sever it from its roots, and make it yours. [[j's note: or dig it up, and bring it home to care for it; or come to it every day to care for it, nourish it, protect it where it is.]]  You want to appropriate the beloved, make him or her be what you want them to be, conform to what is convenient for you in the relationship. Attachment is not care for the other; it's care for oneself. This distinction has to be understood: Are you loving, or are you attached?

If you are attached, you are going to experience the pain of jealousy. It follows that jealousy becomes the opportunity to see within yourself the truth of attachment. Not theoretical understanding, but existential awareness of attachment at its very roots. Only through this awareness can jealousy be really transcended.

PENETRATING TO THE CORE

The most extraneous and irrelevant way to deal with jealousy is trying to control your partner. It is also the least effective. Whatever illusions you may have as to who is to blame or who is at fault, jealousy is within you; not within the relationship. Manipulating your lover is a poor palliative. To control outer circumstances by making your lover behave or toe the line in a certain way is to miss the opportunity. You always miss the opportunity of jealousy -- indeed, any pain -- if you blame others. It is not that the other may not be to blame, but that in the matter of inner realities, blame is always irrelevant.

Manipulation of the other is external. Moving inward, we use the situation that created the jealousy as the occasion for clarifying communication and for negotiation. To do so is constructive for the relationship, but still peripheral, still not touching upon the real opportunity presented by jealousy. Moving further inward towards the core, we come to the personal level: yourself and your own reactions. This is the real field for dealing with jealousy: not trying to blame or fix your partner, but seeing who you are.

Really, jealousy is like an onion -- so overwhelming, so pungent, so difficult to be near. It cannot be ignored. It makes you cry. Yet the onion is an important food. In blaming and controlling, you are refusing to see that there is an onion. You are trying to avoid. In trying to see who you are, you take the onion in hand. You take a radical, internal view of what happened to you in jealousy. Now you peel off layer after layer of the onion until you reach its center. There at the core is the possibility of freedom.

DYSFUNCTIONAL BELIEFS

The first layer of the onion is your unexamined notions about how one should be in relationship. What are your beliefs? Do you believe that if you're in a relationship with someone, you should be with them exclusively and they should be exclusively with you? Well, where does that belief come from? Is it based upon some hidden idea that the other is your possession? Is the other an object to be arranged in a way that is suitable to you? Only if you possess the beloved can you tell them how to be. So, if you're inclined to manipulate and control in this way somehow subconsciously you have already made the lover into your possession. This is something to look at. Can one person be the possession of another? What beliefs do you carry about relationship?

The fact of the matter is, you are not actually in a loving relationship if you think that you possess the other, because the essence of the other is basically free. Whatever peripheral control you may exert, you cannot touch that inner freedom that a human being is.  You may control your lover so that he or she appears to love you, but you cannot make a person love you.

Moving inward, look at the situation rationally or realistically. We each have our own sexuality, and we each have to take care of it as we can. Only some people can fit their sexuality into one relationship. So to have the belief that your lover should be able to so conform may already be erroneous. You are not responsible for the sexuality of the other. You can not take control of their sexuality. You do not own it. It is their own. And what they do about it is in a real sense their own affair.

This insight has probably helped me in my own dealings with jealousy more than any other. Somehow I had the idea that my sexuality and her sexuality were tied up as one. That is a beautiful experience. In fact, the relationship may go through a long period where there is a pure union of two sexualities. But to say that that is how it must be forever and oblige the other to behave in accordance with that belief will not work.

Erroneous beliefs inevitably contribute to the pain of jealousy. Take stock of your beliefs, and drop the ones that aren't functional. That's the first skin of the onion.

PROJECTION

The second layer is projection. Sometimes we suspect that our partner is being untrue to us. For instance, that night you called your lover, a thought immediately came to mind: "Oh, she's got somebody with her." One reason that you may have these perceptions is because you yourself are harboring thoughts of being "unfaithful." In fact, if you are in a relationship where you have an agreement not to be sexual with anybody else, you will almost inevitably start having feeling of wanting to be with others. Sooner or later, if you don't share those thoughts, or if you're not up front about the fact that you have such feelings, you will imagine that your partner is having them. This is projecting. Your jealous feelings may come from the fact that you feel like you want to play around, and so you suspect that your partner is doing it because you refuse to be aware that you are entertaining such a temptation yourself. A projected perception and a real one feel differently. We can learn to discriminate between the two. Again, the challenge is to be aware, to examine oneself.

