THIS is such an incredibly important message. I wish more people could hear it. Christians and non Christians alike living in our sexually wounded world. This feels like it could be something of a course, quite frankly. But at very least included in a much larger conversation with the meaning crisis or meta crisis. Hope you will keep talking about this subject as often and with as many different scholars and poets as possible. ❤ Gratitude
Great job Mark thank you for sharing this wisdom I hope you can further develop and share insights into this important topic. Understanding how sexuality relates to the path to God and meaning seems vital to our time.
This is how any sweetness can be abused and turned into bitterness, and still there is always a chance to turn it back and rejoin divinity. This is the purpose of our life❤😢😍
It is a relief to hear this articulated so thoughtfully, thank you. It can be deeply beneficial to inquire once again along these lines, seeing the erotic as longing for communion with the divine. Emmanuel Swedenborg writes of the erotic as a correspondence for the union of goodness and truth, a state where one's inmost love is framed by the wisdom most appropriate to it.
Maybe that's a bit like Plato's discussion of Eros as a daemon, an in-between god, which is also why Socrates said he was a midwife, aiding the birth of beauty.
Sex is always a powerful reminder that we humans are still fundamentally animals, (with the ability to become moral beings). That religionists have supposed that humans are separate (and superior) to animals, has lead to much confusion. In order to fix a problem, one must first have a good assessment of the facts. Thinking we're not really animals strips that fundamental truth away from our thinking, making it next to impossible to "fix" anything. All efforts have been stop-gap measures. Rules get put in place because folks are not self-governing (yet). The reality is (IMHO) sex is a material, animal, act, with no intrinsic morality to it at all. Morality doesn't enter the picture until the person makes a moral decision regarding it... to use it as a means of expressing love, or to take unfair advantage of another for selfish ends. What gives it morality is our motives. Why are we "doing it"? Like eating and sleeping, we're hard-wired to have sex. We are biologically designed to propagate the species. We are also capable of following the leadings of the spirit fragment of God that indwells our minds (known as a Thought Adjuster), if we're willing to listen to that still small voice. As self-gratification is one of the keys to human happiness, we are forced to learn how to be mindful, respectful, and caring of our fellow human beings, while still satisfying this basic urge. Denying it doesn't make it go away. Suppressing it rarely works, and often causes a psychological hardship. Self control does not mean self-denial. Is our relationship with our Divine Father-friend sexual? 🤣 Really? IMHO emotional? Yes. Sexual? No. Intellectual? Yes. Does God care about how we satisfy our sexual urges? Of course, when morality enters the picture.
People enjoy talking about sexuality and sexual rules. But that was a minor concern to Jesus. Jesus was most concerned about hypocrisy! And religious leaders and people concern themselves least about hypocrisy. But that is a good illustration and almost definitive of hypocrisy!
With regard to Sexuality and the Vatican (who established most of our rules of sexuality for Christians)... I'm of the opinion that folks that don't play the game shouldn't be making the rules.
I was 19 in 1968 and Blake’s divine eroticism (for example) was everywhere in popular culture. It was a great time to be introduced to my own sexuality. When I found myself surrounded by the Evangelical naivety you describe, I was 36 and it seemed very weird. I wonder now if the influencers I knew were men in their early 50’s, more war damaged than I was, for whom 1968 was more than they could bear and this was their revenge. In other words Mark, I think there has been a cycle, and the task of learning from our mistakes, which is clear to you … and to me … may not be so easy to see if you are at another point in the cycle.
