The Holidays are Desire on steroids. At few times of the year is Desire so much front-and-center in our lives. It is part of the lushness and bleakness of this time. You want so much, and you are disappointed so quickly. You want to experience love if you don’t have it, or more love if you do. You want to feel warm, cozy, secure, and happy with all the twinkling and glittering around you. But you know that all this twinkle and glitter is ephemeral—it will freeze and fall away in the January cold and darkness. That is why I want to share with you the wisdom in this entry in my blog on WordPress—to help you keep the warmth you want. Afterall, isn’t that really what Desire is all about?
Here is an excerpt from The Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love, Your Guide to Life, Happiness, and Emotional and Sexual Fulfillment in a Closed-Down World. (Belhue Press 2015). If you want to read more, go to my website, www.perrybrass.com or Amazon.
From CHAPTER 2.
18 things You need to Know About desire Before you read this Book
“They say I am queer, prince, but I can tell what people are like. For the heart is the great thing, and the rest is nonsense.” The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
1. Desire is deeper than simple horniness, want, and hunger. Desire is you asking for completion, identity, and enlargement. It is a large component of consciousness.
2. It is a key to the deepest parts of yourself. The parts we often label your “soul,” or your “spiritual” feelings, or the basic aspects of your own ego and character. I will refer often in this book to the “Deep- er Self,” that is, that engine of your own deepest imagination working through experiences, where the keys to all of your feelings, personality, and drives lie. I will talk about the Deeper Self, how to connect with it and use that connection to bond with other people. How to experience huge joy and happiness from this connection, and expand with it.
3. Destroying and/or obstructing desire can lead to depression.
4. Desire has many facets, branches, and streams to it, often illuminating deeper parts of your experiences and personality, which you have either forgotten or have chosen to deny.
5. Being able to share desire with another person is what leads to genuine intimacy.
6. Understanding how desire works (and how it is repressed), allows you to understand much of the nature of yourself, as well as society’s own nature.
7. The spiritual aspects of desire are often repressed because they are so powerful. Many people who cannot deal honestly with these aspects often find extreme shame in them.
8. Desire is a part of consciousness, and yet runs deeper than consciousness.
9. The boundaries we put around desire very much constitute our own images of ourselves. Changing these boundaries (as well as seeing the boundaries for what they are) can be very important to you, and can become part of your own life changes.
10. A lot of what we call “therapy” is about either reinforcing these boundaries, or acknowledging them without actually opening them up to your own Deeper Self: that most basic inner part of you.
11. Love is more than physical desire but is a part of a greater desire that exists within your Deeper Self.
12. All of consciousness is understanding desire, not simply rejecting it.
13. Much of what we call “art” is about expressing desire.
14. Understanding desire and its place in your life can break harmful cycles of loneliness, depression, guilt, and shame.
15. The deepest love and feeling is allowing someone into your own “field of desire.”
16. This field of desire brings you back to a state of both vast consciousness and the genuine blissful innocence that many if not most of us seek through religion.
17. Desire as a sensual and psychological expression of your Deeper Self can be extended to reach into all parts of your life, and make you very happy.
18. Shame, guilt, self-consciousness, and self-abnegation, enforced on us by parental and social taboos, repressive religion, job requirements, or other aspects of society, systematically destroy our ability to understand the power of desire and how it fits into our real lives.
Ideas about art, life, and the American Way of Loneliness 