This was part of the thrust of the previous piece: that what is selected is, first, what serves survival and, subsequently, what is experienced by sentient creatures as fulfilling.
And, that the experienced fulfillment of sentient creatures, as the previous piece also argued, is the only possible criterion for "the good."
To the extent what we are doing has served our kind of life in the ancestral past, our experience tells us that it is good. Which is why this space of lovers is experienced as a good. Such a deep good, as the ideal gets approached -- in its sexuality, and its other dimensions -- as to reveal itself as a route into the sacred.
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Or we civilized human beings would see sexuality and the whole sacred space as good if the needs of our nature had not in some ways denigrated and thwarted by the demands of civilized societies shaped by forces other than those derived from human nature. And often hostile to that nature.
But how is possible that a creature would develop cultures so antagonistic as many have been to the inherent needs of the human being?
An answer is "Coming Soon": THE PARABLE OF THE TRIBES.
(The reason for this "preview of coming attractions" is so that when we get to that idea, there's an itch for it to scratch.)]
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Sacred Space of Lovers as a Family's FoundationAlthough the connection between male and female lovers thus originates in mating -- the act that is needed to create the next generation of one's kind -- the connection between human lovers is about much more than mating. It is also about romantic passion and about love.
That's because for us humans the task of passing along life is about more than conceiving and bearing young. It is also about the formation of families that will nurture those young.
It is an advantage -- in terms of survival -- for the young of our species to grow up in a strong and loving family environment. And "the sacred space of lovers" between mother and father provides the template around which a family will grow into such wholeness. (Empirical evidence supporting this will be presented in later installments.)
About the wholeness ideally achievable between the mates, one might say that the sacred space of lovers brings together the power of the genitals and the depth of the heart. The one generates the offspring, while the other creates the atmosphere of love. And then within the family, the wholeness between the mates forms the template around which a family will develop in which children are most likely to grow into whole people.
(As I am talking here about the evolution of our nature and our needs, in which the central reproductive task of "lovers" puts an emphasis on male and female, this discussion will focus on the patterns of needs and feelings involved in heterosexual relationships. Those patterns apparently being laid deep into our nature, I imagine that much that is true about opposite-sex lovers is true also of same-sex lovers. I will rely on others, with more knowledge of same-sex lover-relationships than I have, to illuminate what is the same and what might be different as a result of differences in sexual orientation.)
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The special importance of family among humans grows out of two aspect of our path as creatures that differentiate us from the species out of which we emerged.
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