"What has the erotic to do with God?" A desire for and love of the reality of creation, perhaps? For example just behind the spoken voice of Creation, aka God, is seen the nearness of God's kingdom, well manifest and well named as flower's, yet how are we meant to experience Diotima’s Ladder of Love, when we "seeing, see not," according to Jesus, and arguably because we conflate and confuse the 'subjective' reality of our mind’s behavioral habit of merely 'naming' the 'objective' reality of the kingdom of heaven, we all experience and name Earth? Is our unquestioned habit of merely naming reality reflected intuitively in Plato's Allegory of the Cave? Furthermore, did Plato's intuitively wise story seed the historical story, alternatively known as the mystery of the empty tomb and the spiritual form of death that occurs within a space, known as the place of a skull? As for our naivety about the primary role of sex and the primordial reality of creation, would the objective reality named Mark Vernon exist without it? Would the species named humanity exist without the 'primordial-parents' of Father Sun & Mother Earth, aka Adam & Eve, metaphysically speaking? And is the kingdom of God, aka Creation, within us through six innate senses & the development of a 7th? The interpretive sense, we name 'mind'? Diotima’s 7 rung Ladder of Love, & Jacob's too, metaphorically speaking?
I don't follow all that you're saying but one detail that I think matters: Diotima herself never talks about a ladder of love. If you read the Sympsium, it's clear she is talking about becoming ever more intimate with those things that reflect divine beauty. I don't know where the ladder metaphor comes from but it's deeply wrong, boosting the misunderstanding that Plato was somehow against the body.
I listen, learn and respect your numerous podcasts. My erotic question regarding Christianity has never been truly addressed let alone provided any type of answer. It is this; what was Jesus' sex life? Did he have sexual relationships? Why is this fundamental drive of our human existence ignored regarding sex and Jesus? And the implication of its obvious avoidance in Jesus' life is that sex is apparently a verboten topic to acknowledge and hence "dirty" and sinful. And because of this conflicted ambiguity regarding this foundational human topic, I think it has caused the distortions, perversions, anxieties and a twisted pent up vacuum of loneliness and confusion that haunts and, in some instances, transgresses the civilized behavior of the priests, parishioners and lay public who struggle with this powerful, instinctual, survival drive that consumes us all.
I think a lot of the Jesus and sex talk misses is that Jesus was laser focused on the very nearness of the Kingdom of God and everything else that follows on from that. People in the ancient world by and large didn't seem to worry or obsess about the same topics that we do. We take for granted many things that they didn't and vice versa.This is why ahistorical talk like just jumping in out of a 2000 year time differential and thinking you know what happened is distorting at best.
@platosPodcasts Just behind the spoken voice of Creation, aka God, we can see the nearness of the kingdom well manifest and well named as flower's, yet how are to experience Diotima’s Ladder of Love, when we "seeing, see not," according to Jesus, because we conflate and confuse the 'subjective' reality of our mind’s behavioral habit of merely 'naming' the 'objective' reality of the kingdom of heaven? As for naivety about the primary role sex and the primordial reality of creation, would the objective reality named Mark Vernon exist without it? Would the species named humanity exist without the 'primordial-parents' of Father Sun & Mother Earth, aka Adam & Eve, metaphysically speaking? And is the kingdom of God, aka Creation, within us through six innate senses & the development of a 7th? The interpretive sense, we name 'mind'? Diotima’s 7 rung Ladder of Love, & Jacob's too, metaphorically speaking?
Repression is writhe in fundamental literalist Christianity identifying with an all good Christ figure, Causes a terrible enantiodromia. Maybe the ascetic path frustrates to a point it causes a limit experience or something.
Agreed about literalism. Though the Cloud author and Mother Julian aren't really ascetic in the sense of pursuing limits to prompt a flip, but focused in the sense of reorientating their lives towards the one thing that can satisfy desire.
