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Intensional Lover

Man has applied all the same self-defensive stratagems in regard to woman as to the divine; for, in the modern world, the feminine is equally the Unknown. Here, again, the key is the man’s attitude and not the woman as object. Nor should one’s own bodily pleasure and orgasm be the focus of sexual desire, any more than one’s personal salvation should be the aim of worship. Desire is a natural expression of the outward reach of awareness. Subjective consciousness poses the conundrum that experience can be bracketed as referring inward, so that the phenomena of sexual experience may be interpreted as mere sensation in the body. In the same way, religious experience may be trivialized as referring to one’s personal state or salvation. In love, however, as in mystical experience, the distinction between self and other blurs but also deepens in meaning.

RELATED TAGS: [woman and/as (the) divine/object, personal salvation, intension(ality){spelled with ‘s’}, outward reach of consciousness/awareness, psychological bracket(ing), sexual phenomena, mystical experience, dissolution of self]