Being Intimidated by Intimacy The Illusion of Falling in Love (Landing in Lust): Hormones, His Moans, Her Moans: The

Brain is in Business for Itself Bibliography: The Rhythms of Love, Beverley Steffert Pairing, George Bach and Ronald Deutsch Why We Love and Lust, Theresa Crenshaw Culture in Context, Weston LaBarre *** I'm going to tell you what I think is the truth of intimate human relationships - of love and lust, of the awakened personal mind and the dreaming emotional Hollywood mammalian brain. Your brain and body is in business for itself. Its business is to locate a mate and transfer your genetic story to merge with theirs so as to continue your combined genes into the future. Your entire organism is programmed by evolution to do this. Your emotions drive you via your cascades of hormones throughout your sexually active years to do just this, again and again (especially for men). *** The Evolution of Human Sexuality, Donald Symons "Man's brain, like the rest of him, may be looked upon as a bundle of adaptations. But what it is adapted to has never been self-evident. We are anything but a mechanism set up to perceive the truth for its own sake. Rather, we have evolved a nervous system that acts in the interest of our gonads, and one attuned to the demands of reproductive competition...the brain is an extension of the gonads. If fools are more prolific than wise men, then to that degree folly will be favoured by selection. And if ignorance aids in obtaining a mate, then men and women will tend to be ignorant. In order for so imperfect an instrument as a human brain to perceive the world as it really is, a great deal of self-discipline must be imposed." Michael Ghiselin "Opportunities for people to profit genetically from controlling, manipulating, and exploiting each other sexually are ever present features of human existence. The range of human emotional experience must be the result of natural selection. An evolutionary perspective implies a tabla rasa view of the human mind is untenable. Emotions might be considered to be the genes' closest representatives in the mental processes of learning and decision making: they constitute evaluations of stimuli, whether these stimuli originate outside the organism (sensation) or in the brain itself (memory, fantasy), and motivate the seeking of particular stimuli.

"We are moved by emotions as feelings, both figuratively and literally. 'All intellectual and voluntary processes are elicited by the system of some impulse or emotion, and are subordinate to its end.' [Shand] However universal human cognition may be, human

emotion is still more basic, older, and universal, and that 'emotion has taught mankind to reason.' [Vauvenargues]. *** You as a potentially aware person can understand this evolutionary program and guide it to your best conscious ends to achieve personal fulfilment beyond the purely biological end. But it is difficult to do and only knowledge of this programming will enable you to do so. *** Pairing, George Bach and Ronald Deutsch "Millions wait in loneliness for the magic electricity. Others find a momentary taste of it, are filled with hope, but later become nagged by doubts. The electricity generally makes its first appearance in adolescence. The fact is that [adolescents] are really experiencing feelings of love, but without an object. They are erotically self-propelled, for no one else is there. [for adolescents that fall in love] their electricity existed before they ever met. A similar phenomenon takes place at any age, though later they are rationalised by more sophisticated ideas. "The attraction has historical reasons within the individual, beyond feelings that permit love without an object. Past experiences and affections tend to shape present ones. The other person offers a subtle set of cues that yield positive responses. We caution pairers not to judge the attractiveness of a potential intimate by stereotypes of lovableness. People in the first stages of getting together tend to place great emphasis on personality characteristics that resemble some stereotype. "This could be love Now, is at once a promise and a threat. The promise is that an intimate longing may about to be fulfilled. The threat is that it will not be. This anxiety of love is primarily a fear that the other person will not feel love...of being used, exploited, manipulated; of being swallowed up and controlled; of being kept at a distance or being drawn too close; of becoming dependent of being too much depended upon. The greatest fear is the fear of losing love. And the greater the affection grows, the greater grows that fear. "A choice must be made the moment these feelings appear. The would-be lover must decide how to manage that fear. There are two ways. The first is the usual way denying the fear, glossing over the realities [of incompatibility] that produce it. It is the smooth way at first, but in the end it brings mounting discomfort and is not likely to lead to intimate love. The second is the [mature] pairing way. It may appear unsettling, but inwardly it relieves the fears and tensions, and is the sound path to intimacy. "The time to share fears and confront the possibilities of conflict is from the start. From the very beginning, stereotypes of lovableness should be confronted and exposed as unnecessary. Instead the unique realities of the new relationship should be focused on.

