Pleasure & Politics

I can see a shift in my thinking occurring over the past year or so. Of course, I'm still the same person I've always been, but I can see that the importance of pleasure and joy has been increasing in my mind. I've come to believe that so much of the suffering in the world is caused by the inability of people to feel pleasure and joy.

The struggle is to express this idea in a way that people don't misconstrue it as hedonism and irresponsibility. In fact, I think that it is natural for all life forms to feel pleasure. Somehow religion twisted pleasure into something evil. How or why this happened, I do not understand, but I suspect it had something to do with disempowering the masses. Today it is perpetuated through the constant message that you can only be happy if you have lots of money and material possessions. This keeps the masses enslaved to this system.

I was conversing with a friend about these things last night and he equates it with the imbalance between the god & goddess energy (yin/yang energy). Somehow we got out of balance and we're still out of balance. It's problematic because the female/goddess/yin energy is the energy of birth and creativity.

So if you look at a situation like the energy crisis, you see that the response to the problem is to go to war, rather than using our creativity to solve the problem. Why is that? It's not just because the energy is out of balance, it's also because in the collective consciousness, we don't believe that we can be happy without hording all the natural resources. We've lost the capacity to feel true pleasure and joy and this leads to insatiable greed and addiction.

Anyway, it's a subject I feel passionate about so I've been doing a lot of writing on it. At first, I was having a very difficult time communicating the ideas. I felt these things intuitively, but I didn't know how to verbalize them. That's part of why I wanted to write about courtesans. Since religion taught us that pleasure was shameful, I was fascinated by the idea of women who could embody these things and retain their personal power.

Unfortunately, it hasn't taken off in my imagination the way I hoped it would. On the other hand, I'm having an easier time verbalizing the ideas now so have been doing more non-fiction writing on these subjects.

So in the conversation with my friend last night, he said that some people have been called to embody the goddess and I'm probably one of those people. I feel it to be true. In fact, I remember years ago, I used to go hiking in the foothills and Rocky Mountains, often for 5 hours or more, and I would be filled with an incredibly powerful energy and in my mind, I heard that I was the Earth Goddess with a duty to protect the Earth.

I haven't told many people about it, but now I think it's not so strange after all. In fact, it seems to me perfectly natural that women would embody the goddess and all that it represents. It just seems strange in our culture because so few people understand it or acknowledge it.

I'll continue to add to the blog and would love any comments or feedback either on the blog or through email. Aside from The Book of the Courtesans, I've actually got a couple new novels in the works, but will say more about those on another day. I’m also adding Epicurus to my list of subjects to research for this blog so I can respond to David M’s comment.