ENVY

Another level that we have to peel off is envy. Envy is often mistaken for jealousy. I have experienced what I thought was tremendous jealousy, when in fact what I was feeling was envy because my partner was having a ball and I wasn't. Well, she's off having a good time with a boyfriend in New York, and I'm out here sitting alone. I want to have a good time with somebody. Envy is the frustrated longing for the other's experience. It is a different, more superficial phenomenon than jealousy.

GUILT

Another layer is guilt. Guilt can afflict you if you feel bad because you're jealous. Since the sexual revolution, some would-be liberated people think it's wrong to feel jealous. We are told that we shouldn't feel jealous, we should rise above it. So if you have this belief and you feel jealous, you're going to experience shame and guilt. But judgment is truly irrelevant. Jealousy is jealousy. It is neither good nor bad. It simply is, and it is an opportunity.

We must learn to peel away the skins of illusion, and get to the core. Really, what I'm talking about is awareness. The discussions of projection, envy, and guilt are pointers, but you have to bring to your own internal situation of jealousy your awareness. Ask these questions and investigate the reality of your feelings. In order to transcend a negative feeling, you must move deeper and deeper into your own authentic experience of it. Not what you read in a novel or saw in a movie. Not what someone has said you should feel. What you are actually feeling.

Becoming aware of the actual feeling and the true source often alleviates the feelings. You may experience what you describe as jealousy, but when you really examine the feelings, what is really there is anger that you were being left out of something that was fun -- envy. There's your partner taking a trip with someone else. You would like to go on that trip, and you're being left out. Those are not really feelings of jealousy. They are simply feelings of sadness or anger at being excluded from something that's happening, something that you feel you belong to in some ways.

The outer layers of the onion of jealousy really aren't jealousy at all. They're reactions belonging to other complexes. If you can see them, and separate them out from what you're really feeling, you can sometimes relieve the pain without ever coming to jealousy. What was really going on was moral indignation, envy, guilt or fear, or some other kind of feelings.

Up to this point in peeling the onion, the primary emotions are sadness or anger. Both are created out of expectation. You are angry with your lover, you are sad because he or she has violated your expectations. But you are responsible, because you have created and are holding those expectations. Desire, according to the Buddha, is the source of suffering. A tension is created in your consciousness between whatsoever is and what you would have it be. That tension is the basis of all suffering.

Once the anger and sadness resulting from our fractured expectations are peeled away, once blame is removed from the other and anger disappears, once we see the superficial feelings around ourselves that aren't really at the core of jealousy, we come to fear.

FEAR AND ANXIETY

The first fear we come to is fear of loss. Jealousy sees many things that can be lost. The fear of loss of the lover is the greatest. The rest of the fear around jealousy is in fact anxiety; that is to say, it does not have a real object.

The first anxiety comes from the loss of self-esteem. All kinds of self-doubt come up. You don't have enough money. Something's wrong with your body. You start projecting your own inadequacies on the other's actions. If your self-esteem is low, a jealous episode is going to be used as an occasion for proving that you are unlovable.

Examine the ideas that you have. You'll notice that they belong to all the old mechanisms by which you put yourself down. In other words, you were putting yourself down for these things long before the beloved came along to give you an excuse for doing so. Now you're just using him or her as a pretext.

So here's something else that you can do about jealousy: Start being aware that you are putting yourself down and that the inclination to do so is there independently of the jealousy-producing situation. Own your own tendency to put yourself down. Learn to deal with it yourself, and don't lay it on your lover.

Deeper than fear that comes from a loss of self-esteem is fear for the nest. One of two lovers is usually more concerned about the security of the relationship. Often it is the woman. Usually the function of the female in nature has been to keep the nest. It's almost as though nature gave her that fear out of protection of its own. The woman fears for her home, fears that the source of biological or family security is threatened. A man can also be possessed by security obsession. As women have become freer and more assertive men experience jealous insecurity more often. This is a deeper level of this onion of jealousy.

