Don't think about sex 🍆💘😭

What do you mean don't think about sex? Mara wants us to. What's mind to do? (Teal Roberts)

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The Buddha was very wise.

Thoughts of sensuality (craving for pleasures of the five senses) oppress the person beset by them again and again, becoming an obsession and compulsion. What's worse, getting what one craves does NOT solve the problem: Wanting is still there or soon comes back. Getting was no solution at all. Repeatedly getting in fact leads to addiction, a worse compulsion that sees no way out of the quagmire. (Giggity).

When the goal of the mind-body is just pleasure and more of it, the trap begins to become clear. But what other goal might one set for oneself? Liberation from disappointment and all suffering (dukkha). That goal is nirvana, realized by enlightenment (bodhi). But how?

Good times get giggity.

That is what a Buddha answers, having exposed the problem, he claimed there is a cause (craving accompanied by aversion, both rooted in delusion) to our disappointment/suffering. There's a final solution, too. The fourth ennobling (enlightening) truth is that there is a path, a middle way, to the solution.

That might be a better goal, something else to fixate on and strive for, relaxing into it until the illusion dissolves and ultimate-reality becomes clear. Until then, what's a person to do but take Jerri Blank's advice to herself, "Don't think about sex, don't think about sex, don't think about sex," which will be about as useful as saying, "Don't think about pink elephants."

Did you just think of pink elephants? Didn't we just say not to think of pink elephants. Why do we keep saying "pink elephants," which only makes us think of pink elephants... Don't think about sex. Oops! We just said...

(It doesn't work to try to not think about what you're thinking about; it does work to think about something else and keep thinking that other thing).

• Video short; Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly