Fighting and texting

It’s so easy to thoughtlessly shoot off a text or email in a digital world. But we can’t see the others face, their anger, their tears or misunderstanding so we have no real sense of how we are affecting them. Our vindictiveness may tempt us to go further than we would if our empathy engaged someone in person. Moreover, it takes far more courage to speak to a persons face then to type out text. The meaning of our words change in different situations. If a man runs around a… Read More

Abuse of honesty in relationships

The honesty facade is real honesty; it’s a rigorously honest description, but it also hides something that is factually true. I devoted a whole chapter to this topic in one of my earlier works. For the sake of brevity I will state the problem. Think of a child in a night terror. That child is in the throes of instinctive impulses based on a monster under the bed that he or she really conceives to exist and that terror necessarily becomes the preoccupation of others… Read More

Non attachment and love

By Todd Vickers How can we say ‘yes’ to life and not be attached to the people, things, events and outcomes. Non attachment is a vague notion that wrongly suggests that we could be attached in the first place. Even our own body changes happen outside of our control and every particle in the body is different from what it was a moment before. ‘Our’ livers, as important as they are, do not consult us about their job, much less the needed symbiotic organisms that live in our gut…. Read More

Sexual deprivation and deceitful seduction

How many of our sexual beliefs result from conforming to or rebelling against arbitrary, indirect and unrelated suggestions? Things like a belief or a product that our sexuality could easily exist without. Let’s consider letting go of sexual ideals as a compass and let morality be guided by joy and love rendered harmless through reason. How much sexual discovery exists beyond the things we habitually associate with sexuality?  Do we allow sexuality to be a life affirmation? Do we want sex as a delightful, living impulse? Most of us… Read More

What Desires Are Politically Important?

What Desires Are Politically Important? Bertrand Russell – Nobel Lecture Your Royal Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen, I have chosen this subject for my lecture tonight because I think that most current discussions of politics and political theory take insufficient account of psychology… Read more or listen to audio of the speech at nobelprize.org Tonight I will be posting a new piece about how our sexuality becomes associated with unrelated things. Todd Vickers Read More

Sex as an end unto itself

If we learned we should achieve something through sex, other than the instinctive joy, then we learned sex is a means to an end. Even sex to have children, is sex as a means, but harmless sex can also be an end, something that is worth doing because its good, even if nothing else comes of it. Let’s not miss that value because we’ve been taught that if sex doesn’t lead to anything else, it is worthless. The brief video infers from anthropology that our hunter gatherer ancestors must… Read More

Other benefits of non-monogamy

The tertiary benefits of open sexuality might easily be forgotten. The intensity of emotion that may, at times, needlessly drain into drama or fictional fears can also give vitality to the little tasks of life. We feel our blood pump with the ‘yes’ to a date. The joy of discovery makes for a life well lived and gratitude. When that vigor happens and others are not frightened by it, it becomes contagious joy. Read More