The one force i agree. That desire for the divine that supersedes the drives of animal instinct. The unifying power of God. Reconciliation of the opposites. Good video. Thanks. 🙏🏼
@PlatosPodcasts i believe Socrates was married more than once (twice), some say the order of the wives isn't clear and that it's possible Xanthippe was a concubine and not a wife. I'll have to double check all this, because im getting it from things i heard Pierre Grimes say. . Xanthippe was apparently around 30 years younger than Socrates, so perhaps a still technically child rearing age. Grimes repeated this often, that his wife was pregnant at the time of Socrates death, but where he got it i don't know. Incidentally, he wrote a book about Jesus and Socrates, 'Socrates and Jesus: A Dialogue in Heaven'
'The goal... of the erotic is to be one with Christ'? Seriously??? Brother, I think you're a bit confused. Actually, the goal is to become one (spiritually) with our Divine Father-friend (God). The erotic, (wonderful as it is), is a physical / sexual union between people still in animal bodies, satisfying animal urges. Once we're resurrected, we no longer have those animal urges as we will be in morontia bodies, we leave our biological procreative powers behind us on Earth. We have a spirit fragment of the Father called a Thought Adjuster, (aka the still small voice, or the kingdom of heaven within), which we use to interact with our Divine Father-friend, in our path to becoming sons and daughters of God. Our goal is to eventually fuse with our Thought Adjusters to become spirit children of God (as in Enoch walking with God). We don't actually have sex with deity. (Although I have imagined stars, e.g., our sun, as being breasts of the Goddess--aka, the Universe Mother Spirit, the equal partner with our Paradise Creator Son who incarnated as Jesus, but we can only "suckle" those from afar. 😉)
THIS is such an incredibly important message. I wish more people could hear it. Christians and non Christians alike living in our sexually wounded world. This feels like it could be something of a course, quite frankly. But at very least included in a much larger conversation with the meaning crisis or meta crisis. Hope you will keep talking about this subject as often and with as many different scholars and poets as possible. ❤ Gratitude
Thanks
Well said! It would be great if you could expand this important work, Mark
@@iansturgess4768 There is my book on Dante, plus on on William Blake next year...
Very helpful indeed Mark, and profoundly insightful - thank you.
What a beautiful perspective Mark.
Looking forward to your book, love the cover art.
Great job Mark thank you for sharing this wisdom I hope you can further develop and share insights into this important topic. Understanding how sexuality relates to the path to God and meaning seems vital to our time.
This is how any sweetness can be abused and turned into bitterness, and still there is always a chance to turn it back and rejoin divinity. This is the purpose of our life❤😢😍
A great framing of things - sadly out of fashion and/or largely forgotten in contemporary Christian circles
Contemporary topic? Rather the most important now and in all of the human species.
No- I mean this is an ancient topic that is overlooked/ignored/“refuted” in contemporary circles
Beautiful,-thanks a lot.
The statement in the video description is very relevant and on point.
It is a relief to hear this articulated so thoughtfully, thank you. It can be deeply beneficial to inquire once again along these lines, seeing the erotic as longing for communion with the divine.
Emmanuel Swedenborg writes of the erotic as a correspondence for the union of goodness and truth, a state where one's inmost love is framed by the wisdom most appropriate to it.
Maybe that's a bit like Plato's discussion of Eros as a daemon, an in-between god, which is also why Socrates said he was a midwife, aiding the birth of beauty.
@@PlatosPodcasts This certainly rings true.
Sex is always a powerful reminder that we humans are still fundamentally animals, (with the ability to become moral beings). That religionists have supposed that humans are separate (and superior) to animals, has lead to much confusion.
In order to fix a problem, one must first have a good assessment of the facts. Thinking we're not really animals strips that fundamental truth away from our thinking, making it next to impossible to "fix" anything. All efforts have been stop-gap measures. Rules get put in place because folks are not self-governing (yet).
The reality is (IMHO) sex is a material, animal, act, with no intrinsic morality to it at all. Morality doesn't enter the picture until the person makes a moral decision regarding it... to use it as a means of expressing love, or to take unfair advantage of another for selfish ends. What gives it morality is our motives. Why are we "doing it"?
