Before embarking on a major piece of work, a man must sit down and ask himself the question: why on earth am I committing to this?

Sexual energy. The erotic psyche. 

I’m 42. Shouldn’t I have left this behind in adolescence? Isn’t it time to get on with my life?

And a man ought to come up with a compelling answer.

But we do not choose a life, as James Hillman put it. We are summoned by it. We do not choose our perfect purpose, but uncover what has been chosen for us. And the potential of our erotic attractions, and the reasons for their difficulty, has been a rumbling force in my psyche—a core wound, you might say—since I was young.

This comes at a time when there’s great need in the world. A war against male sexuality, some might say. And a generalised hesitation, a caged-in-ness among men, about what to do regarding sex. Since the start of the Spring I have been receiving new answers to help us with these matters. It’s an interesting coming together.

Today I share the four phases of my exploration into the nature of man’s erotic drive. The first two phases focus on what keeps our erotic drive fixated and shallow. In the second two phases we really dive off the cliff.

I could have made this newsletter more brief. But if this topic matters half as much to you as it has to me, you might like to join me in full.

As we go, I’ll be curious: how do you relate to the following?

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1. I wanted more sexual power, but at the core of it I just wanted women to check me out

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I remember cultivating an imagination, a rich erotic life, as a teenager. The women that populated it are mostly forgotten, but their trace sure remains. Soon after my attraction to the girls at school bloomed, I noticed the desire to possess (though I wouldn’t have used these words at the time) more sexual power and, in some way, better erotic psychology, so I would be more effective in my approaches, and simply more alluring. I have been busy with this project ever since.

This whole need for sexual power would kick in most strongly, of course, when I fell in love and got put in the friend-zone. You know the line: I like you, I really do… I just don’t like you like *that*.

Of all the rejections, why does the sexual one sting so hard?

Why can’t we just brush it off? I mean, biologically, it’s a rare sperm that makes it to the egg. Defeat is our destiny! Do our losing swimmers also make it so personal?

But having plunged into the substructures of it, I sense that sex is central to identity—virtually inseparable from it. And keeping our sex in the closet gives the permeating feeling that our whole life is somehow locked in a cage. I also sense that many of us (though not all) equate sexual rejection as a rejection of our biology, and our chosen pretty girl’s no feels, in some existential way, a no to our right to exist. Our figure of feminine idealisation has decided not to validate our essence. The friend-zone is not the failure to bag a schoolyard girlfriend, but a failure at the level of being.

So there’s no greater journey than the acquisition of sexual power to therefore compensate for our lack of existential worth. To fuck one’s way into existence, so to speak. And the roots of much of my sexual conquest had to do with building, on this wonky view of the universe, a foundational sense of identity. Very little sex actually has to do with sex, as Oscar Wilde once pointed out. It has to do with power.

Now this took me a long time to see, but when I look at it—I mean, really look—my need to feel erotically powerful is not so that I can get more women: to actually spend intimate time with more women. Nor is it to get many women, or even that I could travel back through time and make up for all the girls I lost out on at school. There’s something more subtle that I notice in here, and I’ve seen this in many of you:

More than the actual intimate experience of sex, which is full of awkwardness and micro-humiliations even at its best, there’s something in me that wants to be out in the world and be seen. I want mirroring and validation from women in day-to-day scenarios. In the supermarket. At the bus-stop. I want to walk in a room and see beautiful women’s eyes turn to me. I wanna see them sigh and fiddle with their hair and lick their lips. I want irrepressible swoon. I want momentary glimpses, mirroring, that the beautiful women of the world pay attention to me, and show, through a kind of eroticised interest, that I actually exist. At the root of it, I want reflection from the world that I am erotically powerful—that I’m alive, that I’m biologically worthy, that I’m acceptable, and that I am welcomed to take up my chunk of allotted space. As Zan pointed out, I want to live with a deep sense that, if I wanted to, I could. So I need these reminders that I can.

The sex itself, much of the time, I could take or leave. And much of the mess I made in my intimate life was when I took sex I should have left; when I slept with women I simply consumed for validational supply. So I’m a monster? Women have admitted to consuming me too.

Oh, the cycle of seduction!

Well it was that, or it was playing self-worth peek-a-boo

with those who were entirely indifferent.

