Those of us who do not develop the sex impulse experience the impotence of being locked in; a feeling of isolation, separation, and not belonging. We feel we do not truly know ourselves because we lack the power to penetrate our own minds. We feel we are not known to others, as we lack the ability to skillfully and reliably penetrate the layer of self-consciousness that walls us in. There is often a sense of secrecy, as if we must not reveal our innermost desires, yearnings, and hungers, even to ourselves. We navigate a world of ideas and, without any opposition to that mode of operation, the drive for ideals concretizes into control, perfectionism, and discipline, lacking in an organic joy and spontaneity.
From a simple inability to assert ourselves in the world, the inability to move people, to find our voice, to have impact, there is an underlying sense of powerlessness that can present as fear or the belief that we need to be protected, and anxiety accompanies that belief. There may be a sense that we can never get what we want. A whole variety of compensatory behaviors can then develop that may “fix” into an identity: the fragile or traumatized woman, the nice guy who is filled with resentment, the person who aims to accumulate powerless power through emotional blackmail.
Again, this is the result of having been given a vehicle with massive horsepower that we attempt to unsuccessfully control with projections. We have taken the most powerful force on the planet and determined the most effective response is to, at worst, demonize and ignore it, or at best to commodify or spiritualize it—but never to know it directly with honor and respect. At some point, we might look at this force, and instead of continuing to feel we are at the mercy of the trail of wreckage we assign to it, we may stop cursing it and see what, if anything, it has to show us.
If we look, the first thing we will likely see is that we do not know sexuality without our concepts. We know our beliefs about it, even our perceived uses for it, but rarely do we recognize it simply as a value-neutral potent force to connect us to the world. Many of these beliefs have been held for so long in such an unconscious way, they appear to be simply the way things are. We cannot even start the practice of liberating the impulse until we recognize these underlying beliefs.
- The Eros Sutras, Volume 4: Relationship