"The courting [usual unconscious] way is not chosen consciously, but tends to be an unconscious reaction in favour of what appears to be immediately safe and reassuring. How can a potential intimate recognise the self-illusion? Only through understanding the fears of love can an aware decision be made in favour of reality - and intimate longing be fulfilled. *** You have to "walk into love" with your eyes wide open to see through your hormonal haze. To see the person you must compensate for the hormones, use your cortex to challenge your limbic brain, to find those truly personal characteristics - values as ends - which you share with the other. Using the metaphor of Odysseus on his journey back home to his wife and the awake state of conscious intimate relationship, you must like him, tie yourself to the mast of human understanding to not go overboard and be drowned in response to the hormonal song of the sirens of sex. *** Pairing, George Bach and Ronald Deutsch "The typical method by which people deal with their early fears of love is imaging: choosing an attractive way of presenting oneself and what one has to offer. People who seek love want to be at their best. They show off their skills, take extra pains with their grooming, stand up tall and hold in the abdomen and watch how much a potential intimate admires their most loveable qualities. "Feeling the electricity the courter seeks to solidify his acceptability. One of the safest ways to do this is to present oneself not as an individual but as one of an acceptable group. In the male-female introduction, the member of the group image is often conveyed by emphasising one's occupational role. The imager presents himself not as a person but as a symbol. "Much of the typical cocktail party exchange really means: 'Here is my symbol (executive, glamour girl, hippie, etc). Does it interest and attract you? Can your own symbol relate to it? The common dislike of such parties as introductions is, 'They're phoney'. The insight is accurate. They are de-personalising for it is not personal disclosure which is being shared but abstract classes of symbols. "Only persons can achieve intimacy. Non-intimates do not always see people as whole, as having lives of real fear and wanting and hope. Often this limited perception occurs because the viewer wants little real information about the other. We usually choose to see others in terms of their roles, their functions and their most superficial meanings. "When a person is thinged, only one aspect, or group of aspects, of the person is recognised as real. Persons can be segmentalised into the functions they perform. Thinging involves usage, of turning the person into a means for one's own end. But when someone things another, one also automatically things oneself. The prostitute being used sees her client as a body and a wallet. So when a woman treats her date as a thing who takes her places and entertains her, she should not be surprised that he treats her as a thing too. He may win approval as a symbol. But as a person he cannot be recognised. And he cannot hope for intimacy while he remains a symbol.

*** Culture in Context, Weston LaBarre "In a sense, one is always self-deluded. Illusion (a false mental appearance made by some external cause acting on the senses but capable of conceptual correction) and delusion (a fixed false concept occasioned by external stimuli but so consistently misconstrued that the delusion remains largely insusceptible to correction) vary along a scale of increasing psychological intensity, subjective needfulness, and relative incorrectibility. "The ancient notion of a trance as a state in which an ecstatic or body-separable soul wanders in space and time has long since been banished from psychology. The superstition obtains credence from certain drug [or experience induced] states where the subject stands off and views his own body from outside. In each case, other persons can testify that the 'absent-minded' person remained in the same place throughout. The cut off from local and current sensory input, characteristic of the REM state dream, contributes to the belief. "The human mind can be said to exist in two different states of being: wakefulness and sleep. The waking mind ordinarily has full access to sensory input, hence is adaptively environment oriented. In 'sensory deprivation', the wakeful mind promptly begins to project its own contents onto the blank screen of consciousness...the person hallucinates. In the REM state of mind the brain seems to be in business for itself. The outside world is subordinated to the inner. REM mind states are a spree of the Id, a freewheeling of the central nervous system in a kind of primary process thinking otherwise most visible in schizophrenic fantasy...as Kant said, 'the lunatic is a wakeful dreamer' and Schopenhauer, 'a dream is a short-lasting psychosis, and a psychosis is a long-lasting dream'. "The motif of loneliness and social and sometimes also sensory deprivation seems to be a constant in anthropological reports on trance cultural behaviours. Hallucinatory projections are interpreted as spirit encounters. But a demon is psychologically real as the phobic projection to the outside of one's own psychic processes. A good case could be made that much of culture is hallucination: the concerted seeing of mindtailored clothes on the naked emperor, nature. The common defence of all humans seems to be simple denial, the shutting off of unwelcome facts, because that is what all persons habitually do in dreams and visions or religious revelations.

