Make Peace With the World

Madonna with Blessing Child by Giovanni Bellini

Perhaps there’s nothing that hits us in the quick of our social selves more than sex.  Sexual contact without a doubt is the most controlled contact among us.  In an effort to control even sexual desire, because it’s an irrational impulse that we know all too well can in an instant override the reason and move us as if by force to have sex, showing the sexual organs in public is not only largely prohibited by law everywhere on the globe, but also by our own acute sense that showing them is wrong, as though hiding them goes hand and hand with our self-awareness as a person such is the degree of social indoctrination in regards to the genitals we undergo from birth in order to control sexual contact.  It would not be an exaggeration to say that sexual conduct is the heart of morality, is what all other notions of right and wrong are subordinate to, morality itself the heart of social life, what we use to measure the worth of one another, and if you don’t believe me take this test: who not in your reason but in your gut offends you more, makes you want to throw up, the suicide bomber or the pedophile?  Yet in terms of harm to their victims, though there would be those who would argue given the abhorrence of the former, hands down the suicide bomber causes more.

Many might say that the suicide bomber was brainwashed into doing the destructive deed they did, coerced by fanatical elements of their religion, and that their act came out of their devotion to God however confused that had become, and therefore if they can’t be forgiven then at least you might give them some understanding, but the pedophile, on the other hand, they are just evil people.  Some might be as kind to say mentally diseased people, that either in their genes or the chemicals in their brains something is haywire, given our preponderance for reductionist materialism even in popular culture nowadays, the attempt to reduce everything to gross material process, consciousness and all its manifestation to chemicals in the brain, speaking of contemporary technologically based societies (calling them the ‘developed’ nations isn’t a truthful description, implying as it does a developed people), what, with the aid of communication technology is giving rise to some semblance of a world culture.  There would be those few, however, that would see in the pedophile the same set up as the suicide bomber, that neither are they evil nor genetically and/or brain damaged people (generally speaking, since in some cases the latter may be the case, but in others evidence of such might have to do with the possibility a baby’s brain may be more plastic to nurture than now believed, and the former would naturally have a role if such behavior extends through generations, is a set familial trait). Pedophiles are people that have been conditioned in the most basic sense to cause harm, conditioned in infancy, when how you will behave sexually is determined, who you’ll be attracted to and how you’ll manifest that, something that after untold centuries we still largely don’t know so strong is the taboo in regards to sexual feelings and our children.

“The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world” is a common idiom in English, from a poem of the 19^th century, but the idea can be traced as far back as Classical Greece, though neither those who use the idiom, nor the poet, who wrote his poem in praise of motherhood, nor the Greeks, who had an eye more towards the advent of political leaders, saw its deeper sociological significance in terms of what I now speak.  Beginning with Freud, the existence of sexual feelings in the parent and early child relationship, though under his ‘microscope’ those were exclusively on the part of the child, was not only admitted for perhaps the first time in polite society, but also made the foundation of his whole psychology of the human being, and for a time of the science of psychology itself, though not without many dissenters, and it bore so much influence and still does (as a basis not now corroborated but one no serious student of the science can ignore) because of the truth value of his narrow and lopsided findings, not that sexual feelings on the part of a small child for their parents are the foundation of the making of the psyche of the human being, of course not, but that such sexual feelings exist between both parties (not only on the part of the child), and they are not the basis of an individual but of a person’s sexual orientation and the manner and degree in which that is manifested.

Before we turn our attention to the production of the hated pedophile, and in so doing look too at his cousins-in-law the now largely socially accepted and legally protected (in most contemporary technologically based societies) homosexual and lesbian, social assembly lines hidden from view and taking place in the factory of the family in our most sacred social relationship and the one in which we depend upon over all others, that between parent and child, allow me to show you a contemporary crisis in India, the gang-raping and overly-pronounced sexual harassment of women (with a view of such in all societies), in light of my bold proposition, since that cradle rocking hand is much less hidden, rocking in this sense ‘to rock the boat’, not to soothe and give comfort.  It will not prove my thesis, but it will give not only food for thought, but also, to the more sincere thinker, a line of sight to substantiate it.

