A blog dedicated to the joy and adventure of thinking (and often spiced with humor).
“The concept of ‘god’ was originally an error in translation committed when some ancient sage tried to reduce the mystical experience to words.”
Or, alternatively…
“The concept of ‘god’ was originally an error in translation committed when some ancient sage tried to reduce an experience of the weirdness to words.”
Paul Sunstone
(About a 4 minute read)
It is incredible to me that the Arab and Persian Court Poets lumped possessiveness in with love to arrive at the concept of “romantic love”. But they did. The gods themselves were so disbelieving when they witnessed it that they forgot to wank for six days and six nights, and stars began to fall from the sky. The universe began to end! Nevertheless, it was true. The poets really, honestly did lump possessiveness in with love!
The consequences have been devastating. In effect, the poets created a schizophrenic concept of love.
(About a 1 minute read)
Over a thousand years ago, a handful of Persian and Arabic court poets created a new way of looking at one of the seven or eight kinds of love. Today we still see that kind of love largely through their eyes. We call it “romantic love”.
Of course romantic love has been around since the first homo sapiens — and most likely even before them. It’s as old as the yellow grasses of Africa. But it has not always been seen — it has not always been understood — in the way we see and understand it today.
Here’s a thought for you. The world is coming together and I think it is likely that quite soon, some group of “poets” will create a new way of looking at love — one suited to a global culture. But if that wild idea comes true, then hold your breath! How people see love influences how they love.
If and when a new way of seeing love comes about — will that way be overall a good thing for the world, or a bad thing?
In my opinion, it could go either way.
For more on this topic, see this post.
(About a 3 minute read)
We all know the story. Boy meets girl, they fall in love. They fight. Then make up. Then pair off forever and ever.
Puke me a river of boredom. The story has been repeated more often than Trump’s stupidity. Besides, it’s totally outdated. Totally outdated.
It’s outdated because it is basically a Western story — and we living a world now where “we” are no longer just and only the West. Think about it. Isn’t it time for a new kind of love story? One that combines — that synthesizes — the great motifs of both East and West?
In a way, it does not matter what you and I think the time has come for. It’s going to happen anyway. The world is already too globalized for it not to happen. There will be an East/West love story someday — and probably someday soon. A story that has elements of the old Western story, but also much that is new to the West.
Why do I think so?
Maybe the easy way to put is this: In the West, you love an individual. You love what is unique, special about someone. . In other words, you love Jim, and no one will do but Jim. Or Melinda, etc. If you, dear reader, are from the West, that’s all common sense, right?
But traditionally, it was different in the East. Traditionally, you do not love the individual there. You do not love whatever it is about them that makes them one of a kind. Instead, you love the universal in someone. The timeless, unchanging, eternal in them. The thing they have in common with everyone else.
Don’t believe me? I had once had a professor who now and then would read traditional Indian love stories to us. Every hero is the same. Every heroine is the same. Story to story to story. Only the moral of he stories ever changes. Only the moral.
Of course there are Western style love stories all over the East these days — but guess where they came from?
I will wager that someone soon is going to create a true synthesis of East and West when it comes to love stories. Something that will worldwide replace the individualism of “She’s the only one in the whole world for me” — but also replace the universalism of “He’s interchangeable with any ranking member of his cast or class or clan.”
By the way, look not just for a new story, look even more for a new way of thinking about what it means to love someone. That will be the real change. The real synthesis. Not the plot, but the new vision of what love is.
Just a thought for the day. Y’all can go back to being sane now.
(About a 2 minute read)
A very experienced man, Patrick, tells me that the most pleasurable sex he’s ever had in his life came about as a one-night stand with a perfect, but perfectly skilled, stranger.
Patrick has been married for at least a dozen years to the love of his life.
I myself cannot say quite the same thing as him about the best sex. The best sex I have had came about within a committed relationship. But I do think I can confirm that — in terms of pleasure — sexual skillfulness can go quite far towards making up for a relative lack of emotional intimacy.
Confirm that for me, if for no one else.
Put differently, the notion that emotional intimacy is absolutely key to sexual pleasure might be a myth — at least for some people. For while intimacy certainly enhances sexual pleasure for most of us, so too does skillfulness for most of us.
Our culture does not recognize that fact. We are so often told that almost everything depends on emotional intimacy and emotional intimacy alone. But is our culture doing us a service there?