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This whole dance of eyes, this pinging of noticing and approval and existence, went on for many years. If I am low on energy, or feeling out-of-sorts, I notice a dependency on this pinging creep in today. It was almost like I needed a hit of this every day, or at least a few times a week, in order to feel somehow right in the world. And when I got a good hit, when I smiled at a girl and she gave something wholehearted back, my psyche would light up in a bolt of joy I would never otherwise feel. Why can a simple moment of such coarsing validation hits a man’s psyche at a level deeper than physically having the woman? And why, starved of such validation, if this starving goes on for months, does a man feel like he’s physically rotting, let for dead in the endless void?

Now this is insidious, see if you resonate: if I didn’t get this mirroring and validation back from new, strange women out in public, then this deserted feeling, this sense of discard or abandonment could brew up—even with a woman who loves me at home.

It’s a huge burden to put on every half-pretty woman out in public, to gaze upon her but with an ask, that she’ll reaffirm your existence back to you. There are angels who freely give this out in the world. But many of us feel dependent on finding them (and then, trickier still, ‘possessing’ them) until we find that substance inside that gives validation both to our sex and to the centre of our identity.

It feels like I’ve healed through this pinging-hunger, this outside-sourcing. But it did not happen quickly.

Am I sleeping with her to reaffirm my existence, or because I admire her so much I want to share everything with her? This question will change the satisfaction of your love-life. But it’s not an easy question to answer.

Thank you for reading this far. That was section #1.

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2. The Madonna, the Whore, and the Women who Aren’t There

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With all this going on, it took a while to be able to carve out a stable, relatively healthy intimate relationship.

But it’s not like, as soon as one enters a stable, relatively healthy intimate relationship, that those grooves in our erotic conditioning simply fade, letting go of their archaic fixations, letting one rest in peace.

Why is it that, with my beloved soundly sleeping, her face resting sweetly (and drooling slightly) on the pillow, I walk into the kitchen to grind some coffee, and I’m visited by images of women who aren’t here? 

Why has it long been that, even with a lover who’s fresh and new, where the intimacy nourishes and the sex is good, when she’s opened and she’s given me everything… why is it that I’m capable of dreaming of someone else? Plunge me right in the heart of the communion for which I’ve long yearned, and I’m but a half-inch away from the image of another.

Now I am committed, highly fucking commmitted, and I stroll down the road—I banish every trace: of hair of smile of breast from my mind—but trip on a momentary weakness and I’m back in Northern Thailand, I’m in the Rocky Mountains, I’m on the glaciers of Patagonia in a tent, I’m in the cubicles of the girl’s room at school. I feel quite in love with my needs seemingly met, and yet—I’m away ten-thousand miles.

I’ve never had a problem with infidelity, but is it not cheating if you’re compelled to think about somebody secretly in your own mind? Why do we do that? In pop-psych they’ll point you to the complex of the Madonna and the Whore. They say we split our women in half—or that our women do the splitting for us. My girl is fiery; I want someone demure and shy. My woman is too wise; I want the irritating nonchalance of the rebel. My woman smokes, she’s cool, she’s a cynic; I long for innocence lost. This lover is too young to get me; where can I find someone mat—no, fuck all this challenge and maturity—I’m going for a twenty year-old, too naïve to know what her curves do, in a land where nobody knows me, down deep in the depths of Brazil! The search for the greener grass goes on.

It is already hard for a woman to embody both sides of a human character, and our very way of relating will invoke one in her and exile the other. We shape each other. And the one that brings you tender care is not the one you lust after in secret.

Now I don’t want to keep half the moon dark… and continue seeking sunlight on some ever-more distant world. And yet, I do.

And the more the idle time, the more my inner distress, the wilder the fantasies get. Another chapter gets bolted on.

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Here’s a question, drenched in mystic superstition, you might have once upon a time wondered: if you fantasise about a woman on repeat, will something in the depths of her ever know? How private is an interior life—can anyone, even the Gods, read it on us?

Many of us enjoy our fantasy lives—they’re a guilty pleasure, a moment of escape. But sexual fantasies, to the extent that you’re plagued with them, can turn out an utter bother: a distraction from work, and a nagging sign of what’s missing. And there’s a tacit knowing, if you’re ready to admit it, that when sexual fantasies blow up (like a bad case of rash), it becomes hard to harness the potential of one’s psyche on one relationship, one task, or professional direction, because there’s minutes or hours of each day where you’re prone to being distracted by something else. As an Amorati recently told me: if you add up all the life-force I’ve squandered in masturbation or sexual thoughts… well, that’s something I don’t even want to add up.