Some years back I was talking to a semi-educated middle-aged Indian man about the preponderance in India of fondling an infant and preschool boy’s penis on the part of not only adults – mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, neighbors – but also of older children, not usually to sexual arousal, but giving it a pull, or tug, or twist, and he vehemently denied that, and I thought I might have to bear the brunt of his righteous indignation (people are funny about their country), but right across the street this grandfather, unaware of us watching, began to play with a little boy’s penis, a boy about two, and the boy kept pulling back, but the old man kept at it, and not only did this spare me the man’s ire, it also made me realize that the behavior, though quite widespread, something done in public as well as in private, was ‘below the radar’ of what they generally would talk about or admit doing, like it was a semi-conscious activity they indulged in that at the time were very aware of (I’ve had women wink at me while they did it on a number of occasions, watched teenage girls and boys laugh and pull on the penis of some beloved baby in their care), but it wasn’t something as a group they were conscious of doing, and if you asked them about it later individually, you got mostly shrugged shoulders as an answer, or some explanation like, “he’s just a small boy,” meaning he’s not yet of the age of reason and doesn’t know that thing down there is anything special.  I even had an argument with a well educated Western woman, the founder of an NGO there to help after the 2004 tsunami, who had seen the behavior herself (who I ascertained would want to throw up if confronted with a pedophile) and defended it, arguing that such on the part of in this case village mothers was within their cultural limits, wasn’t harmful, and shouldn’t be judged by Western standards.

That a baby is crucially conscious of that thing down there and how it’s handled, in the East, the West, on the moon and Mars if we ever end up living in those places, or anywhere in the universe human beings come to live and birth children, to such an extent ‘under the radar’ feelings towards it can be experienced as touch such is the touchy-feely wide-open ocean infants swim in, and they pick up on what we are not even conscious of in ourselves as their caregivers, isn’t quite understood even in those countries it’s against the law to kiss it and toss it to and fro, behavior prohibited not out of the knowledge that contact with an infant’s genitals determines how it will manifest sex, which isn’t generally known, but that the baby will grow up and have to deal with serious issues over being sexually abused, though there’s the underlying reason that has prohibited child sexual abuse to begin with: it being seen as a major factor in the making of a criminal, though no one to my knowledge in the science of psychology has identified the social indoctrination surrounding the genitals, conscious and unconscious, reflexive and purposeful, as the basis of learning right and wrong, the heart, as I’ve proposed, of human morality.

It’s more than that; it’s where on the body is the limit of our social self (in the Indian esoteric chakra system it’s the ‘communication’ chakra), and it’s the privatization of our private parts that organizes our physical ego, or I might say its seat on the body, the degree of how private we are taught our genitals are having a lot to do with the strength of our individuality in relation to the group, since it’s the body and not so much the mind or emotions that separate us from one another, and hence the genitals are a person’s stronghold on the body, what they keep to themselves, what they make private and give only to ‘who they should’, which is largely culturally determined deviancy notwithstanding.

But this privatization is not black and white, and it’s not in terms of being seen but in those of being felt of with either looks or touches (but it would have to be understood at the same time that the general taboo of showing the genitals even in a non-sexual context, as well as not allowing young children the freedom of nudity, significantly contribute to the mounting sexual problems modern society faces, which underscores the paradox and enigma of sex and why we are yet unable to integrate it in society, starting with the reproductive organs themselves functioning also as our organs for the elimination of waste, making it necessary to often expose them to eliminate waste and giving a direct ever-present association of the most disgusting aspect of our body with what gives us our offspring and an almost transcendental bliss, albeit only momentary).  When looks or touches convey the feeling of sexual contact, which would be how the baby being conditioned experiences to a certain extent even care and cleaning contact, wide-open as they are and not yet able to differentiate types of contact on such a sensitive and communicative area as that, which in the context of which we are speaking would include contact considered only playful or teasing on the part of the ‘conditioning’ person, who could be anyone over the age of reason (we’ll excuse any on the part of anyone below that threshold, and we’ll tolerate that with older children to the degree we can, since sexual curiosity among children is part of their natural sexual development, the increasing prohibition against that one of the major causes of the modern proliferation of sexual deviancy).  Not all such playful contact on the part of persons above the age of reason is harmful, and here is the muddle of the matter, but that contact that has a curiosity behind it if not outright conscious or unconscious sexual desire, what no one would admit to.  Though it’s beyond the scope of this present essay, that babies are so wide-open might be why some now questionable practices were adopted, rites such as circumcision, which, along with giving a strong conditioning to the male about his genitals, would naturally tend to limit contact with the penis during cleaning.