INFANTILE ANXIETY

Deeper than fear for the nest ­ and close to the core, are anxieties from infancy that are quickened by the present situation. Often, such jealousy is delusional ­ there whether or not there is any occasion for it. We can come to terms with many of these fears by looking deep inside and finding memory traces from our childhood ­ of being abandoned, for instance. These memory traces come from various losses or threats, beginning at birth. Later, you may want to win the special love of the parent of the opposite sex, but you may not achieve this primitive goal, so you feel constantly frustrated and inadequate. Or you become morbidly guilty and conclude that you should lose your oedipal goal because your incestuous wishes are bad.

You carry within you for the rest of your life memories of these early childhood traumas. Later, as soon as your lover goes for someone else, all that early trauma is triggered. Now if you move into a deep awareness, you can actually experience those childhood traumas, you can see that what you're experiencing in this present situation actually comes form a deep residual memory of abandonment.

All of these levels of the onion have to do with illusion, not with realities. They're from the past, from childhood, or they're illusions about the present, beliefs that are illusory, that don't relate to here/now reality. This is a very significant aspect of these anxieties that come with jealousy. If you have jealous feeling, and you start looking at them, suddenly you begin to see that they're not real. You are torturing yourself with unreal fears. What does this mean? What does it come from?

THE CORE ILLUSION

We are coming closer to the core of the onion. Reactions that are peripheral, the more superficial skins of the onion, are resting upon the core. The core is the source -- the first illusion. The core has to be there for the other illusions to be there.

At the core is fear of a deeper kind. In its first aspect, it looks like fear of aloneness. This fear, too, comes from a childhood situation, from memories of when your parents left you alone. There you were, freaked out in your crib, crying, and nobody heard you.

This core fear has also the aspect of fear of death. Again, something is going to be taken away -- your own being! That's how vulnerable you are. There's something about jealousy, that gut feeling, that is like the fear of death. It's that immediate, it's that real.

Something that's very like fear of death, interestingly enough, is fear of love. When we love, we move so much into the other that we lose ourselves. We use the expression "falling in love" because it's like falling into a great abyss. You lose your identity, your sense of autonomy. And that is exactly what happens when you fall in love. You lose your autonomous sense of who you are.

The fears of aloneness, of death, of love, all have the aspect of fear of abysmal nothingness -- the fear that there isn't anything. Death suggests this to us. When we die, we don't know what's beyond. The only thing we know is that it's not like here. So as far as we're concerned, it's just oblivion.  [[[ Is there life after love? ]]] Nothingness is there in our consciousness all the time. Jealousy brings us immediately to this fear of oblivion.

All these fears -- of death, love, aloneness, and nothingness -- all are like the core of the onion. In fact, they all point to this core. The core itself is existential. It has to do with your existence. Thus jealousy is not fundamentally a problem of relationship, not a problem of love, but a problem of religion. Jealousy is basically, fundamentally, a spiritual problem.

What I mean by "religion" here is not belief or morality. I mean religion in the fundamental sense of how you relate to your own existence -- your feelings, your senses, your inner aloneness ­ all of those realities that you experience but can never really communicate. Every human being relates to his or her own existence. Existence is God. In that relationship you're totally alone. In that you have no company. That is what it is to be a human -- relating alone and reflectively to your own existence.

The truth of your religion has little to do with going to a church or temple, but with how you relate to that which you can't articulate, which is within you, and true. The way you relate to this existence is the basis of religion, and this religious matter is the core of the onion. Jealousy in its core exposes how you, as a human being, relate to your existence.

THE EGO

Basic to the question of existence is the question, who is this "I" that's doing all of this feeling? Who is this "I" that loses self-esteem, that has a nest to protect, that is afraid? Who is this "I" that says "mine"? Who is this conglomerate of expectations? Who is this I?

In the East, they call it the ego. We use the word "ego" in the West in the sense of self-esteem; or in psychoanalysis, it is your capacity to cope with reality. When I talk about ego, I'm talking about something more fundamental. It is that which identifies, that which feeds on self-esteem, that which is the composition of all your expectations, that which perpetuates itself by possessing. In short, ego is that which can become jealous.