Why is that? Why do sexual fantasies—so many of them impossible—eat up so much psychological time? Is it dysfunction, or an aspect of true nature? I believe in both sides of the answer, but I’m finding that much fantasy content—especially if the scenes are long, drawn out, meticulous, and repeating—tends to be psychological and a lot of it can be addressed; meaning healed. And this healing is essential, because to the extent that you have life-force trapped in the same recurring fantasies and patterns, I’ll bet that some other area of your life is stuck in similar regression.

Not all fantasies come from what’s unavailable at home, what your partner fails to bring. Many fantasies stem from wounds and emotions unresolved from the past—the taste of the childhood home, first glimpses of the undergarment, the bruises and cuts and vengeance promised from the tarmac just outside of school. Whatever the shape of our teenage distress, these movies in our minds form as medicine—an interior completion of externalities we’ve long yearned to fulfil. And while the fantasy, in its scope, might far surpass the initial suffering you went through, keys that’ll unlock your psyche are placed around these erotic worlds you conjure up.

This is what I’ve spent many years on the heels of:

Healing these mental fixations—grieving and letting go—of images that simply can’t happen.

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3. Dirty Hangovers & The Primordial Soup

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Now I bet you’ve had the experience of getting steaming rotten drunk and falling in a sweaty pseudo-sleep with a dirty forever hangover. One stews hours in bed, never resting, never facing the trial of waking. Amazing what happens to one’s thoughts in that swamp, in the cesspool of evolution itself. This is the consciousness beneath the veil—you might have tripped here on a mushroom and fallen through—where the bottom opens and one falls free of their regular filters, into a realm that’s quagmire and raw. When I think of sex while hungover, it is not me thinking of this sex. I have become a different animal.

There are the fantasies I have by day. And there is the primal imagery of the sludge-realm, stamping onward, slaying and yawing like a horde in the village… and while every horde leaves you shame-naked and jewelless, no same horde ever visits again. These are not the meticulous medicine of psychological daydreams, neat plays in five-and-a-half acts. This land is ground of bile and mammoth tusk, the ferment of crude oil and snake.

The psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek said that, at first, dreams are for those who can’t take the realities of living. But later, living is for those who can’t take the reality of their dreams.

Anyway:

Last summer, I awoke to record a dream that I was back in England, resting on what was my mother’s bed inside my teenage home. I was staring out of the window, over the back fence, and I could see through one of the windows into the neighbour’s house. Now this neighbour was getting changed, and otherwise moving small items around in her bedroom. I saw her shapely breasts, I saw her night-robe open and close, and I tracked her moving body, transfixed. I have to say that this neighbour was well into her sixties, so my voyeurism had passed my own bounds.

So this neighbour went downstairs and out of her house and disappeared from view. A reprieve. Until, moments later, the two metal footings of a ladder slammed against the window ledge, then some heavy rocking, and the curly dark hair of an aging lady appeared in electric view. She came through the half-open window, this neighbour, and landed on the bedroom floor striding confidently towards me. I was struck immobile, enraptured, terrified. I couldn’t take my eyes off this voluptuous old lady who had caught me in my gaze. I don’t remember how close she got, whether she had climbed on top of me, suffocating, sliding down, or whether she had absorbed me in her arms, for as I became conscious of the dream, I remember I started breathing and contracting my pelvis so as to keep my life force together, you understand, and after a minute of such undulation I can confirm that I willed myself back from the ledge. Having secured control of things I reached for my phone. And thanks to that moment of continence you have this science-shifting discovery you’re reading today:

Your turn-ons by day are not your turn-ons in dreams.

But my fear didn’t allow me to see what was next.

A few nights later, I found myself in a car driving half-way across China. I’ve never been to China, but it was a dream I often had at this time. Anyway, I was visiting a male friend, a good guy, a few years older than me, and we were on a trip. Something stinking out the atmosphere of the car, though, was his girlfriend. She must have been eighteen or maybe twenty, but had her hair in pigtails, and absolutely no chest whatsoever. Flat as a board. And she was an absolute bitch—henpecking, belittling my kind and decent friend at every opportunity. I was disgusted, almost to the extent of saying something, but her onslaught was so rapid that my tongue felt constantly tied.