I recall another friend of mine, Jennifer, telling me she stayed in an abusive relationship for six or seven years because she had convinced herself that surely she must be in love with her abuser or otherwise the sex would not be as mind-blowing as it was.
Was she encouraged to think that way by our culture? Or was that her own idea? Or both?
Who really knows?
It would be nice to see some science on the subject. A few surveys might give us an idea how most of us rank emotional intimacy relative to sexual skillfulness. In the end, however, there is no substitute for figuring out your own answer to the question.
As for myself, I am greedy and want both. Give me warm intimacy and cold ice cubes!
(About a 2 minute read)
I am of the alarming opinion that American and United Kingdom sex education is rather on the deficient side, crazy as my opinion might sound to this blog’s typically well-informed readers.
Nevertheless, even if that is so, there is fair and just cause for joint UK – USA pride.
We both beat India.
(About a 9 minute read)
We used gold star stickers in Sunday School. You licked them and stuck them to you. I always wanted my teacher to lick them — because I would over-lick them — and I always wanted her to stick them to my forehead.
It was almost the only good and decent thing I could fathom came of attending Sunday School.
When we three sons would ask Mom why we could not stay home to play on Sunday mornings, she would tell us that “Christianity is your cultural heritage and you should be exposed to it.”
That was mildly confusing because not only did I fail to fully understand what “culture” and “heritage” were, but it also seemed to contradict Mom’s almost scandalously old fashion notion that we were not to make up our minds about religion until we had “reached the age of understanding”. That is, until we were at least 18 and “preferably 21”.
Continue reading “How Mom Raised Me to Think For Myself About Religion”
(About a 6 minute read)
It is easy to fall for the cliché that ours is the most sexually liberated age in history. It might be actually closer to the truth if we were to think of ourselves as among the most sexually complicated ages in history.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Paul discusses how the concept of “god” varies from one religion to another with the focus on Christianity, Judaism, and Taoism.
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THE CRITICS EXCLAIM! “It is absolutely certain that Paul Sunstone will someday come to a rich and full understanding of God. That is sure to be the day Our Altogether Righteous and Just Lord mercifully condemns Paul Sunstone to being eternally chained to Justin Bieber’s buttocks in the hottest regions of hell. Until that day, his opinions and views of deity cannot possibly rise above the ignorant, thoughtless slime that is his post, ‘About Your Gods’.” — Merriweather Sterling, Blogs of the Day, “The Daily Burtie”, Berwick-Upon-Tweed, England, UK.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Paul offers his opinion that people today have all too often come to treat each other as interchangeable, faceless grains of polished rice.
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THE CRITICS EMOTE! “De hunne of blogging, Paul Sunstone has excreted yet another one of his innumerable atrocities upon the world. The immediate effect that ‘Our Lives Have Broken’ has upon the honest and orderly reader is to provoke him or her to yearn for the nearest body of water deep enough to drown in. Sunstone is the refutation of the thesis that history is progressive. He is the refutation of the dialectics of both Hegel and Marx. A Spengler would see in Sunstone the decline of the West, and he would be correct.” — Johanna Meyer, Der Blogkritiker, “Die Fussen-Welt”, Fussen, Germany.
Continue reading “How Most of Us Say, “Our Lives Have Broken””
(About a 4 minute read)
This is how I explain it to myself. Suppose you meet someone who soon delights you, but who you do not in any way think of as “yours”. She’s not (at least not yet) your friend, or your lover, or your colleague, or your boss, or your employee, or your client, or your teacher, or your neighbor, or your — anything. She delights you, but — as we sometimes say — she means nothing to you.
Let’s say you met her because she sat down at the table next to you in a coffee shop. Glancing over you see her take a novel out of her purse. “What a striking cover! I’ve never seen another like it. Is it a good read?” A conversation starts. A few minutes later, you are thinking she’s an easy-going, down to earth, and rather delightful person.
Continue reading “The Lightness of Love. The Heaviness of Possession.”
(About a 5 minute read)
It has long been my personal, tender opinion that the pure Japanese genius for first seeing nearly everything as an aesthetic experience, and for then optimizing the aesthetics of those experiences — that the Japanese genius for that has only been defeated once — and once only — in the entire cultural history of that remarkable people.
The Japanese genius for aesthetics was overthrown when it took on sex.
Continue reading “A Indelicate Post on the Most Delicate Topic of Simpatico Sex”