Ego and jealousy are both illusory. In your experiences of jealousy, you come to an insight that it is not real. You were jealous, and then all of a sudden you're not jealous any more, and you look back to when you were, and you feel that it wasn't real at all. It disappeared because it had no basis. That's what I mean about ego. Ego is that which we experience which is not real. Jealousy is also not real. Becoming aware is the joy you feel when you actually experience that unreality.

Let us consider envy again. Like all the skins of the onion, envy stands on ego. See how illusion works in envy. First of all, how do you know if you can be envious of another person? You see only outer circumstances and objects. You don't really know if the other is really happy with what they're experiencing. When you look at the other, what you perceive is your own projections. Don't even suppose that you can see another person's reality sufficiently to compare with yours in the first place. There's no way -- until we reach utter, silent awareness within -- that we can go into another and truly know their reality. But the illusion goes deeper.

In envy you are comparing the I -- which is your ego -- with the ego presented by someone else. Your comparison is based on an illusion that you are an entity and the other another entity, and you can compare the two, Only ego is "comparable." Only if you see yourself as an ego can you compare yourself in the first place.

Your comparison is based on illusion. The "you" object that you're comparing with some objectified person out there is really a subject -- internal, hidden, uniquely, incomparably yourself. All your subjective reality is being objectified and then compared with an object out there that you perceive to be a certain way.

With envy, possessiveness, jealousy, ego itself, we are not dealing in moral or ethical issues. It is irrelevant whether these or any acts they come from are wrong or right. It is a matter of reality or illusion, of authenticity, of phoniness. When I talk about peeling away the layers of the onion, what I am asking you do is become aware. Through awareness only can we drop this illusion. And that which has illusions, that which can be jealous, is ego.

The feeling of abysmal jealousy is an eruption, a deep catharsis of ego. That's why jealousy is the great opportunity to stare ego right in the face. But it is difficult. It requires ruthless awareness, because ego is usually concealing itself. With deadly subtlety it masquerades as comparison, as blame, as the fault of the other, as problems that you have. It's hard even to have any grasp of it, because its hold on you is so subtle, so magical. It's always casting a spell over you. In fact, you believe that you are ego. That's why it's so hard to see. Thus, when jealousy presents the source of suffering itself directly before you, there is great possibility.

What creates ego in the first place? Existence takes care of me as a child in a womb. It keeps "breathing" me. Then why do I develop this illusory me that -- in the name of protection -- keeps me in pain, keeps me alienated, isolated, separated from others, and unable to trust in existence? Why am I unable to trust that I'm taken care of by the whole, by all that is? All of us live in fear, and that which lives in fear is the same as that which is jealous: the ego.


THE ABYSS

To understand the ego, we must return to the core of jealousy. We "fear" the same in love, death, and aloneness. It is existence, or God, pure being. But because it is not a thing (only ego sees things), it has been called in the East, "nothingness" and "emptiness."

Let me give you an experience that might give you some sense of this nothingness. When you're waking up in the morning you are in a twilight. You're just coming out of sleep, before your thoughts begin to form, some ground is there. Like a tremendous empty vessel, it's there prior to your thoughts. Things bubble up in it and become realities. They congeal, take on an identity, and form the ego that you think you are.

The words "vessel of emptiness" or "nothingness" sound as though they are describing something that is devoid of content. They don't have that meaning. They mean that for existence there are no things that are real. In other words, existence presents us with an undifferentiated flow of experience welling up out of a void, an abyss of the unknown. Only with our minds do we pick out things, interpret them, and say that they are real. Our minds say that things out there really exist in the meaning, context and values we assign to them. What we actually experience is a moving kaleidoscope of uninterpreted fullness. And this moving, ever-changing phenomenon over which we have very little control, really, is a nothingness. It is a fullness in which there is no thing. So when you get right down to the basic religious question raised by jealousy, you have to question whether or not you really even exist.

