Dear yous,
It's been a while and I've been living life. I'm alive and that can be pretty cool sometimes.
One of the things about being alive is that there's a definitive up and down to the feelings and moods that I experience. That's part of the thing. That's OK.
Another thing about being alive is the depth of experience that is possible. Gurdjieff talks about this in terms of taking impressions via the senses, registering finer and finer impressions as one gains deeper understanding of themselves. This makes sense to me.
I'm aware that my consciousness is fundamentally the same as it's always been and also that experiences I have day-to-day can serve to deepen or enrich my consciousness. In other words, I tend to view time not as strictly linear but also circular, spiral-like, whose purpose is ultimately to refine what's already here, not necessarily usher a linear progression from start to finish.
In this context, then, I'd like to talk about consent. I'd ultimately like to drive down to the level of talking about consent in terms of relating sexually to other humans and to oneself. I recognize that for me and others, this can be a difficult topic. So I'll start broad and then refine. Normal CWs apply, though I keep it pretty high level.
OK. In the broadest terms, consent is defined by a quick google search as "permission for something to happen or agreement to do something." This is wonderfully generic and I have fallen in love with its non-specificity. Let's break this down.
There is "something" that can "happen" or mutual agreement to "do something." What this "something" is was not made clear by google. This is wonderful.
This is wonderful because to view this definition in the negative sense, this implies, to me, that without consent "nothing happens" and there's "nothing to do." This gets into physics in my mind: inertia.
In physics, inertia is "a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force."
As a living being, I feel a lot inertia. I wake up and generally do the same things everyday. When I don't do these things, I feel anxiety. My body wants to keep its current day-to-day motion going.
Also, as a living being, I feel like I don't want to do anything a lot of times. I just want to exist. To be. To breathe and have that be enough. If I move, if I break my inertia of the moment, then I move out of conscious choice, returning to rest once that movement is complete.
This, I feel is fundamental: there exists a state of rest, of existence, in which conscious choice is possible, in which true power is felt. Power to act out of what is needed in the moment. In this state, there are needs and also paths for those needs to be met. There might be worry, but that can come and go. Feelings can be consciously acted on in the moment or left to dissolve for another time.
Let's take this fundamental state of rest and make that the baseline. In this fundamental state of rest I am alive, I am aware. I am breathing in and out. I can focus my awareness on only this if I choose. I can speak or not speak as I desire. When I respond, I speak from a place of depth. When I listen I listen with my whole being. This is the fundamental state of waking existence I will be basing this analogy of intimacy on.
This fundamental state is a state of inertia in the restful sense. In this state, I am content to be as I am, where I am. If I choose to move, I do so with conscious intent. If I choose not to move, I also do this with conscious intent.
So, if I am in this fundamental state, what will motivate me to move? If I am content and have all my needs met or, at the very least, if I feel capable of getting my needs met, if I feel an abundance of love and strength, then why move at all?
Of course, there are bodily needs to attend to. I must eat, take from the environment. That eating turns into waste products that must be put back into the environment. All of these things require action, motion of my body.
Let's say I live completely off the land. I grow my own food. I am intimately connected to the full cycle of my body's needs. Maybe a lot of my time and mental resources are concerned with this. I am connected and relate to others for my survival. This way of life feels to me to be fundamentally connected with the earth, with life. I don't live this way currently.
Currently, I live in a city and have the ability to get my groceries Instacart delivered and to have Blue Apron as well. Even will a full fridge, I can feel disconnected from the food in it. Takeout is usually the least amount of effort and more short-term satisfying. In other words, food to me a lot of times is a bothersome necessity. I must eat in order to keep this body going in order to do all this other stuff that I do in my life.
By why do this other stuff if the other stuff isn't fundamental? Why do I feel the need to focus on all manner of non-survival things in order to feel better about myself, all the while doing the fundamental survival things out-of-order or just plain neglecting them? What is my motivation, my drive, my inertia here? Why is eating a bothersome chore?
I can say with some certainty that my motivation is ultimately survival, but it's survival at the level of connectedness. I feel such a desperate need to connect sometimes, paired with a desperate perceived inability to initiate and sustain intimate human relationships, that I simply don't do it. I have the desire to connect with people but often feel like I don't know how, and so I don't. I do all this other stuff instead. Sometimes the other stuff is self-destructive.
There is an important distinction here. I desire human contact and connection but often don't feel I have the agency to go through with it, so I take that desire, that energy and direct it to other things. In other words, there is either meaningful human contact or other things done to avoid or deal with lack of meaning human contact. If I could boil down my life to that duality, I'd say that's it.
OK, so if I have this desire, that's my motivation to move from fundamental rest. If I have a desire, I can feel it wanting to move my body. I can feel the actions that will occur to fulfill that desire. Or maybe I've never done the thing before and I feel like I just jumped off a cliff. In either case, I feel the desire. That's the impetus for moving, for doing something different.
I have a desire and I can consciously choose to act on it or not. This can include suppressing the desire, a mechanism I know well. Why would I choose to suppress natural desires? Why does anyone? Well, that seems to be the culture we live in. And my personal history lends itself to suppressing my desire for human connection. This is pretty common, I think.
So I've identified that I have desire to do a thing. To do "something." I can feel this desire and then either nothing happens or something happens. Since my default setting is to suppress a lot of my natural desires for human contact, the something that happens when this desire arises is suppression. My body tightens and I get a specific feeling in my chest. I feel small. I feel withdrawn from the environment. This happens over and over and over again until it's automatic. Wilhelm Reich talks about this in terms of body armor, muscle rigidity that forms as a suppressive response to emotion over time.
