Power of Love/and sex/ and the role of heart Part 3/5

by Stefka Atanasova

THE POWER OF SEX

Love has many manifestations and sex or physical love is one of them.
Why Are We So Preoccupied with Sex?
In the spiritual world, the soul is united with the Light, and this union is called - coupling. It constitutes the unification of two parts of creation - male and female, and is the greatest pleasure that can ever be - the soul being filled by the Light of the Creator. This spiritual coupling also has a branch or copy in the physical world, the world of matter. This is why we are so preoccupied with sex - it is the ultimate pleasure in this world, and the root of all of our desires in this world. Sex is the basis of all our thoughts, because its root is the soul's union with the Creator. This union is the final goal of Nature, and everything that happens in the world is determined by the final goal. This is why we just can't avoid thinking about sex. Our attraction to the opposite sex and to pleasure also come from this final state - the adhesion with the Creator, called (never-ending sexual union). The pleasure we feel from sex is a perfect example of the difference between physical and spiritual pleasure. We spend so much time and effort thinking about sex, and we imagine that it will give us enormous pleasure, but in fact our pleasure vanishes into thin air the minute we reach the peak of sexual satisfaction. Before we really had time to enjoy this feeling, it is over and we find ourselves once again striving for another moment of pleasure.

The mysterious power of attraction

Attraction is fantastically attractive. Especially when it is powerful and mutual. Attraction can provide a link to another human so irresistible that it feels like an enchantment, one that renders all other needs and duties oddly meaningless, tiresome and irrelevant. Away from the object of desire, one is fretful and distracted, unable to eat, unable to sleep, unable to concentrate. All that matters is the next encounter, for with its consummation one will feel euphoric, blissful, thrumming with life and with tenderness. With that other person, one will feel that nothing is missing any more. Couples so drawn, talk of being two halves, complete only when they are together.

Who would refuse such luxury, such security and such communion? Who would not want to be so lucky? Anyway, isn't that passionate compulsion practically useful? Doesn't it encourage exclusive pair-bonding in humans, and foster the lovely notion that there's a perfect soul mate somewhere in the world for everyone? Or is that feeling so preposterously wonderful that, really, there has to be a catch somewhere?

Attraction, after all, can be so overwhelming of the individual, and of the individual's other necessary duties and relationships, that during most of Western history it has been considered dangerous and destabilizing enough to be constrained as much as celebrated. The Greeks portrayed sexual attraction as a weapon, a dart that might pierce the flesh and possess a soul, causing chaos among humans and gods alike.
For Dante or Petrarch, courtly love was a kind of divine torture, with young men pining and fading for years at the sight of a chaperoned maiden who besotted them. The great literature of love Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary warns of the dangers of being driven by desire. Even in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, forbidden love leads to disaster and death. Except in this work, though, there is a sense that it was splendid, even sacred, nonetheless. Wagner contended that it was wrong, not right, to fight or fear erotic longing. His idea caught on, and plenty of people now subscribe to the belief that a truly significant passion should be gleefully accommodated, not resisted. Wagner's vision can credibly be argued as one which helped to dismantle views about attraction, desire and love that had for thousands of years been forged in the Judeo-Christian tradition.That, sensibility, warned against being carried away by sexual passion, and portrayed such unbiddable emotions as an unreliable foundation on which to build anything as fragile as love, or nurture any creatures as vulnerable as children. By the second half of the 20th century, though, this culture of restraint had been jettisoned, and replaced by the idea that self-denial was self-abnegation.
Now, in its general thrust, our culture is in love with the idea of love, awash with cock-eyed romanticism and unable to tell any more what's attraction, what's lust and what's love. Puberty, and even childhood is suffused with a popular music soundtrack that peddles endless trite paeans to the central importance of modern romance. The most surprising of people want naff anthems celebrating some songwriter's long-since ruined "true love" at their weddings. At some point, most teenage girls at least flirt with the idea of giving attraction a dry run by developing a crush on a pop star. Heaven knows what Wagner would make of it all.

On the whole, people don't really like it when scientists tell them that attraction is all down to pheromones, or waist-to-hip proportion, or instinctive recognition of genetic differentiation. There's disgruntlement as well, when churchmen tell us that togetherness is tough work involving ceaseless dollops of selflessness and commitment to the needs of others. We don't like it when our mums tell us that it is not "real" because we have never met Frankie from Look We're Boys. It's love we want, because we want to believe that love conquers all.It is considered a measure of the depth and the wonder of attraction, when a couple recognize a special bond from their first glance. Their eyes met across a crowded room. They fell in love at first sight. They knew they had found their soul mate. And so on. But really, it is not in the least surprising that many couples lay claim to such a moment of revelation.

The great thing about "love at first sight" is that it is retrospective. The exchange of a special look can be forgotten within moments if a seemingly perfect potential partner is exposed in a minute of conversation as a humorless bore, or a sleazy vulgarian, or merely myopic. But if the exchange of looks that register mutual interest is followed up by the discovery of easy conversation, shared humor, fascinating opinions, common enthusiasms, and a yearning to touch and be touched, then that first glance is remembered and treasured. Even if the encounter goes nowhere even if one of the amazing things the two of you discover you have in common is a spouse at home looking after the children then that short time of togetherness can still be filed away as a beguiling monument to what might have been. And if the encounter does develop if sexual pairing is as intimate and intense as it promised to be, if care, commitment and domestic compatibility lead inexorably to the creation of one big happy family, then that first meeting becomes a talismanic opening to a family's narrative of perfect togetherness. But social science does, in its controlled experiments and clinical assessments, offer an alternative story of love. Humans, like all other animals, tend at times to be in search of a mate. At such times, each encounter, with anyone who might possibly be considered a candidate, is an audition. Without even being particularly aware of it, people tend to size up potential partners and even just potential friends all the time. When we are looking for a partner, we are auditing all the time. Once a target is so selected, the chances are that further investigation will indeed elicit mutual interest. Despite all the myth and mystery the romance, if you will - that surrounds the process of human pairing, this, at bottom, is the essence of the matter. People tend to be attracted by people who find them or seem likely to find them attractive. The faces we like best are the faces that are looking our way. The eyes that we are mesmerized by are the eyes that are looking into ours.
The banal truth, around the world, is that couples tend to be homogeneous they choose (or in some cultures, have chosen for them) people who are at a similar level to them of attractiveness, or intelligence, or background, or economic power. When people step outside that convention, others are often distrustful of the couple in question and their motives.
A beautiful young woman, for example, may decide that she is not going to barter her beauty and youth in the sexual marketplace in order to snare someone who is as young and beautiful as she is. She may decide instead that she'll cash in nature's chips for old and rich. It's a fair exchange between consenting adults, but one that's seen as pretty risible.