In his great work Being and Nothingness, Sartre said that we as human beings so dread this ground of consciousness, this nothingness, that we have to create ourselves to be something. We are nothing. We are undifferentiated out of the great emptiness. We have no content. But this is so frightening, so abysmal, that we create ourselves to be something ­ namely, an ego. Being and nothingness is ego and existence, jealousy and the abyss. We are something fearful created out of nothing. Since somewhere we always know the something to be unreal, nothing is always present to us threateningly. My sense of my death is that it is always present because nothingness is always there. Death is an accession to nothingness, a return to the source. So here we are, and basically what we come from is emptiness or nothingness. This is our basic angst.

A friend of mine experienced a lot of pain in her relationships. She was very compulsive, and possessive. She asked her teacher, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, about her pain, and he told her this: The ego, which arises out of the nothingness that we basically are, can have a negative or a positive response to the nothingness. The something that we are knows deep down that we're standing on nothingness. All of you know, deep down, that before the whole, you aren't anything. The negative response is subliminal terror. Against this fear of nothingness, you create the illusion that you are something. You back this project by preoccupation with realities, accumulating and possessing. That something illusory that you are is the one that suffers in jealousy. The entire structure is a negative or fearful response to nothingness.

But Bhagwan told my friend that this something-ego can also relate positively to nothingness. Only then can we move out of attachment into prayerful gratitude and heartfelt celebration of the other's being. Only then are we capable of real love. Only by saying a deep yes to nothingness, existence, the whole, do we come to be at home in nothingness. Eventually the positive response enables us to drop the something in favor of nothingness.

You are just a bubble. You were nothing before; you are nothing now. An enlightened bubble is not concerned with its bubbleness. It just is. It doesn't appear anything special, yet it feels all, sees all just as it is. That's why it is said to be enlightened. This is a positive, pure response to our given existential situation.

FALSE IDOLS

Most of us don't react positively. Instead, we shore up our ego realities and live in fear. But death goes on reminding us of nothingness; aloneness goes on reminding us of nothingness; and love reminds us of nothingness. All three of these are ways that we experience nothingness right here and now, and they are frightening. If you have a fear response to nothingness, you will cling in your relationships, you will have to be possessive. You will have to control others. These are all tensions and compulsions that reflect this fundamental fear -- this negative response to nothingness.

Thus ego in its fear protects itself from truth. This is the core of the onion. It is this core that you're really dealing with in jealousy. Many illusions are there, many external circumstances distract you from this core, but this is what jealousy is.

Given what is so, you have to turn yourself around completely and fall in love with nothingness. This turning brings with it the greatest religious insight: Nothingness is there to be relaxed into and loved. This is what they call in religion, surrender. You surrender to the nothingness and when you do so, it begins to give forth what you need. You have no control. There is no you that can control.

The you that controls is exercising the illusion of the ego. We are all in it -- all of us running around filling our lives with possessing, controlling, and manipulating. We are not really in control. Our manipulations are only superficial, but the ego would have us believe that we must be in control or else there is chaos. If you have much insight into how things around you really are, you will come to see this control for what it is. It is like a molecule thinking it controls the universe.

The whole organism of existence is moving in its own way, and we are just nothing. Nothingness is the organism that is the whole. You are not separate from that organism, and the sense that you are separate from it is the basic illusion of ego. It prevents the richness that the whole gives forth when we let go to it.

You can become possessive about God as you can about a lover. If you become possessive in religion, you lay a trip on God. He will be Rama, he will be Jesus, he will be dialectical materialism, he will be the state, he will be your God. "My religion is the only true one." "The God I believe in is the one and only." Anyone who is very rigid in his or her beliefs is manifesting the same principles as that which creates jealousy. In other words, the possessive person and the fanatic are involved in the same game. They build up the same kinds of resistance to the same primordial fear. So, if you are in negative response to nothingness, you'll become preoccupied with material possessions, you'll become obsessed with controlling a lover, or else you'll become very religious and rigid about your beliefs.

When you possess you become possessed. You live in a deep vulnerability based in illusion. The stomach-churning pain of jealousy comes from that vulnerability. That's what you're experiencing. The jealous moment is essential catharsii of this existential complex.

TO THE CORE

Now, a relationship with a lover or a relationship with God can reveal the ultimate. Through loving a lover or an image of God you can experience pure nothingness as bliss. But if you possess, if you have a God that you have fixed beliefs about, or if you have a lover that you jealously control, what you're actually doing is blocking your realization. Out of fear you are misusing that which can give you an experience of bliss. You are so controlled that you cannot be overwhelmed. And the ultimate can only make itself known when you allow yourself to be overwhelmed.

