What are your thoughts on Lust for the opposite sex (hopefully, homosexual lust may also be applicable)?
I found Shakespeare’s take on lust agreeable. (In Sonnet 129, this can be found on wikipedia’s definition for lust.)
He writes:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad; Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell
The portion in bold seems like an apt description of lust in my life. In my life, I think that lust has become a sort of driving force. It is a force that compels me to delve further into obsession and motivates me in a search for greater stimulation as temporary satiation.
Does lust produce anything beneficial for those engaged in it? Does lust hurt anyone? I suppose that one could cite the effects that lust has had for rape victims, but rape is not such a common occurence. There are plenty of people that treat the opposite sex with considerable respect and still engage in the thought processes of lust (myself included).
I have been contemplating what my life could be like when free from lustful drives and motivations (as much as is reasonably possible). If I were to elimate lustful motivations, what force should I then be motivated by?
" have been contemplating what my life could be like when free from lustful drives and motivations (as much as is reasonably possible). If I were to elimate lustful motivations, what force should I then be motivated by?"
That not just abstaining from lust, but using it to drive you further than you could ever go in other pursuits.
Sexual energy is probably one of the most potent energies you have. If you can harness it and use it for drive, you have the ability to drive yourself beyond normal motivation.
How can lust hurt? It’s two people enjoying pleasing eachother. It’s a kind of intimacy. It makes people happy. I think lust is great. That being said,
I heard that there are three wavelengths of love. 1 physical (lust), 2 mental, 3 spiritual. perhaps lust could be an imbalance. perhaps lust alone without enough of the other two could sometimes be an imbalance. perhaps the problem is only when people don’t know how to properly relate to lust. they’re not mature enough, they don’t know themselves well nough, or like shakespeare says they’re not evolved enough to keep from doing bad things to get what they want (which isnt really in itself a criticism of what they want, it just says they want it so badly, which kind of suggests it’s a really good thing to have). if lust without the other two frequencies of love is an imbalance, it makes me wonder why people would naturally seek an imbalance, and why lust is more intense than the other two. i think animals experience lust alone even more than we do, and they’re just doing what they’re designed to do. and we are, too, animals. so how much more refined are we supposed to be? and why can’t we just obey our god-given biological urges? so some open questions for me, but basically i think lust is awesome and people should pursue it guilt-free, unencumbered by religion which tells us so many ridiculous things about ourselves to make us feel bad.
Lust: Need overcoming reason and driving the individual to act and behave in ways he cannot justify rationally.
Lust: Mortality forcing an irrational action and a hidden hope - the body screaming for a second chance; a rebirth through the union with another imperfect being.
Lust: The self dominated by the desire to devour another in the effort to find final satiation – the feeding drive to absorb or to be absorbed into a higher Becoming.
makes no sense. people seek what makes them happy. that’s why we use reason. if something feels good, that’s its own justification. reason doesn’t set goals (except when they further other preexisting goals). it doesn’t need justificaition. are we supposed to understand why everything we do makes us happy? are we supposed to justify liking to eat an orange, or to play with friends? we don’t understand how life works anyway, lust is no exception.
i htink that’s partially what lust is but it’s not irrational, children are extensions of ourselves. it’s also a way to bond with someone, to create an extension of the uninon of you two, so it’s an expression of love for someone. if the lust is purely physical, maybe it’s an expression of the love for having an extension of yourself that is healthy, i dunno, but even when it is purely physical, it can be more than that, because humans are all basically the same in fundamental ways.
that makes it sound sinister, but if you don’t think of it in a sinister way, and think of it as a reciprocality of absorbing and being absorbed, then maybe tehre’s some truth to it.
makes no sense. people seek what makes them happy. that’s why we use reason. if something feels good, that’s its own justification. reason doesn’t set goals (except when they further other preexisting goals). it doesn’t need justificaition. are we supposed to understand why everything we do makes us happy? are we supposed to justify liking to eat an orange, or to play with friends? we don’t understand how life works anyway, lust is no exception.
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Actually it makes perfect sense. Clearly you are not with it enough to understand that.
People seek what makes them happy? Hardly. People seek short term gratification.
Lust DOES override rationality. Hence heroin addicts.
Actually lust has two sides to it, first, lusting can be a good thing. A good example I found was in the New Testament Greek version, where desire is actually lust in the NT Greek. The other side is the version that is bad. For example a man lusting after another woman.
Sabrina, your reply was a little too simple. You seem to disregard to elements that make up the concept of lust; You also ignore the ramifications. This you may do at your own pleasure, but it is not intellectually honest. I can lust for something that is worthwhile and positive that would be beneficial to me. However, one can lust after say for example someone else’s money, that has negative connotations. I wonder, would you want someone to lust after your money and then act on it? You might see the “dark” side of lust.
Heroin is not lust, so that doesn’t follow. That’s why i compared it to eating an orange and playing with friends. You’re implying, without saying it, that lust has short term benefits and long term harm. You’d have to make a case that that’s true, and i think it’s not, or at the very least it obviously applies to the individual. Lust is a very natural thing.
“people seek short term gratification” is a ridiculous generalization. people seek what makes them happy, or at least what they think will make them happy. i don’t even know how to prove that one. it’s just evident in everything anybody ever does. (if you’ think all people do is seek short term gratification you’re not even with it enough to understand why 401k’s exist.) SOMETIMES people fall into traps and seek what makes them very happy temporarily but has drawbacks that make it not worth it, heroin being an example. eating an orange NOT being an example. so by your logic anything that feels good is wrong. like i said, we don’t understand lust or practically anything else about life, so we can’t say it’s wrong.
perhaps lust sometimes overrides rationality, but that doesn’t mean it always does, or that it’s always wrong. and it would override rationality a lot less frequently if religion didn’t tell us lust was a bad thing. if lust is a bad thing all animals are going to hell for reproducing.
Again, it’s the variations in the subject and object of lust that causes variations of acceptability-unacceptability, but my summation was merely for the amusement of it.
i think a distinction should be made between lust in essence and the things people do to pursue it. people do even more evils for money, but money is generally accepted to be a good thing. i don’t think it is, but that’s another subject. hainous acts have also been done, but maybe less frequently, in the name of LOVE. i think we can say that anything that’s desirable enough will make people do evil acts. (that’s just a matter of humans’ point in our evolution.) and lust may be at the top. and it would be absurd to say that anything desired (lust, love, food, money, health, heroin, air, sex, etc.) is bad in exact proportion to how much it’s desired.
To be an animal is to have lust. To not be an animal is to be lustless.
The question is not whether lust is good or bad at all.
The general question is when is acting on lust ok?
The individual question is, "Can I live with myself if I act on this, does it involve others I care about, what are the short term and long term consequences?
If any of you are religious in a way that makes you feel bad about sexual lust, then I see the only solution to be . . . castration. lusting after another is in your DNA, acting on it is what secures or destroyes or is neutral to your relationships.
Sabrina, I didn’t write that lust was darkness, I simply wrote it had a dark side. Lust is not necessarily a tool, but people can be enslaved by their lusts. ie pornography, sexual promiscuity, ad infinitium.
lusting after another is in your DNA, acting on it is what secures or destroyes or is neutral to your relationships.