Like eating and sleeping, we're hard-wired to have sex. We are biologically designed to propagate the species. We are also capable of following the leadings of the spirit fragment of God that indwells our minds (known as a Thought Adjuster), if we're willing to listen to that still small voice. As self-gratification is one of the keys to human happiness, we are forced to learn how to be mindful, respectful, and caring of our fellow human beings, while still satisfying this basic urge. Denying it doesn't make it go away. Suppressing it rarely works, and often causes a psychological hardship. Self control does not mean self-denial.
Is our relationship with our Divine Father-friend sexual? 🤣 Really? IMHO emotional? Yes. Sexual? No. Intellectual? Yes. Does God care about how we satisfy our sexual urges? Of course, when morality enters the picture.
Very good comment. Thanks for sharing!!
People enjoy talking about sexuality and sexual rules.
But that was a minor concern to Jesus.
Jesus was most concerned about hypocrisy! And religious leaders and people concern themselves least about hypocrisy.
But that is a good illustration and almost definitive of hypocrisy!
Thank you for this exquisite presentation! Brilliant! We should play chess sometime!
An interesting observation.. Bet it applies to US evangelicals too.
With regard to Sexuality and the Vatican (who established most of our rules of sexuality for Christians)... I'm of the opinion that folks that don't play the game shouldn't be making the rules.
I was 19 in 1968 and Blake’s divine eroticism (for example) was everywhere in popular culture. It was a great time to be introduced to my own sexuality. When I found myself surrounded by the Evangelical naivety you describe, I was 36 and it seemed very weird. I wonder now if the influencers I knew were men in their early 50’s, more war damaged than I was, for whom 1968 was more than they could bear and this was their revenge. In other words Mark, I think there has been a cycle, and the task of learning from our mistakes, which is clear to you … and to me … may not be so easy to see if you are at another point in the cycle.
My understanding is that celibacy is not the same thing as chastity.
True.
"What has the erotic to do with God?" A desire for and love of the reality of creation, perhaps? For example just behind the spoken voice of Creation, aka God, is seen the nearness of God's kingdom, well manifest and well named as flower's, yet how are we meant to experience Diotima’s Ladder of Love, when we "seeing, see not," according to Jesus, and arguably because we conflate and confuse the 'subjective' reality of our mind’s behavioral habit of merely 'naming' the 'objective' reality of the kingdom of heaven, we all experience and name Earth?
Is our unquestioned habit of merely naming reality reflected intuitively in Plato's Allegory of the Cave? Furthermore, did Plato's intuitively wise story seed the historical story, alternatively known as the mystery of the empty tomb and the spiritual form of death that occurs within a space, known as the place of a skull?
As for our naivety about the primary role of sex and the primordial reality of creation, would the objective reality named Mark Vernon exist without it? Would the species named humanity exist without the 'primordial-parents' of Father Sun & Mother Earth, aka Adam & Eve, metaphysically speaking?
And is the kingdom of God, aka Creation, within us through six innate senses & the development of a 7th? The interpretive sense, we name 'mind'? Diotima’s 7 rung Ladder of Love, & Jacob's too, metaphorically speaking?
I don't follow all that you're saying but one detail that I think matters: Diotima herself never talks about a ladder of love. If you read the Sympsium, it's clear she is talking about becoming ever more intimate with those things that reflect divine beauty. I don't know where the ladder metaphor comes from but it's deeply wrong, boosting the misunderstanding that Plato was somehow against the body.
I listen, learn and respect your numerous podcasts. My erotic question regarding Christianity has never been truly addressed let alone provided any type of answer. It is this; what was Jesus' sex life? Did he have sexual relationships? Why is this fundamental drive of our human existence ignored regarding sex and Jesus? And the implication of its obvious avoidance in Jesus' life is that sex is apparently a verboten topic to acknowledge and hence "dirty" and sinful.
And because of this conflicted ambiguity regarding this foundational human topic, I think it has caused the distortions, perversions, anxieties and a twisted pent up vacuum of loneliness and confusion that haunts and, in some instances, transgresses the civilized behavior of the priests, parishioners and lay public who struggle with this powerful, instinctual, survival drive that consumes us all.
