Why has pornography become ubiquitous across the world?

The answer is that your relationship, as a human family, with sexuality across the world has become blocked. The core of human sexuality is based in love — love for yourself and love for others, love for the world and love for everything. Your bodies are built to generate love, and sexual feelings are part of that structure.

Because love is the original force that makes you who you are and what you are, every human being is made of love. You were conceived in the energy of nothing but love. Because of the ways that human beings have hurt one another throughout history, every culture has developed patterns based in hurt, patterns that support and perpetuate something other than love. Each culture has its own different way of doing this but, every culture in the world has some version of making people feel bad about themselves. Every culture across the world has ways of creating a sense that the human body is something other than completely lovable. But because the need to love and be loved is so great, when people are taught to feel bad about their bodies, then they turn to any source they can find to try to feel love. Some people turn to drugs, some people turn to food, some people turn to greed for money, and some people turn to pornography.

 

 

The reason that pornography is particularly pervasive and powerful is that it taps into one of the most natural functions of love in a human body. In a perfectly healthy human system, if you can imagine a person who has never been hurt and has never felt anything but delight for their bodies and who has always felt completely loved and connected to the people around them, that imaginary person would feel sexual arousal only when they are feeling tremendous love for someone. This can include love for oneself.

Because almost every human being on the planet gets hurt and feels unlovable, then people strive to find ways to feel love again. And because the way sexuality is embedded in your bodies is attached to the way you feel love, sexual stimulation becomes a natural place to seek love. But if you approach sex with need instead of love, you pour the trauma inside you out into the sexual images, stories, and ideas. And this is what makes pornography. Pornographic images, pornographic stories, and pornographic ideas become pervasive because there are so many people yearning for love and looking for love through sex.

In order to define pornography for the purpose of this channeling, pornography is any representation of human sexuality that is based in and perpetuates oppression. Most often, that is oppression of women. What actually occurs when pornography is used is that every person involved is oppressed. Every person involved in the need, desperation and objectification presented in pornography looses part of their humanity.

True human sexuality — an unadulterated and healthy sexuality — never arises from a sense of desperation or need. It always arises from a sense of fullness and love. Human sexuality is inherently generous. It arises naturally from a love that you feel coming from you and flooding the world around you. So it is inherently joyful. A hallmark of pornographic sexuality is that it arises from a sense of need, a sense that you are unlovable, that you are shameful, empty, hollow or lonely and that you yearn for sexual pleasure or sexual arousal as a way to distract yourself from that loneliness — as a way to strive to fill the loneliness with love.

Ultimately, pornography never leads to fulfillment — and this is a hallmark of pornography — that just like with any other object or item that can be used as a drug, it arises out of desperation and it perpetuates further desperation. Just as in any form of addiction it is vitally important that you address this.

Once this internal process leads to addiction, the external world finds ways to generate pornography. Because there are so many lonely hearts and there is so much confusion people hold about their bodies, there is a huge market for pornography. The people who benefit by creating pornography by getting money and gaining other kinds of power and status, further perpetuate that need. Just like any drug dealer, they encourage users to ingest more pornography so they can make more money. Then there is a commercial machine in place to further perpetuate the addiction. Remember, the core issue is that all of you are yearning for love. Only when your need for love are addressed in healthy ways, can you dismantle the commercial industry of addiction.

What are the components of a healthy sexuality and how can we tell if our individual sexuality is healthy or pornographic?

The first thing to know here is that human beings are hard-wired to love. You are built to feel loved. You are built to love others and love everything around you. Children who are treated with kindness, respect and compassion are automatically generous and loving with others. It is the natural state of humans to be filled with love — it is your default position. It is only when you are given messages that there is not enough for you, or that you are not lovable, or that there is anything shameful about you at all — that is how you begin to be susceptible to addictive patterns and messages. When this happens, you begin to seek stimulus that reminds you of your inherent love. This can include sex, food, drugs, and many other forms of stimulus.

What happens throughout the human family, in every individual person, is that you are constantly navigating two completely opposing dynamics. Those dynamics are love and need. Love is inherently generous, it is inherently joyful, and it is inherently energizing. Need is inherently stingy, it is inherently exhausting, and it is inherently addictive.

It is not possible to feel love and need simultaneously. Every act arises out of love or fear and so every act generates either love or need. Throughout the world, there is strong societal confusion about love and need being the same thing. Much of your stories about romance, and therefore your stories about sex, confuse love with need. If you just think about some of the phrases in western culture to describe sexuality, you will see immediately how this happens. It is very common for a romantic message to include, “I need you.” When this is said, it is meant to convey love when in fact it is not possible if you to truly share love when you need someone. When you need someone to do something for you, or to fulfill your expectations, or if you need them to fill emptiness inside you — you are not sharing love with them. You are not generous, you are not overflowing with joy and love for them; instead you are pulling energy from them. You are drawing them toward you. You are seeking to empty them in order to fill yourself.

As you address your own personal sexuality, the first thing to do is to explore how sexuality arises in your life. When do you feel sexual? What kinds of stimulus cause arousal for you? For each of these, first start with a sense of forgiveness. Forgive yourself for whatever you notice here because inevitably you have been affected by society and part of your sexuality will likely be damaged. You must forgive yourself for this. There is nothing inherently wrong with you.

Then, for each of your answers, ask yourself, “Am I feeling energized, generous and filled with joy in this sexual arousal?” or “Am I feeling empty, lonely or needy in this sexual arousal?” Again remember, there is nothing wrong with you — you are simply playing out the patterns of your culture. The difference between love and need is the fundamental question to explore. If you can begin to build more experiences in your life where sexuality is an expression of your love, rather than an expression of your need, you will be on the path to resolving any damage that has been done to your sexuality.

If you are one of the millions of people who engage in pornography, part of what you can begin to work on dismantling is the addiction that often occurs. With any addiction, it will not serve you to try to shame yourself out of it because that shame just leads you to a further desperation, which inevitably pulls you back to the addiction. First, remove a sense of shame and accept that this is a part of the way that you have been seeking to feel fulfillment for the love that inherently yours. Then, as you feel drawn to pornography, first before you engage with it, ask yourself, “Is there some other way I can feel fulfilled right now?” “Is there some other way I can feel close to people?” “Is there some other way I can feel comforted?”

Often what you are seeking is to feel that you are lovable and that you deserve to be close to people. You might uncover that you are yearning to feel like you belong, or you might realize that you are yearning to feel pleasure instead of pain in your body, or that you are yearning to feel awake and alive. There are so many different yearnings underneath the addiction and if you can identify what you are yearning for, what is the core need, then you can begin to build other ways to address that need.

If you are turning to pornography out of loneliness for example, you might consider spending more time with people in different sorts of activities. But in ways that fill that need so that it removes some of the drive toward pornography. This can be a very long journey. Because sexuality is deeply tied with your sense of love and your identity, it is worthwhile to take the time and effort to heal your sexuality.

In order for you to heal as a an individual and in order for you to become whole, and this is true for every human being on the planet, in order to move through Enlightenment, just as you must bring your body and your mind and your spirit and your emotions along with you, you must bring them all out into the light so to you must bring your sexuality out into the light and let all of the components of need and loneliness fall away. That includes pornography.

This message was originally posted here.