Getting back to India and its current crisis, over which women have been seen out in the streets in mass protest calling for the hanging of the rapists, and the major national and world news outlets in solidarity with the protests, the call for the death penalty in this case not being challenged even by those news outlets from countries opposed to it (to my knowledge), and no one with any voice that can be heard has questioned child rearing practices such as what I’ve mentioned as something that might contribute or even be the roots of such destructive and at times deadly behavior (or even the fact that in India contact between males and females is strictly controlled after puberty, at the very time such contact is called for by their nature animal yet as we are, or that boys are largely served by females and not generally required to learn to cook or wash clothes and the like, especially in more traditional families, which would tend to reduce and not enhance respect for females, and I can continue).  At any rate, you might see those women and news outlets have not yet a clue as to why such ‘monsters’ are in their midst, under the all-encompassing assumption we have absolute freewill and are separate from one another not only by our bodies but in our minds and hearts as well, what it might be said contemporary technologically based societies base society upon, that illusionary assumption: that we live in our own separate bubble of consciousness cut off in there from the rest of humanity and the universe; the only communication possible with our surroundings is via the outside.

When it’s the mother of the boy, and she is his primary caregiver, playful contact is much more serious, has such a greater conditioning impact, his utter dependency on and love for her likened unto that the fervently religious have for their God, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that one’s mother (or primary caregiver) is God to an infant for all practical purposes.  I’ve seen mothers fondling their infant and toddler boys on buses, in temples or wherever people sit and wait, not everywhere you look but often enough to see a pattern, and sometimes I’ve seen both arousal on the part of the boys and keen interest on the part of the mothers, though more as a slight of hand, something she looked at indirectly from a sideways glance, under the radar.  What would the boys learn from that?  Being teased in such a manner, at a time when they are so very vulnerable and when they are being conditioned as to how they will manifest their sexual feelings towards woman, they would not be learning to respect woman to say the least, and to say more you could say they were learning the culture of rape.

Let us now move to the production of the gay and lesbian before we come back to our beginning the pedophile, or end with it I should say, since it’s the general principle of the end in the beginning and vice versa that I’m more or less demonstrating, continuing to concentrate on the male because, spending a lifetime researching and doing fieldwork on such matters, unofficially and solo, though I did attend university and read a lot of the psychology on the subject, even learning Classical Greek for deeper insight (hence the counter-attention-deficit sentences and paragraphs), I wanted to get a handle on my own conditioning in regards to where and in what manner I show my penis, and hence get a handle on showing it, but it would not be too far a leap to apply the same principles to the conditioning in regards to the vagina, since, though there would be those who would argue based on the degree of conflict between the sexes, males and females are not from different planets.

Here it would be the father or dominant male adult in the role of caregiver that would be the determining agent, males who are paradoxically generally homophobic, the unconscious attraction manifesting in the manner in which they relate to their toddler boys before they reach the age of reason, which for the most part would be more romantic than outright sexual, though the sudden squeezing or pressing of the boy’s genitals would be part of the conditioning and as well the feelings experienced during intimate carry or lap sitting, genital communication under the radar of the father but the most pleasurable part of the experience for the boy, physical pleasure, erections on the part of the boy a manifestation of that.  What happens in such relationships is the boy learns to associate romantic love with a male figure, genital contact as well, since his father is the love of his life, as opposed to his mother, not something in itself strong enough to overcome the naturally or instinctively occurring attraction for the opposite sex, but when the father responds likewise, especially when he albeit semi-consciously nurses that with genital contact however slight, that boy will have the constituent elements to become a homosexual.