Anyway, at some moment her attention went over to me, this little brat. I was in the back-seat in the corner, and she would have been in the middle. I could feel her thigh on my thigh, I could feel her gravity move closer. There was a point in which she lifted herself—it has to be said that to me she was always respectful and kind—and found herself sitting on my lap. I could feel the expanse of the back of her thighs covering the entirety of the front of mine, I could feel her narrow, lithe ass nestled into the pit of my crotch. And then, the car smashed over a speed-hump, and I exploded. I could not breathe myself back from the ledge.

It has to be said, and I say this with urgency, that the images and archetypes of the women in my erotic dreams are not women I’d have fantasies, desires or impulses for in the objective light of day. My psyche, though, the deep, unfathomable, uncontrolled strata of it, seems less hemmed in by my mental preferences. All this leads me to wonder, what is the real nature of desire, if unmitigated by the shapings of my mind? What, in the whole world of women—waking or indeed dreaming—does the depth of me want? And in a wet dream, where orgasm screams through without need of mechanical stimulation, what is this unknown libido that can bring an adult man fully off?

By day, I’m divided and partial. Even the filth of all my desire is manicured and psychologically constrained.

But by night, there’s a love of women, of all women. Maybe not a love, but a surrender. A surrender to the entire river of women, a drowning in the undifferentiated deluge of women, without any preference-making at all.

In dreams perhaps we’re all greater Amorati.

In dreams lay the deepest force of all.

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4. The World-Changing Potential of our Biological Drive

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It is not a conventional hobby, to comb and plume one’s interior nightlife for untapped symbols of erotic potential. I’m a chemist rambling rugged planets, sampling submerged lakes for humanity-saving molecules or cells. When I take a finding back to the lab and unfold it under microscopic light, an integration comes back. In fantasies as in dreams, we witness repressed desires for power or surrender, for vengeance or tenderness, for union of all and every kind. I take the raw material of the nightworld, and bring it, by day, into my embodiment, my journalling, my ‘self-coaching’ technique, unfolding the harsh coal of it, the noxious fumes of it, into an enlivened sense of contemplation, which expands the edge and verve in me and follows me out of the door. Putting this back together in my body, I feel alive, I feel loving, I feel free.

It has been said, by teachers ventured far further than I, that our sexual impulse—rib of our desire to survive—can be, and needs to be, transmuted entirely towards the sublime: that our every erotic droplet be a gesture toward God. And there’s a sense that the highest virtue of passion, the everest-peak of our sex, so to say, is where the filth of our lust becomes thinned and evaporated and, in utter ungrasping, spiritually inseminates, through our every unattached gesture, into humanity as part of the holy play. It is said that the worst, the murkiest sludge and our reptilian force—pete from the most depraved inner swampland—is fuel for a man to come home, to exist, as a generative, passion-laced being on earth.

I do not know if I embody that—whether this wretched solo dive into the psycho-erotic abyss is merit-making; bread of awakening for this gathered five-thousand. I do not know if I stand separate from some state of sexual enlightenment, or if these years of inquiry, the recording, this relaying of it, are shining part of a grander plan. I see only my eyes in this give-and-take of approval, this mind in lovely covet of its neighbour’s ass, and my dreams a kaleidoscope of apocalyptic smut. Maybe scaling all these depths, bringing back what I can, deepens a sublime sense of knowing, a wink from the oil-field, or an ability to give from beyond time.

One of the great insights I ever had was that (and it’s living in me here as I share all this with you) if I can feel as much carousing passion unloading something on this blank page than chasing girls a-giggling on the beaches of Brazil—and I do: every sweet metaphor a clutch of fine ass, every hidden in-joke a fed line for my own delight; and where the delivery of the final sentence, the finger mashing wet on ‘post’, is the final stroke and plunder in a vast, orgasmic high—then passion comes from somewhere different from where I, at one time, thought it did.