My guess is he was celibate but like true celibates not out of a dislike of love but a desire to fulfil love that way.
There is a book for free online called "Jesus Was Married" by Ogden Kraut
I think a lot of the Jesus and sex talk misses is that Jesus was laser focused on the very nearness of the Kingdom of God and everything else that follows on from that. People in the ancient world by and large didn't seem to worry or obsess about the same topics that we do. We take for granted many things that they didn't and vice versa.This is why ahistorical talk like just jumping in out of a 2000 year time differential and thinking you know what happened is distorting at best.
I think he was focused on the nearness of the kingdom, yes, but the nearness that is within you.
@@PlatosPodcasts nicely said
@platosPodcasts Just behind the spoken voice of Creation, aka God, we can see the nearness of the kingdom well manifest and well named as flower's, yet how are to experience Diotima’s Ladder of Love, when we "seeing, see not," according to Jesus, because we conflate and confuse the 'subjective' reality of our mind’s behavioral habit of merely 'naming' the 'objective' reality of the kingdom of heaven?
As for naivety about the primary role sex and the primordial reality of creation, would the objective reality named Mark Vernon exist without it? Would the species named humanity exist without the 'primordial-parents' of Father Sun & Mother Earth, aka Adam & Eve, metaphysically speaking?
And is the kingdom of God, aka Creation, within us through six innate senses & the development of a 7th? The interpretive sense, we name 'mind'? Diotima’s 7 rung Ladder of Love, & Jacob's too, metaphorically speaking?
Repression is writhe in fundamental literalist Christianity identifying with an all good Christ figure, Causes a terrible enantiodromia. Maybe the ascetic path frustrates to a point it causes a limit experience or something.
Agreed about literalism. Though the Cloud author and Mother Julian aren't really ascetic in the sense of pursuing limits to prompt a flip, but focused in the sense of reorientating their lives towards the one thing that can satisfy desire.
The one force i agree. That desire for the divine that supersedes the drives of animal instinct. The unifying power of God. Reconciliation of the opposites. Good video. Thanks. 🙏🏼
The lion and the lamb will lie with one another.
Of course, as Pierre Grimes points out Socrates was married and his wife was expecting a child at the time of his execution.
Really? Never heard that, only the tales of her tipping the washing up bowl over him. He was 69 when killed. Was she not passed child-bearing?
@PlatosPodcasts i believe Socrates was married more than once (twice), some say the order of the wives isn't clear and that it's possible Xanthippe was a concubine and not a wife.
I'll have to double check all this, because im getting it from things i heard Pierre Grimes say. . Xanthippe was apparently around 30 years younger than Socrates, so perhaps a still technically child rearing age. Grimes repeated this often, that his wife was pregnant at the time of Socrates death, but where he got it i don't know.
Incidentally, he wrote a book about Jesus and Socrates, 'Socrates and Jesus: A Dialogue in Heaven'
'The goal... of the erotic is to be one with Christ'? Seriously???
Brother, I think you're a bit confused. Actually, the goal is to become one (spiritually) with our Divine Father-friend (God). The erotic, (wonderful as it is), is a physical / sexual union between people still in animal bodies, satisfying animal urges. Once we're resurrected, we no longer have those animal urges as we will be in morontia bodies, we leave our biological procreative powers behind us on Earth.
We have a spirit fragment of the Father called a Thought Adjuster, (aka the still small voice, or the kingdom of heaven within), which we use to interact with our Divine Father-friend, in our path to becoming sons and daughters of God. Our goal is to eventually fuse with our Thought Adjusters to become spirit children of God (as in Enoch walking with God). We don't actually have sex with deity. (Although I have imagined stars, e.g., our sun, as being breasts of the Goddess--aka, the Universe Mother Spirit, the equal partner with our Paradise Creator Son who incarnated as Jesus, but we can only "suckle" those from afar. 😉)