Where am I seeing the true self?
Well, of course the cerebral narcissist realizes that he's not having sex.
So this is a very good definition of asexuality.
So he knows he's not having sex.
I explained before that he creates an ideology that elevates sexual celibacy or sexual abstinence into a religion, in effect.
Everything in narcissism is religious in nature, as I always say.
Narcissism is a private religion with one God, which is the false self, and one worshiper, which is a narcissist.
It's not surprising that this religion also came with sexual abstinence as an element.
But still I think that one must make a very, very clear distinction between Eastern religions, mystical cults, mystical sects, and so on.
And that would include, when I say Eastern, that would include many Middle Eastern, even, for example, the Kabbalah in Judaism, and so on.
And Western, which would mostly include North Europe and the Anglo-Saxon tradition.
Sexual abstinence exists in all of these, but for totally different reasons.
In Eastern religions traditions, including mystical traditions, sexual abstinence is the internalization and the use of a positive life force, internalizing it in order to induce a transformation which elevates the person to a higher level.
The sexual energy, whatever it is, they use the term energy, which is a physical term, but still, the sexual energy is considered to be a positive thing. Something that, if used and leveraged properly, can get you to higher planes.
And actually in all these traditions, at some stage, sex itself is used, not sexual abstinence, but sex is used to obtain some outcomes.
So sexual abstinence is just an aspect of using the positive life force sexual energy. You can use it by abstaining, and then it remains inside you and fertilizes you from the inside.
Actually, you're having sex with yourself.
Or you can externalize it, for example, in the tantric tradition and other traditions, have sex with others, and also induce a very positive transformation in yourself towards a state of enlightenment.
So sex was never perceived negatively. If you go to India, there's no negative perception of sex. In any way, shape, or form.
This is not the case in the West.
When I say the West, I mean, as I said, North Africa and Glusaksa. Their sex is dirty, dirty, prohibited, taboo, negative force, to be suppressed, to be ignored, to be ashamed of. There's a lot of shame and guilt associated with sex, which have no place in the East at all.
So from the outside, it looks like all these traditions focus on sexual abstinence.
But the reasons are completely different, completely different.
Unfortunately, we're embedded in the Western tradition.
And via modern transportation and modern communication, especially recently, Western tradition had become the global tradition.
So sexuality, even in Eastern countries, China, India, Middle East, and so on, had become Victorian sexuality, dirty sexuality. You were not supposed to put books by female and male authors on the same shelf. This is inappropriate and so on.
So it's extremely unfortunate.
Sex was outsourced in the Victorian tradition.
We live in the Victorian tradition. I mean, the so-called sexual revolution did not release us from the Victorian tradition.
The sexual revolution just legitimized sexual practices, but had nothing to do with the emotions attendant upon sex.
So now we have a much worse situation than in the 19th century.
In the 19th century, the emotions and the practices went together. There was congruence. There was ego-syntony.
Today, the practices and the emotions don't go together.
So today we practice, and then we feel ashamed. We practice, then we feel guilty. And shame and guilt induce us to practice even worse, which makes us even more guilty.
So we are caught in a cycle of shame and guilt.
Additionally, in the 19th century, it was perfectly clear that it's legitimate to outsource sex. So prostitutes, lovers, they were totally acceptable part of life. Lovers in 19th century Britain, not to mention 18th and 19th century France, and even Netherlands, even Germany, even absolutely, those were known. I mean, you had a wife, you had a mistress. And you had children with both. I mean, it was absolutely acceptable.
There were even in the law books, in law codices, you had special status for mistresses and their children, what they can inherit, what they cannot inherit. I mean, prostitutes were utterly acceptable. Sex workers were utterly acceptable. Every man went to a prostitute once a week because you don't do sex with a wife. She's not dirty. The prostitute is dirty. Everything was well organized, well structured, totally crazy, but structured. There was no ego destiny. There was no bad feeling. There was no discomfort. There was no guilt, no shame, no nothing.
We created this since the 1960s because we changed the way we behave, but not the way we think about how we behave and not the way we feel about how we behave.
So today a woman would have a one-night stand, but after that she would feel like a slut. She would feel ashamed and guilty and bad.
Or a man would have casual sex and hide it from his wife, deceive. Cheating is a modern phenomenon. We think it always existed. It's not true. There was no concept of cheating in the 19th century or the 18th century. Men didn't cheat. The woman knew, the wife knew.
I mean, there was no cheating. Cheating is modern.
Many of our sexual practices today that we think existed forever are totally new inventions. No more than 50 years old, 100 years old, totally new.
And we created a very sick sexual environment.
This goes hand in hand with the rise of narcissism.
What happened is as narcissism exploded as a social phenomenon, not only individual phenomenon, society became narcissistic and developed narcissistic attitudes to sex.
And this leads me to the last point.
Narcissists are very conflicted about sex, like modern society. They're very conflicted about sex.
On the one hand, they want to engage in certain sexual practices. On the other hand, it contradicts, for example, their ideology or their values.
Their sense of grandiosity challenges their grandiosity, and so they feel ashamed or guilty.
There is a lot of dissonance and conflict in the narcissist's soul, even the somatic narcissist.
And of course, narcissists treat other people as objects, commodify, objectify and dehumanize them, which I think is the common practice today in the world.
I don't know if you know the latest statistics, but it seems that 50% of people engage in casual sex and majority of them is the only form of sex.
Casual sex is narcissistic. Nothing wrong with it. I'm not judging it. It's bad, it's good, but it's narcissistic because you don't know anything about the other person.
81% of men interviewed after one night stand remembered only one item of information about the woman they had sex with, her first name, nothing else.
Even if they had a few hours conversation before, they remembered nothing except her name.
20% of casual sex, the people don't know their names. It's totally anonymous.
We have entered a narcissistic society with narcissistic practices, but our mental equipment, emotions, cognitions, is still Victorian.
And this is the...