Eroticism is obsessive interest in sexual opportunity or possibility.

Just about everything that catalyzes or promises sexual stimulation and satisfaction is but an object for its calculating eye, something to buy a share in, something to package and profitably replicate, something to hot-wire genitalia and thoughts to, something to exploit.

Eroticism makes an idol out of pleasurable excitation, thereby bringing about addiction to whatever maximizes -- or once maximized -- such excitation. This intensifies not only our distress, but also our urge for release, especially the release of orgasm.

However, this release, whatever its marketing, is neither ecstasy nor liberation, but only exaggerated relief, a discharging not of distress itself, but rather of the branchings of distress. It is akin to the relief felt when an extremely tight pair of shoes is at last removed. Repeatedly putting the shoes back on so to later have -- no, necessitate -- a pleasurable release is the essence of eroticism.

Understandably, eroticism is a popular refuge for us, given its power to distract us from our suffering, especially through its hands-on capacity for the discharge of tension via sex. Eroticism keeps us in heat, neurotically available for sexual activity, just as tightly bound to sexual possibility as anxiety is to threatening possibility.

Eroticism, with our easily-bought cooperation, keeps our sex center open for business as a psychological garburetor and tension-dump, as well as an entertainment complex bulging with steamy distraction and dreamy drama.

Eroticism is but unilluminated lust polluted by desperation in hope’s clothing. It is kept on the burner by our very urge for release from its contractedness and underlying pain. Over and over again, we seek release through sex from our craving to have sex, emptying ourselves of our eroticized craving even as we strengthen and complicate its roots, ever looking for a better pair of tight shoes.

That is, we crave getting rid of the intensity of sexual desire itself, feeling ourselves unable to tolerate its fleshed-out presence, even as we force-feed it again and again, even as we think it full.

With numbing regularity, we tend to eroticize ourselves into a position where we have to have some sort of release, some sort of orgasmic payoff, some sort of semi-blissful sedation, which only deprives us of the very energy that we need in order to truly investigate the source of our distress.

Eroticism promises Happiness, but real sex begins with Happiness.

Eroticism is but visceral-mental technology for tension-release through sex. Real sex is spontaneous play, needing no distress for its intensity, no preconceived stimulation for its passion, no fantasy for its ecstasy, no strategy for its depth. Sex for conscious lovers may include intense stimulation at times, but this is created not by conflict or mere friction, but instead arises as an utterly natural byproduct of their love-play. They already feel good; they are not expecting sex to make them feel good. They are not suppressing their being and making a goal or grail out of release, for they are already released, already at ease, already in embrace with the heart of their desire, already consciously and willingly consumed by their passion’s fire and light.

By reinforcing the must in lust, eroticism cheapens sexual desire, stripping it of much of its natural spontaneity and expansiveness, injecting it with compensatory fantasy. As such, eroticism is an abuse of imagination. If we need to fantasize in order to have “good” sex, then we are not truly interested in sex, but rather only in a mind-game whose purpose is to maximize pleasurable release.

Sex does not need mind in order to function, and in fact will not flow fully and freely if thoughts and fantasies are allowed to intrude into and dominate its domain. The only useful use of mind during sex is that involving psychic communion between lovers; this requires an expansiveness and naked openness of mind, in contrast to eroticism, which is but a contraction of mind, a neon theater of dark dramatics, crawling with pornographic abstraction.

But what happens to eroticism when sex is no longer gone to mind? What becomes of eroticism when Happiness is not the goal, but the foundation? It becomes the playful expression of sexual desire, its face that of longing, not a tense, ambitious longing, but an ecstatic, open-eyed longing, an achingly sweet wanting to share our depths with our lover through flirtatiousness and sexplay that is as loving as it is lusty, as subtle as it is succulent, as free of mind as it full of ever-fresh wonder.

The point is not eradicate eroticism, but to illuminate it, to free it of desperation and egoic agendas, so that it might outgrow itself, becoming but available energy, cutting new, life-giving channels, reestablishing our embrace with our Eternal Lover.