If you have this negative response to nothingness, the very base upon which you are standing is false. That false base is ego, the seat of jealousy. The possessed person, or the God or principle that you believe in, is only a projection of that ego. It is not real. You are relating to an illusion, a projection that you created to keep yourself from experiencing fear. Your eyes are closed. You can't really see the beloved.

And this is what happens to us. This is why we don't communicate in love. Because the lover is a false idol. Whether it's the person or whether it is a God, somehow it's false. Our eyes are closed to the reality, and what we're relating to all the time is our own illusion.

This is the basic mechanism that creates jealousy in the first place. What you really want from a lover, what you really want from God, is bliss. If you possess them, if you lay your trip on them, if you're relating to your own projection, you're stopping yourself from experiencing this bliss. If you can't know joy through the lover, or through God because of the illusion that you've created, you can't really experience the bliss of love. You have to see this basic mechanism that is happening in your relationship to existence and know that as a jealous person you are making a choice.

Love cannot be channeled to one object. If you have one love object and channel all of your love there, what you are experiencing is attachment. Similarly, if you are jealous, you are not experiencing love, you are experiencing attachment. If you really love, then you'll experience an overflowing, you will experience love for all. It's a natural consequence of loving. It is not a natural consequence of attachment. In attachment, you're channeling all of your love in one direction. In love you're experiencing something in one direction that frees you in all directions. It's as if you threw a stone into a pond. Where the stone hits the water, radiations ripple outward. When you really love, it may be directed toward one object, but it radiates into love for all of existence. That is why love is said to be divine.

So this is the possibility that you have as a jealous person. When you work on jealousy, forget the lover and deal with your own relationship to existence. Go deep inside yourself, slowly peel away the outer layers of the onion until you come to the core that is your own relationship to existence. Then you will free yourself to love more.

My own love relationships have been guided by my teacher. In the last five years he has shaped all the significant factors in the development of my love life, because he wants me to reach beyond the neurotic needs of relationship. There was a time when I experienced a lot of pain in loving, a lot of jealousy. I felt that I was always living in fear of loss. I felt like I couldn't hold on, and I was in constant pain because of it. So I went to my teacher and asked what to do. His answer cut through to the core. "Simply love more," he said. "To cut right through fear of loss which is infantile in its source, right to the core of the basic relationship that you have to existence, go into more loving." In other words, if you love someone, go deep into your own unique experience of what that love is, and just let that be who you are. Surrender to it. Build your identity upon it. You are not a person who is jealous. Not someone who's trying to control. Not even someone who's fearing. You are love experiencing itself deeper and deeper within its own fullness.

"Your love is a boat," Bhagwan said. "Just go on, enter loving more, tending, penetrating -- and the boat, of its own volition, will carry you to the other shore."

http://www.planetwaves.net/jealousy.html

Will sex be better after the revolution?

...

 

Links

www.sexuality.org
www.theethicalslut.com
www.lovewithoutlimits.com
www.lovethatworks.org
www.polymatchmaker.com

Glossary

Compersion: The opposite of jealousy; the feelings of happiness that your lover(s) are also loving and being loved by other lovers. Coined by the Keristan Commune of San Francisco, which practiced polyfidelity and was disbanded in the early 1990s.

Condom Commitment: Agreement to confine exchange of bodily fluids and barrier-free intercourse to a closed group whose members have been screened for sexually transmitted diseases. A.k.a. safe-sex circle.

Love Magick for the Holidays
"The Power of Orgasm"

                  By Ina  Laughing Winds M.A. M.F.C.C.

We have never been told how powerful our orgasm is. It could be the greatest gift you give to yourself and lover this holiday season.  

Orgasms are the key to rejuvenating yourself at the cellular level. It is what balances your internal environment.  Just like a thermostat. Not feeling well? Have an orgasm. Tired, feel depressed? Have an orgasm.  An orgasm a day keeps the doctor away. 

The more orgasms you have a year, the younger you are.  The average American has sex 58 times a year. If you double that, you can reduce your real age by as much as 1.6 years. The benefits keep adding up as your frequency increases.  Age estimates RealAge (Cliff Street Books, 1999). 