I say constituent elements because other factors come into play: heredity and hence predisposition for homosexuality, which may or may not be a factor; key romantic and/or sexual relationships with other boys growing up, though expressions of homosexuality among boys is a natural stage of boyhood, and even though it is a factor in the making of the adult gay sexual orientation, it must only be noted and not prohibited for the same reason children need to be able to express their sexual curiosity among themselves (for a healthy human sexuality); whether or not males dominate fantasies during masturbation in early adolescence, since that very short and difficult to identity period is, to a very small degree I have to stress, likened unto infancy such are the basic elements of identity such as sexual orientation ‘up in the air’ and consequently able to be manipulated with one’s consciousness, not too unlike the programming of a computer in theory, though here that has to be done repeatedly, and I’m sure I have not exhausted the constituent elements in the making of a homosexual, but you can see the nature of the material used and build on from here.

You might consider a moment that a society that permitted sexual contact between young adolescents of the opposite sex who had been identified by nonintrusive and non-coercive means were in process of developing a ‘different’ sexuality would be a society that had a greater sway over its sexuality (here again, though, we meet sexual paradox, which might be partially captured by saying that it’s quite difficult for our morality to ‘understand’ the vitally important role in cultural evolution – moral, aesthetic, and intellectual – of those persecuted as deviants because they were not heterosexual).  In some ancient societies that sex between early teens was allowed may have more to do with assuring heterosexual orientation than the moral ignorance it appears to us now.  It might even be that a future humanity will not equate sexual fulfillment with human fulfillment and leave to the younger generation that function, to those above the age of responsibility though yet below the age of actual adult maturity, which most over that age would agree is around 30, what could only be possible if the control of sexual contact and all the conditioning that entailed was not a blocking of our natural and instinctual sexual expression based on a reaction against sex by an ill-informed culturally determined morality, but truly the right way to do it, hence making it easier to leave behind when the time came.  Such a scenario would free an untold amount of human effort for higher pursuits.

You would have to figure that if it’s the truth of the matter we must know about it on some level, something so basic to us as this, returning to how sexual orientation is determined, but today we would not likely be able to access that level, or wouldn’t accept the knowledge gained there, because the only level of knowledge we recognize, in this world culture arising from a basis on technology, is the one reached through the scientific method, which concerns itself with outer reality and considers contents of our inner life such as dream and inner vision, where something like this might become visible, as too subjective a field to apply that method to, its importance in psychoanalyses notwithstanding.  In any event, no scientist, the basic authority in this arising world culture, would accept the contents of a dream as proof of anything and would want to see the operation of this in outer reality, something not likely possible given the fact that one, we don’t generally remember anything before the age of reason, and two, few if any parents or caregivers would admit to such behavior such is the social stigma of sexual contact with children, and that’s assuming they were even conscious of it, and most are only half-conscious it and wouldn’t even admit it to themselves.  Neither is it something you can easily set up a long-term experiment to investigate, because of moral issues of course.

So it’s not something we of that arising world culture are likely to believe because we don’t have the means to thoroughly investigate it other than primarily through the inner life, the very thing we of that culture about ourselves trust the least, and if you don’t agree let me ask you if you are largely conscious of that third or fourth of your day called sleep when you are fully immersed in your inner life and having the experiences called dream and the like where you can see played out as upon a symbolic stage all the basic constituent elements of yourself, believe it or not.  If you had faith in your inner life you would be, and if you were largely conscious of that large portion of your daily experience, you’d see it’s not a matter of belief but a primary though atrophied way we acquire knowledge, and you’d wonder as I do: how can we be so ignorant of ourselves?

