P.A.S.T!
In other words, it’s yet another four-letter word that I’ll reveal at the end. You can look at it whichever way you want, but the real pleasure of S.E.X! lies in the darkest recesses of the mind. Not really in the bare comfort zones of the body. It lies well beyond the touch and feel of flesh. To wherever your imagination finally soars...
Which is why, the original act of joy resides in the original act itself. Which is also where the future truly rests.
Bereft of the ego and the superego, it resides in what Sigmund Freud once described as the primary process of thinking — our most primitive, need-gratification impulses — the id.
Let me guide you there.
I’ll start with you. Have you ever looked at it this way: Whether man, whether woman, you are an outright selfish creature? Right from the moment you’re born, till the day you die. Every man, every woman, is obsessed with the image of the Self. With, how to keep going... that one more time... that one more breath.
You look that up in the mirror, day after day. And you search that answer within. In your compulsive, obsessive preservation... and procreation... of that one and only Self.
You can trace the history of that Self to four billion years ago. That’s where your past belongs. Life emerged on Earth in the form of a primitive bacterium in sulphureous oceans under a poisonous sky. Modern science calls that life form that gave Life its initial foothold, the microbe. So much for your ancestry and mine. For the past four billion years that microbe has done everything for itself, guided by a compulsive obsession to preserve and procreate, even when the Earth was such a dangerous place to inhabit ...without ‘life-sustaining’ oxygen... creating oxygen in the process, making the world a cleaner and safer place to live, climbing the evolutionary ladder, its imagination soaring... until two million years ago, when came you and me.
And that Life still sustains. There are more microbes on your palm today than there are the likes of you and me inhabiting this planet. That’s the first fact of Life. That’s also the first fact of Sex.
How did it happen?
Scientists will tell you microbes developed when the Earth was relatively new — a mass of steaming lava, boiling water and a swirl of methane, ammonia and other smelly gases. Out of these basic elements, proteins, the building blocks of life, were formed. And those proteins came together to form the bacterium, the first creature that could reproduce itself and contained a genetic blueprint.
The first sexual encounter that the bacterium had was by way of self discovery. Its need-gratification impulses, or the id, made it split into two, with each new bacterium, a clone of the original, containing a copy of the original DNA. Modern science calls this binary fission. That’s how one bacterium becomes a billion. And that’s how it was intended to be. Had the ego not stepped in to balance our primitive drives, our moral ideals and taboos, and the limitations of reality. And that reality rested on Man being himself. And Woman, herself.
You get the hint of that in the Book of Genesis: God created Man, as a mirror of himself. And then, He created Woman to give Man company. And God forbade both to partake of the Forbidden Fruit of Knowledge. But then came the ego, in the form of the Serpent, prodding Eve to share the fruit with Adam, activating their psychic functions of reality-testing, information synthesis and intellectual functioning. Making each look beyond the Self. Discovering the sexuality of one in the other. Exploring the boundaries of Shame. And thus, the Fall from Grace. Theologians will never tell you this, but somewhere in the dark recesses of their minds, Jesus had to be born of a Virgin mother, to redeem the Sin of Adam. Perhaps! Because Nature, and, therefore, God, willed Sex otherwise. Just as with binary fission. Yet, in the birth of Jesus, you can probably trace the seeds of empowerment of the modern woman.
You don’t need to read the Bible to trace the history of Man. But you can certainly trace the history of Man’s imagination to its pages. And out of those pages, I can tell for sure that it was at the Garden of Eden that Adam and Eve first confronted their conscience, imbibing the sense of right and wrong, establishing the taboos of their time, and internalising parental culture in Caine and Abel. In the process, they also gave birth to the superego of Man, in direct confrontation with the desires of their id, internalising their world view, norms and mores in their children. And upon that internalisation has rested our sexual conduct ever since.
So where do we go from here? As I said, the way to the future is in the past. To appreciate that better, look at the world around you. It’s dark and lonely out there. You can see that in the empowerment of the modern woman. You can see that in surrogate motherhood. You can see that in the test-tube baby. You can see that in the eventual cloning of Man that is only a step yonder. And you can see that happening because of your compulsive obsession with the Self.
Which is possibly why, more and more women are opting out of marriage. Which is possibly why, more and more men are opting out of carnal contacts to make sex happen. Which is why men don’t matter in the desires of your id. Which is also why women don’t matter...
Researchers at the Kinsey Institute in the US say today’s women have less sex than their 1950s counterparts.
Fifty years ago, most American women were stay-at-home mums with more free time. Few had jobs and television sets were rare. The researchers found that 42% of women who cohabit with male partners have sex two or three times a week, compared with only 33% of married women. This is far less than what it was in the ’50s. Today, many women hold jobs while also raising children. Any spare time is often spent watching TV, shopping or gymming.
For many, idle time is also spent surfing the Net.
So, welcome to the world of virtual reality. Welcome to the comfort of your id. In his fascinating book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, Thomas L Friedman takes us through the limitless possibilities of the virtual world. Where he doesn’t guide us is the limitless expanse of virtual sex. That’s for the present — which is certainly why, the most visited sites on the Net belong to the universe of cyber porn... which is why, the most frequent chatroom act on the net (and your mobile phone too) is the virtual smoooooooooch! The future should have more in store... so that the original pleasure of Life, tucked in the recesses of your mind, can be lived beyond the bare comfort zones of your body... beyond the touch and feel of flesh. You can find its reference in Krishna’s raas leela from the past. You can also rediscover it in the wildest imaginations of your own adolescence — in your id, devoid of the ego and the superego, in the darkest corners of your mind.
The future of S.E.X! rests in a four-letter word: P.A.L.M!
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