Friendship, Sex, and Love Excerpt

This excerpt from the draft of Friendship, Sex, and Love is from two different chapters. Everyone should keep in mind while reading these excerpts that a lot of ontological information and ideas are ahead of them. Also, instead of looking at these excerpts as being mostly sexual, one should look at them for what they actually are: the merging of the ontological and the sexual.

Many ontological emotions, desires, and thoughts can be seen in these two excerpts, but four in particular stand out: (1) The desire to get inside a loved one’s ego boundary so that one’s own realself can be with a loved one’s realself, thereby establishing a realself-to-realself connection. (2) The awareness of the numerous layers of the ego boundary, and of how the entering of or the passing through of these layers represent greater and greater degrees of realself and realself-to-realself involvement. (3) The awareness that greater ontological closeness also represent an increase in one’s own degree of realself. (4) The jealousy that can develop when a person who is at a low degree of realself becomes his or her realself with another person.

Chapter 1: Sex Is a Realself Event

Sex Is a Striving for Realself Being

Men and women shift from their socialselves to their realselves during sexual arousal and activity, and because of this their desires to become even more their realselves and to experience even more realself-to-realself involvement increases. Sexual activity is an ideal time for people to remove their ego boundaries because a person is often in a warm, safe bed in the dark with someone he or she loves from his or her realself, and all of these conditions help to make the removing of one’s ego boundary easier. Trust, intimacy, gentleness, and love are all a part of loving sexuality; ontologically sensitive couples who are in love want to be their deepest selves with each other; and they use the momentum of sexuality to assist them in satisfying this desire.

As men and women move forward along the beginning Transition, they become increasingly aware of the relationship between sexuality and ontology and between sexuality and elevated degrees of realself. Because of this awareness, they start thinking of sex as a means of increasing their degrees of realself, since they sense they become more their realself when they are what the socialself world calls “sexually aroused”(in their own mind they may think of themselves as also being “ontologically aroused”). For instance, an increasing realself young man may be experiencing Transitional pain more intensely than usual, because he has recently had an encounter with decreasing realself people and he is still recoiling from the pain of having his realself hurt. Because of these feelings, he has a stronger than usual desire to make love with his girlfriend, who he feels understands him ontologically. Consciously he thinks he is experiencing an intense desire to have sexual relations with her, but in fact he may be experiencing an intense desire to have ontological relations with her, so that he can become more his realself and thereby lessen the pain he feels from being his realself in an alienated world with alienated people. He senses that once he is making love with her he will reach her realself and become more his realself, and he senses that achieving both of these will diminish his ontological pain.

After hearing these ontological reasons for this young man’s desire, an ontologically insensitive but curious person may wonder, “Is it sexual intercourse he desires or what might be called ontological intercourse? Does he want to enter her sexually so that he can get sexual pleasure, or does he want to enter her ontologically so that he can get ontological pleasure?” The answer to these questions is that he wants both. Like most ontologically sensitive people, this young man uses sexuality to gratify his ontological needs and desires, and he enhances his sexual pleasure by blending his ontological emotions with his sexual activity.

The desire for sex is recurring, and the desire for realself being and for realself-to-realself relationships are also recurring, at least in men and women who are committed to increasing their degrees of realself. Some of these men and women mix and confuse their ontological desires with their sexual desires, and so they end up expressing their ontological desires sexually and their sexual desires ontologically. Surveys have shown that men think about sex once every fifteen minutes, and other surveys have shown that men think about it more often and less often than this. The exact frequency isn’t important, but what is important is whether these surveys were mistaking ontological desire for sexual desire. For example, while at work a man thinks, “I want to hold my wife’s naked body in my arms tonight,” and he believes this desire is a sexual desire. But this desire may actually be an ontological desire to reach and be with her realself and to be more his realself. He may have never heard of the word ontology, and he does not recognize an ontological emotion when he has one. He is conscious of sex, however; he knows that holding his wife’s naked body in his arms is usually a prelude to sex; and so he mistakenly thinks his daydream represents sexual desire. But this man’s realself may have momentarily surfaced within him, and because of this it sent a daydream though his mind of his wanting to be in bed with his wife with nothing between their two realselves.