"The intense suggestibility of a person under hypnosis is well known. Easy insight and simple suggestion are the stock in trade of primitive witch doctors as well as psychotherapists. When the mind is cut off from sensory reality and becomes a brain in business for itself, the dream or trance world becomes reality. By contrast with this faith in altered states of consciousness, the authority for belief for rational persons is to be found in the common world of interpersonally validated experience as opposed to the private world of dream or vision or intense desire.

"So called divine revelation is merely the result of tapping the Id-stream of REM mind states and such revelation should not be approached as a cosmological but as a psychological phenomenon. "We see ghosts dance because of specific universal experiences occurring in the development of the human animal. We bring from each individual family-nurtured past a mode of response to the supposed Stimulus, the nature of the Unknown being projected, not perceived. Supernatural revelation is misapprehended information about the mind itself. The Mystery is in fact only our own brains, often in an altered state of Consciousness: experiencing the 'supernatural' is only a functionally dissociated and differentiated state of mind. *** Pairing, continued "The greatest problem in meeting intimately is to reduce the anxiety that comes from wanting to be loved and that increases at the first sign of love and grows deeper as love grows and separation becomes more of a threat. Solutions to this anxiety must be learned before the first contact with a potential intimate. "Successful partnering depends on the development of your unique personal qualities and the effective expression of them. The key is the exposing of genuine, here and now feelings to another potential intimate in the earliest stages of meeting. You learn to be less likely to treat others as stereotypes, to make them into things and to deal with them from a distance. You become curious and learn to want to get closer. Your romantic preconceptions of what a partner ought to be are replaced by openmindedness. Your illusions of walking into some magic room to find the all-electric eyes of his perfect match, your Right One, are seen through and exposed. "If a man meets a woman who asks him what he does, a good response is, I'd rather not tell you, for I want you to meet me and not my work. For the truth is their are a much larger range of potential intimates for persons than they realise. Each person if explored personally becomes an adventure in a new country. You cannot know what you may find until you have actually entered into that person as a person [the etymology of "intimate"]and not a symbol of your own processional wishes. Each person with whom you spark intimacy is also a link in a chain. Once the chain is entered, your world can enlarge enormously. You form a series of link with other people. You have a friend, who has a friend, who has a business acquaintance, who has a niece, and so on. "To build chains of social contacts, does not mean to become indiscriminate. It means to cultivate curiosity and interest. It means to explore and then discriminate on the solid basis of reality-tested information, not on the illusive basis of symbols, images, masks, and facades. The best way to find intimacy is to become an intimate person, open to the whole world of people. As your experiences of creating intimacy multiply, you become more skilled as an intimiser...you are better equipped to find a permanent partner, to build the relationship, to elicit that potential partner's real interest. You must take the trouble to look and really take note of the world and the persons in it as if you were a reporter who had to describe and explain them later.

"Part of the pleasures of opening up a stranger is observing and being observed, and discovering what the observations mean. You become attentive to and interested in signs of being accepted or excluded. As you watch people develop an eye for details...what are the clothes like, what is the person carrying, what food do they order, is there any way of feeling what that person is feeling right now? Many people are so self-concerned that they can be with a friend for an hour and not notice some fairly apparent physical discomfort, or emotional uneasiness. This lack of awareness can seriously retard the growth of intimacy. "To create the 'Intimate Eye[I]' is to care for the details of the other - to look on the other person as a work of art, to see the nuances and subtleties of their personal response to life. The very expression of interest in another creates a responding interest. The interest you express however must always be genuine, even if it is clumsy and a little self-conscious at first. This is the only way to overcome the suspicion that society assigns to an expressed interest in strangers. Most people are perceptive enough to sense phoniness. Expressed interest carries great impact. But that impact can turn into acute anxiety and withdrawal unless it is promptly and logically accounted for. The interest must be real and shown by specific comments which prove the genuineness.