With this armor, when I feel like I'm operating from this place, I feel small. I feel like I have no agency. I can feel this desire but the desire is overwhelming. It has no outlet and so it implodes inwardly. It builds over time. Attempts to overcome this armor, to operate from a different place, are met with frustration, rage, anger.
In terms of motivation, what motivates me from fundamental rest, desire is the active force. If desire is the active force, then agency is the gate that either allows that force to continue out into the environment or to flow back into myself. If I feel like I have a sense of agency, if I feel like I can either act on a desire or not and either choice is OK, then the desires themselves are not a big deal. They are things that arise in my conscious awareness and fall back out of it again and I am the conscious agent through which these desires move and express themselves. I am in harmony with my environment. The Tao.
By contrast, if I don't feel agency then that gate is closed and then my desires become a seeming insurmountable problem. The desire for human connection doesn't go away, it just builds and feels impossible, only able to find outlet indirectly, or through use of substances.
In those times that I do feel the agency to connect with others, then the next gate on this circle analogy is the process of connection. I reach out to you with words or eyes or hands. You reach back. Or not. It's a give and take. It happens over time.
At some point, being humans, if I am going to really connect with you, I feel we must touch. It doesn't have to be a big thing. It can be a hug or a handshake or maybe a hand on the shoulder. Just some sort of physical contact to make me really believe you are there. That are you physically there and that I am physically here.
The closer that we become physically, the closer that we become mentally, emotionally, the more intimate we are. The more I see your humanity and the more I allow you to see my humanity determines the level of intimacy we have. This may involve more than just a greeting or parting touch. Maybe we cuddle. Maybe we're lovers.
Let's bring consent into the mix here. I have a desire to connect with other humans. I feel agency. I connect. I feel some level of intimacy. The connection temporarily ends. I see you again and we re-connect. We build more intimacy. Or maintain it. Or maybe we grow further apart. Either way, if we're going to relate at all, consent is required.
Consent is defined wonderfully loosely as "permission for something to happen." In terms of human relating, that something could well be anything, but here that something is intimacy. Ultimately, when I connect with others I desire intimacy. I want to see and hear you. I want to be seen and heard by you.
In order for this to happen, consent must occur. There's a protocol that develops. We learn how to communicate. We learn our body languages. I ask you to do things. You ask me to do things. We do things together. We say yes sometimes. We say no sometimes. These things don't necessarily have to be sexual but they could be, given mutual feelings and consent.
The thing about all of this for me, if I can be vulnerable here, yous, is that I understand all this theoretical stuff all well and good, but my sense of agency feels kind of broken. I feel like I've had to create this analogy in order to understand the process of how intimacy happens so that I can move on with my life. I've spent so much time analyzing and agonizing over this, over my perceived inability to connect with others. I've since realized the fallacy of my thinking. I'm human like everyone else and so have the same basic desires for human connection and intimacy.
In order to function as a complete human, I must be able to feel all four of these things: Desire, Agency, Connection, Intimacy. If any one of these are missing or suppressed, that energy gets diverted to other activities that don't involve human connection. I think of it like a wheel with freely spinning energy, clockwise in this case. Each of the circles are gates that must function and be open in order for the whole circle (i.e. me) to function properly.
Desire is the energy that arises that motivates me to move from fundamental rest. If I feel agency to act on this desire, I can act on it. I can then connect to my environment. Through that process of connection I gain some level of intimacy with both myself and others.
If any of these gates are stuck or closed, then I will feel broken. If my desires are suppressed - specifically, here, I'm talking about sexual desires - then this filters out into higher level life things. If my lower level, more fundamental desires are suppressed, this will manifest at all levels of my life.
If my desire is free but my sense of agency is all fucked up, then I will compensate by using substances to increase my sense of agency or to reaffirm my lack of agency. Either one leads to self-destruction.
If my desire and agency are free but I am unable to make the connection piece happen then I will be unable to achieve intimacy and will fall back to suppressive patterns. My sense of agency will weaken.
Even if desire, agency, and connection are all working fine, I've found I can connect with others and not feel intimacy whatsoever. It feels empty. I feel I need all four of these "things" in order to feel that I am whole and functioning properly as a human.
So, really, in this model, consent is required at all levels. I must consent to feeling the sensations in my body. I must consent to feeling agency and taking action. I must act with consent in connecting with others. Through acting this way I can feel intimacy with others. Intimacy is built. The wheel must have all its gates open in order to circulate properly.
Intimacy is the thing here. Intimacy can include sex, but it doesn't need to. What I ultimately desire is human connection and intimacy, which sometimes manifests as sex. I used to think it was the other way around, that sex = intimacy.
Of course, the direction of energy can reverse as well, so that intimacy is withdrawn. I believe this to be a healthy part of the process. There's a winding up of intimacy and a winding down, a back and forth negotiation between humans, moment-to-moment about how to exist together in the same space, about how to touch one another if that's what's desired. I mean, that's the ideal, in my mind. In reality, our given conception of this stuff is wildly broken.
I feel like if there was a good model for this stuff, it would exist already. There wouldn't be so much abuse in the world. But I look around and I see abusive dynamics everywhere, including in myself. I feel like we're collectively fucked up about how to relate to one another, especially sexually, which is fundamental to our existence. To me, it's not enough to say "practice consent." I need to understand the lower level, more fundamental stuff first. Like, what would motivate me to put my face next to another human's face in the first place? Sure, I can ask, I can obtain enthusiastic consent, before putting my face close to yours. But why the fuck do I want to put myself in that position in the first place and what do I do once I'm there? That's what I want to understand.
With love,
Casey
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