A study published in the British Medical Journal suggests that men who have frequent sex are less likely to die at an early age. 

Sexual dissatisfaction has been shown to be a risk factor for heart attacks in women. A Duke University study linked enjoyment of intercourse with longer life in women. 

The Great Spirit created our bodies to have orgasms. The more you understand the vital need for the human spirit to enjoy this very intimate form of communication, the more you will be willing to open yourself to the magickal journey of spiritual sexuality. 

Here is a Holiday recipe: 

 2-3 hours
Intimate location
Sensual music
Candles to create an ambiance (remember lighters)
A small bowl of water (south), earth (west), incense for air (north), and yellow candle for fire (east).
Massage oil
Lubricant of your choice (safe sex items needed)
Sensual attire, from a sarong to lingerie. 

Begin with an agreement to be present 100%.  You are gifting this time, not using it to discuss old grievances.

Set up the room so it feels sexy, sensual and inviting. 

Place the elemental bowls around the bed or on a shelf in their proper direction. Honor each of the elements and light the east candle.  Say a prayer from your heart. 

Write a simple statement of intent. Place it under the east candle.  Such as, “Love first and foremost, financial security and independence, and all else will follow.”  “Or Thank You Great Spirit for my new job.”  (Make your statement as if it has come to past) 

Take a shower, bathe each other slowly and sensuously with playfulness and laughter. Towel each other off. 

Step into something sensuously revealing. 

Take turns, no less then ½ hour for each partner touching the entire body, front and back, do not focus on the genitals! Use hands, mouth, hair, your entire body touching their entire body. 

After both have given and received this touching, or you have given it to yourself, allow your love making to begin. Slow down make it last a long time. 

As close to the peak of your orgasm as is humanly possible, speak your statement out loud with conviction, using the orgastic energy to manifest your dreams and desires.   Repeat as often as you desire. 

Do 10 acts of kindness in appreciation for the universe granting your desires. 

Ina Laughing Winds is a marriage/relationship counselor, spiritual sexuality therapist and coach.  Workshops, private practice, speaking engagements. Office 623 465-9151  on line www.spiritualsexuality.com

Talking Stick   (like Imago's Mirror exercise)

When the talking stick is picked up and presented to you it means STOP what you are doing. What needs to be spoken is important and it is difficult, which is why the talking stick is being used. It gives strength and grounding to the individual holding it. Do not abuse the talking stick. Be sure everyone understands the reason to use it and to honor it. One uses the Talking Stick to Speak the Unspeakable.

Sit across from each other. The Talking Stick is held so one end of it is firmly planted on the ground. The person holding the stick begins by stating their feelings. Speak in short paragraphs, so the other person can repeat the essence of what you just said. The way this works is: I speak one paragraph, then we hold the talking stick together, lengthwise between us; take a deep breath together, looking into each other's eyes, exhale and release the stick. The breath and eye contact are important; it means you are both willing to stay present.

The person who is listening will repeat the essence only. Do not add in your own response at this time. And ask, was that correct? Give the stick back to the person who began, and let that person make another statement, or repeat what was just said in another way if you did not get it correct. Remember to keep it short. Now repeat the process of handing the stick, breathing, and the essence being repeated. You go back and forth in this manner until person number one has completed saying what is on their mind. Then the other individual gets to respond using the same method, one paragraph at a time.

from: What is Spiritual Sexuality?
by Ina Laughing Winds, M.A., M.F.C.C.

The energy that flows through all matter is known as the river of life that courses through our blood and the very core of Grandmother Earth. To try and separate this life force energy into sexuality and spirituality begets disease.

This life force energy heals us at the cellular level. It replenishes our soul and brings meaning to our everyday life.

Sharing the passions of the soul as expressed through the physical temple culminating in joyous orgasm is a journey that no other experience on earth can give you. Some are close, like sky diving, skiing, surfing, mountain climbing. These are sports done alone. None allow you to touch God in the way spiritual sexuality connects you intimately to another human being. There is something truly magickal that allows the individuals to feel the power of spirit. With this awakening there is nothing that one cannot accomplish.