Chapter 12: Moving Toward Ontological Fusion

The Layers of Clothing and the Layers of the Ego Boundary

In an earlier chapter the ego boundary was said to stop at the surface of a person’s skin, but most people feel that their ego boundaries extend all the way out to the surface of their clothes. This ontological link between clothing and the ego boundary can be seen in the thoughts and emotions of two young men in 1850, one of whom is living in an isolated, aboriginal village and the other is living in Victorian England. All the women in the aboriginal young man’s village keep their breasts uncovered, and he sees their breasts daily. Everyone in his day-to-day world sees the breasts of all the girls, young women, and women, and because of this all the males and females in the village think little about them. By being exposed all the time, women’s breasts have become for these people a part of their socialself world, and because of this they are imbued with little ontological emotion.

The young man in Victorian England has quite different thoughts and feelings about women’s breasts, because for him they are replete with ontological emotions. He has never seen a woman’s breasts because in his socialself world society they are always kept covered behind layers of clothing. And partly because women always keep their breasts covered, for both his society and for him women’s breasts have taken on ontological emotions; they have become something that are kept within and behind one of the boundaries the women in his society have around them. In his socialself world, women show their breasts only to those males with whom they have an emotional relationship, or so his society likes to think.

If we now compare the feelings these two young men have when they put their hands for the first time on young women’s breasts in a loving and sexual way, the differences in their ontological feelings become apparent. The aboriginal young man experiences strong emotions, since even though he has seen the breasts he is now putting his hand on countless times, caressing them still engenders sexual feelings and brings him closer to the young woman ontologically than he has ever been. His previous relationship with her has been on mostly a socialself-to-socialself level, but now they have changed it to more of a realself-to-realself relationship. When the young man in England puts his hand for the first time on the breasts of the young woman he loves, however, he experiences much more intense emotions than the aboriginal young man because he definitely senses he is getting closer to her realself when he caresses her breasts. As he puts his hand under each succeeding layer of her clothes, he feels he is moving his hand—and his realself—closer and closer to her realself, since the layers of her clothes correlate with the layers of her ego boundary around her realself. The moment he first puts his hand on her breasts his breathlessness and the pounding of his heart are brought on by his feeling that he has reached all the way through the many layers of her ego boundary and is putting his hand on her realself. When the young man in the village puts his hand on the young woman’s breasts he is putting his hand on something everyone else in the village has access to, at least visually, and so inevitably her breasts become less a symbol of her realself than do the breasts of young women who always keep theirs covered.

The relationship between clothing and the ego boundary and what is behind each of them is also seen in the decisions a young woman makes about her future sexual involvement with a young man she knows who has asked her for a date. If she doesn’t want their relationship to go any deeper than her socialself, she may decide that she will let him kiss her on the cheek, but nothing more. If she likes him a little more, but not fully from her realself, she may let him kiss her on her lips. If she likes him even more and wants to be somewhat but not all her realself with him, she may decide she will let him fondle her breasts from outside her clothes. If she likes him even more than this, she may let him put his hand under her blouse and bra and caress her breasts. And finally, if she loves him from her realself, she may already know she is going to let him take off all of her clothes, kiss and caress her all over, and have sexual intercourse with her, because she wants to get as close to him and she wants them to get as close to each other as possible.

This young woman’s decision on how close she will let the young man to her sexually is determined by how close she wants to let him to her ontologically. If she does not want him to get any closer than her socialself to her, she will not let him within any of the layers of her clothing, thereby keeping him outside all of her boundaries. But if she wants to bring him all the way within her ego boundary to her realself, she will let him within all the layers of her clothing, since she will feel, as does her ontological world, that the deeper one lets another person to one sexually the closer one also lets that person to one ontologically.

In the day-to-day world as it presently is, an ontologically sensitive young man who knows his girlfriend has never let any other man see her breasts will feel more intense emotions with her when he first caresses her breasts than he would with a young woman who he knows has let many other men see and caress hers. He will know that his girlfriend’s realself is important to her, her breasts are extensions of her realself, and she is not going to let just anyone reach, see, or touch her realself. With the other young woman, he will know that her breasts are not extensions of her realself but are a part of her socialself, and so he would become less his realself when he caresses them.