Insanity, I believe, is the feeling of mounting one’s own purpose. Creating, when the force is strong, is clumsy like first sex when you’re in love. The near-impossible effort to capture your madness in a single artifact: imagine—the dying monks doing it in haiku! Enlightened sex is in the wrestle to get it out when your body stands every five minutes to walk to the kitchen, or pulls down its boxers in a bid for self-touch. The raging edge of one’s gift is one’s bucking bronco, the Gisele one can barely seduce. In Sex as it is in Purpose—it’s angst as it is anticipation! What awaits is a bolt of creative passion still too much for your bodymind to take. I stand up again. What was her name again? She was blonde, from the south… Let us just take a minute and—no! I practice accepting all this in my cells.

If birth is pain for the woman, imagine the latent pain in the years we wait, hoping we’ll ever plant our seed in fertile climes!

Yet in the very centre of it all, in the midst of writing this, and reading, ‘cause reading is the root of all writing and I’m inside this sentence right with you, there is a palace, a glazed castle, an extraordinary perfection of being. I don’t want to admit it—there was gluten in this carrot cake; this coffee-shop, run by lovely lesbians, all breasts in denim aprons, will turn out a source of frustration—but if I relax I can see it, every beauty in the universe, carrying on, unknowing, the dancing music and the throb of the bass, the lights, the fog, the jungle, the neon-illumined palms, the glistening sweat, and all this here in the comfort of home, the psyche more depraved a festival than any you could ever attend—be it flooded with feet-licking nuns on psilocybin and orgydomes. This psyche aches to sign off on a brain-breaking essay that inseminates into you the glimmering promise that you lay helpless and spreadbare in the midst of an erotic cosmos, that all of it is perfect and that none of your sex is at fault.

I don’t know about your life goals, but this is what I seek from art: revenge-sex on the computer where I’m in active tense. Maybe that one glittering moment, where you feel that undistracted central engagement with everything that is is what you seek, too, at the centre of your passion. Have we made it to that hallowed land, together, where our sexual force is at work on the universe, changing worlds for those ready to hear? Sure, why not?! But give me fifteen minutes in this bliss, gimme twenty seconds of unified ecstasy and these eyes, I swear, will slam wide shut, and that girl from school, or maybe from last year’s conference—you know, the brunette with the red lipstick, the purple, the blue—will rush in, nipples first, to fill the void.

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Find Real Erotic Power by Setting Your Psyche Free

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That was a tour of the underbelly; explorations underpinning what I’ll guide you through this summer.

If you’d like to really go into this terrain and unfold the nature of your own erotic soul, I have—as well as these summer newsletters—two big invitations for you:

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(1) Liberating Sexual Presence

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Most men have a couple of core sexual fantasies: visions, dreams, scenes we long to experience. For some, our sexual fantasies are secret pleasures; for others, these images bring great shame and bother, for what really gets us off can threaten the identities we wish to portray to the world.

In fact, sexual fantasies are meticulously created by the psyche to bring closure to something… to stimulate our deepest needs being met. In fact, our entire psychological biographies can be revealed in a simple couple of fantasies.

What if you could tap the deep, taboo reservoirs of your libido… and transmute a lifetime of shame into presence?

Find out more and secure your place.

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(2) VIP, Personal Coaching

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Or, if you’d like to skip the group-work, and uncover the power in your ‘dark forest’ personally…

… I have two spaces in the second half of the year for 1:1 coaching. This begins with working on your personal sexuality, and ends with bringing your creative force to every area of life.

Send me an email to discuss more.

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Integrating the Content of Today’s Post

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I’ll share more details about these events in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. Feel free, also, to send me any of your questions.

For this week, I offer you a little journalling homework:

— How has the need for validation affected your intimate life so far?

— If you are honest, how many of your sexual partners have been, in some way, to help you resolve some question about your identity… and how many of your partners have you chosen simply to share what you have?

— When you’re in a committed relationship, how many of your erotic resources are available to the woman you’re with… and how many are caught up in daydreams of others who are simply not there?

— What other women do you tend to fantasise about? What qualities do your fantasy women have that your real-life partner doesn’t?

— To what degree have you felt into this deeply primal underbelly? How is your erotic life different in dreams when compared to the erotic life you know in waking life?

— Do you sense there is a sublime potential to your sexuality? How close, or how far, does a sort of divinity regarding your sexual nature seem?

— Finally, what kind of work, devotion, or practice ignites your awareness into full-blown, excited engagement with all of life? And does your erotic nature fuel or scupper your work?

Reach out and let me know.

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~ Jordan Luke Collier

   Head Coach, Ars Amorata

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