It wasn’t in my inner life, though, that I first learned my mother had sexual contact with me as an infant and toddler, not the ‘slight of hand’ kind but full on sex, or as much a boy so young can perform with a woman, and I must leave the details to your no doubt reluctant imagination.  My psychiatrist just blurted that out, that my mom had sex with me, who I had just started to see because I was exclusively attracted to pre-pubescent boys, and I was 23 and had just discovered, despite efforts to deny it, keep it from manifesting, that I couldn’t so easily control it, though with me it manifested more in a sexual/romantic relationship with a boy than dragging one behind the bushes or somewhere and forcing sex on him.  I told my doctor that was preposterous, since my mother was a good mother, about the best mom one could have, and I didn’t have the slightest memory of anything like that, but based on her declaration and subsequent explanation, over an intensive year seeing me an hour twice a week, I came to entertain the possibility.

Later, when I turned to an investigation of my inner life as a means perhaps of getting a handle on my sexual orientation, something natural for me because since infancy I’d remained more or less conscious of that third or fourth of my day most are unconscious of, I saw that sexual contact as the background of many of my dreams, which, the more I both learned to interpret my dreams and recognize the repeating and emerging patterns, began to show itself naked of symbol.  By that time, some 10 years after therapy, because it was painfully apparent that I would always be defeated in anything I did, and I was not an ungifted young man, my mom finally admitted the abuse, but she didn’t see it as abuse or even as being sexual, saying it was beautiful and sexual desire had nothing to do it, that I just got it all mixed up, her way of living with herself constantly reminded she’d socially crippled her only son and made it impossible for him to live a normal life.  It didn’t start with her though, and she was born to a social class and at a time when such was basically the order of the day, so she isn’t the villain of my life.  Ignorance is, yours, and though in light of infinity I know next to nothing, I do know myself and now can control myself, because knowledge and will do meet when the former informs the latter with the truth of who and what you are, which isn’t evil or diseased but something infinitely larger than the scope of this present essay, what I discovered in the exploration of the depths of myself, what I found when I went upon my heights.

Though it’s a bit complicated to understand how my mother having sex with me would determine my sexual attraction to boys and not just greatly amplify my attraction to women, what that teasing described above does, see she crossed that indefinable line where it became actual outright trauma, what I define as that abuse done to a child below the age of reason, what we might call developmental trauma because it occurs during basic ego formation, whatever kind of abuse, that causes them to develop what I’ll call for simplicity’s sake a subconscious complex (a reaction to trauma not limited to infants and small children – a basic reaction to it for people of any age to a lesser extent) whereby they have the strong impulse as an adolescent or adult to give the same abuse to others, children or other vulnerable people, or act out some other antisocial and/or self-destructive behavior to fulfill three basic functions, and all might be in play to a certain extent, but as a general rule if it’s developmental trauma the first would be visible: as a means of unconsciously exploring the trauma from the other end, the one who did the destructive deed; dealing with the guilt of receiving it; and, especially when the acting out is self-destructive like the abuse of alcohol and drugs, to keep it unconscious or if conscious dull the feelings associated with it. I learned that if I wanted to know what my mom did to me I only needed to watch the way I manifested my attraction in its particulars.  It’s not a 2 + 2= 4 equation, and there are many variables in play, and so the age and sex of who (or what) is the object of attraction, and exclusiveness of attraction to that type person the abused child as an adult abuses would vary based on those many variables.  My story perhaps is atypical in the excessive degree of sexual contact, but being so pronounced it is easier to see how I’d develop an attraction to children because of it.

 That contact, being so overt and overwhelming, terrified me and at the same time melted me in pleasure, burned me more an apt description, and often I’d hide from my mom the contact was so scary, which was one of my first memories of the abuse, her ‘in that way’ and coming and finding me hiding under the cabinet.  Pain too was part of the program, what actually started the sexual contact, since my anus was too closed, according to our doctor, and he’d instructed my mother to insert something into it to widen it, and so during my first diaper changes I was held down and basically anally raped by my mother’s finger, as I screamed in pain, the doctor having told her it would hurt but she had to do it, and I guess maybe as a way to both make up for it and to show herself she was not mean but gentle, in the aftermath she’d rub the area, rub too my penis, which would come erect, and so in time she did it all with me, orgasm quickly entering the picture, and we don’t know the strange effects that has on an infant’s consciousness, but the next item might begin to fill in that gap of ignorance.

