Porn Mind vs Sacred Eros
A Battle at the Heart of Modern Male Sexuality
In the context of The Resonant Man’s ongoing address of masculinity, we’ve been contending with the cataclysmic impact of porn culture on men’s minds and intimacy in culture. Having just completed our Month of Eros, we’re been developing a deepened understanding that ‘The Resonant Man is an Erotic Man’. Which is to say, he understands the erotic to be deeply integrated with the Eros that flows through the whole of his life—they are not separate.
In this piece, Jacob Kishere draws out the opposition between the two poles of this work: ‘Porn Mind’ and ‘Sacred Eros.’ Two polarities which through the core of our lives, our sexuality, our spirituality, our relationships and our experience of reality itself. Porn Mind has been personified here as ‘he’ to emphasise an address of men.
“The problem with pornography is that it sexualizes the mind.”
— Maestro Remi Deluane, Philosopher, Ayahuasca Curandero, Founder of Kumankaya
Porn Mind is a way of being, seeing, and relating that has taken hold because generations of young men have been abandoned to an unbridled programme of hyper-available pornography throughout their early life. Porn Mind is, principally, the porn-conditioned mind, body and sexual system that the majority of men are living in and the majority of women are living with. Porn Mind has taken root in a larger context of a post-war sex-positivist, secular and materialist culture. Having freed oneself from the grip of consuming porn, the scope and depth of restoration and integration required to escape its long-term effects is profound.
Sacred Eros is the way of being, seeing, and relating that arises from a re-sacralization of culture and the sexual. Sacred Eros comes from healing — from a deepening into our primordial masculinity and our relationship with the feminine. Sacred Eros situates the erotic within the broader life force of Eros. It situated Eros within the field of the sacred. Sacred Eros is a compass the Resonant Man offers to men navigating today’s culture.
Porn Mind is lost in fantasy. He’s constantly creating sexual fantasies and then feeding on his own creations. Porn Mind’s state of perpetual fantasy brings him out of the body and out of direct encounter. Like a gluttonous king, Porn Mind’s delusion is that more fantasy will lead to more fulfilment — but he cannot appreciate or live the abundance that is already present. Everything before him progressively lessens in flavour. He strives for some gargantuan pinnacle of fantasy that he cannot reach. Porn Mind is rooted in lack. With each passing click into the backpages of pornhub, he moves further from the flame of his own Eros. Porn Mind’s ultimate delusion is that his pornographic orientation is actually bringing more sexual aliveness into his life.
Sacred Eros lives in the state of potential that is prior to all fantasy—the ground from which both his sexual energy and thought arise. The practice of the man living in Sacred Eros is to keep returning to that ground, to not get lost in fantasies of the mind. In Sacred Eros he is powerfully charged and resourced by the eros of the body in the moment such that getting lost in the mind holds no appeal. He does not need to journey out of the body into fantasy, but lets the mystery of the feminine unfold before him through his grounded presence.
Porn Mind expends and wastes his life force for the short-lived high of a solitary wank. He is left depleted for days afterwards, somehow lacking potency.
Sacred Eros cultivates desire and conserves sexual energy as a valuable life force that imbues all of his experience and encounters. Sacred Eros does not waste seed but conserves and grows it in creative polarity with the feminine. Sacred Eros experiences the sexual as something that charges up his life force, flow, and love.
Porn Mind lives between the brain-penis superhighway which bypasses the wholeness of the body. He is head-centric and shifts between projection and grasping towards the object of desire.
Sacred Eros encounters the world through his heart and his body. His awareness is spread throughout the body. When he walks, he moves and senses from the whole body from the pelvis and balls up to the heart and shoulders.
Porn Mind experiences the balls as little more than receptacles of cum. The sexual organs are incidental appendages, or means of achieving pleasure.
Sacred Eros experiences the balls as anchors of divine consciousness, centers of light, potency, and creative seed containing the hidden potential to transform the world.
Porn Mind seeks out sex to fill the empty heart.
Sacred Eros lets sex flow from the full heart.
Porn Mind’s encounter with the other is one of separation and fantasy-fulfilment. Porn Mind does not experience sex, he projects and enacts his pre-loaded pornographic fantasies upon the body of a woman. Porn Mind is rigid, tensed up disconnected from the tantric body. Porn Mind turns all sex into a replication of porn — only able to find orgasm through hyper-visual stimulus.
Sacred Eros meets the other as a cosmic dance partner with whom the sense of separation can be playfully dissolved. Sacred Eros finds in lovemaking an intuitive exploration and a process of discovery. Sacred Eros holds lovemaking as a domain for giving and receiving without expectation. Sacred Eros cultivates the full potential of his sexuality in both masculine and feminine expressions. Sacred Eros has many kinds of sex.
Porn Mind lives in shame and fragmentation. He leads a double life in which his extensive porn use is neither celebrated nor integrated.
Sacred Eros grows in life force through his self-integration; he dissolves shame and celebrates the sexual as a context for deepening aliveness, sacredness, and play.
Porn Mind views sex as simply a positive force, one which is albeit short-lived, and emotionally un-affective.
Sacred Eros contends with the profound depth, power, and potential negativity in the sexual. It’s magic, emotional and life-bearing potential are held in awareness.
Porn Mind elevates his own uniqueness through possessing the fetishized racial other, reifying the Asian, Latina, or Black woman as the object of pornographic exoticism.
Sacred Eros enacts a primordial eros that connects with the sacred energy of the feminine across all cultural frontiers. Sacred Eros creates the context for healing across cultural and racial boundaries.
Porn Mind is the unwitting subject of parasitic market forces; social media, ‘dating apps,’ and the consumptive logic of capital. His sexuality is implicitly led by a reductionist theory of evolution and mate selection which makes him more vulnerable to this manipulation. His sexuality simply goes along with market forces. For Porn Mind sexuality is simply an expression of drives originating from a theory of evolution.
Sacred Eros lives in sacred world that goes beyond and deeper than the logic of capital. His erotic self-connection is more than a drive, it is his connection with the divine. When Sacred Eros prays he becomes more alive to his erotic life force. When he heals through communion with the divine he lands deeper and deeper into the cosmic depth of his body. With a deeper resourcing, Sacred Eros trades swiping through dating apps to a growing capacity to trust and participate fully in life as it presents to him. The depth of his sexuality creates a locus of resistance to the consumptive logic of capital.
Porn Mind lives in pursuit of a fleeting satisfaction. He needs to get somewhere and is willing to instrumentalize the sexuality of the feminine other to get there.
Sacred Eros finds immense satisfaction in the process itself. Sacred Eros is unattached to outcome and allows the sexual to open in accordance with its own nature. Sacred Eros experiences the sexual fundamentally as a domain of abundant giving.
This essay is part of The Resonant Man’s address of masculinity . The Resonant Man field and weekly container is a valuable space for men stepping into a powerful new way of being.
The essay draws extensively upon my own process work with additional inspiration from
’s Return to Eros which was one our key texts during the Month of Eros.If you are interested in working with on dissolving Porn addiction I am supporting clients in this through my Soul Journey practice. My work in this is entirely informed by my own experience deconstructing and dissolving Porn Mind over many years and gradually igniting the healing flame of Sacred Eros.
—Jacob Kishere