If you are at all science-minded you’ll just see it as evidence of insanity in my family, but even if it is you’ll have to eventually come to realize such things might have more a reality than you’d be comfortable with giving them, since this next item has to do with spirits, demons, daemons, whatever you want to call them because it’s not a ghost.  Before I was born my mother had a phantom lover, an invisible spirit that would come into her room when my father was away and have sex with her, and during her sexual abuse of me I would see an ‘imaginary playmate’, an animated dog-dragon standing there wearing a grin from ear to ear, taking me on inner journeys in the journey to orgasm, who would also come when I lay in bed or at play under the house or somewhere no one would see (and become alarmed that I was inert) and take me, before I even knew I was on the way, on inner journeys to the lower worlds, where I learned the basic skills to do inner exploration, but I’m going too far off the map of our counterintuitive world culture, though these metaphysical things in conjunction with sexual abuse are slowly creeping into the picture even there, but to my knowledge infant orgasm isn’t known or even speculated to open the inner consciousness to such a degree.  You might imagine I never did fully put my faith and trust in the outer world, a loaded statement I know.

 That it was prepubescent boys I was attracted to, ideally between the ages of 9 and 11, the years I spent horribly emotionally abused by a ‘wicked step-mother’ (I do understand this whole thing is a bit much to take in, but match the level of insight with the level of intensity, and that should make it easier to give me at least the benefit of the doubt), all the while pining over my mother like a young man over the loss of his love, had to do with the experience of momentarily losing my mind when I was 9 over being pulled off my mother kicking and screaming so to live with my father and his new wife, who I lived with until I was 11.  I got that mixed up too, and those two years not only became the ideal age of a boy for me but also put another nail on my coffin in terms of the social death someone such as I experiences in my social life: it gave me the tendency to become obsessed with whatever boy I happened to fall in love with, to the point of a temporary psychosis upon the loss of the boy such was the intensity of the obsession, what had landed me in that psychiatrist’s office when I was in my early twenties.

You will not realize it unless you spend a great deal of time in quiet reflection over the things which I’ve shown you, but I’ve basically told you how the cow ate the cabbage so to speak, shown perhaps some of the most basic causes of human conflict, since so much of that has to do with unwanted or unlawful sexual contact, what today looms so large in our society, in every society on earth.  Until we address the roots of those things, which would have to be in a manner opposite from the way we deal with such behavior ignorant of those roots, in other words with compassion and understanding, we will never have either peace on earth or human unity, neither peace in a single town or city nor unity in any community, and we will be continually defeated in our efforts to pull ourselves out of the cycle of violence that threatens to destroy human civilization and much of Nature itself meeting violence with violence, hatred with hatred, as we do now, as we always have.  Though we can split hairs all day over what actually constitutes justifiable violence for self-defense, the greatest weapon against what hurts us is knowledge, the light of which turned me from one who hurts others to one who now helps to heal. I’m using the problem I’m having with society, society in animal clothing, as a hammer to beat into the heads of those who have made me an outcast, which would not be an exaggeration to say is the whole human race, that I am a valuable person to humanity and a needed voice in your community, and if you haven’t at least begun to entertain that possibility after reading this essay then, though you are valuable, as valuable as the sun and stars, maybe your voice isn’t needed here in the sense that you really and truly have nothing of value to say of me or that of which I speak, and you’d need to stand aside and let me in.

Who am I?

I am so much more than the pedophile,

but let’s start with me.

Then you’re ready for everybody,

whatever,

in regards to a future of unity.

And we manage it human maturity.

It’s what we’re written for.