In moments in life, I’ll come to the awareness that an erotically charged engagement from my past or a fantasy about the future is alive in my mind space and simultaneously notice an accompanying arousal in my physical body. And it makes me wonder—did the fantasy emerge first or the physicality of the arousal?

The order of noticing for me has always been memory first followed by the physical arousal. In fact, it’s the felt sensation change in my physical body from arousal, that breaks me out of the mental fantasy space.

This contrasts with my intellectual understanding of the human bodily experience influenced, heavily, by my explorations of Buddhism. Where bodily sensations triggered by a shift in the energetic environs precede mental thoughts.

If I were to look back upon moments where I’ve found sexual fantasies alive in my mind, I’d say there’s a quality of drifting into these fantasies after hopping around from thought to another thought in my mental space. The preceding thoughts are often sexually innocuous and then suddenly there’s an erotic shift and I find myself in erotic fantasy land. Note here that the usage of the word “innocuous” is a hat tip to the normie association of “harmless” with “non–sexual” and is not a position I fully endorse or align with.

I characterize this mental space of being with trauma–induced dissociation–a drifting away of my conscious awareness from the fullness of my physical body followed by its concentration in my brain space. When my consciousness is fully soaked into my physical body, I’m aware of gentle, slight vibrational patterns at the surface of my skin. My breath feels expansive & my awareness extends to the environs around me. When my consciousness is concentrated in my brain space, I feel “focussed” and “narrow” and can be surprised by sudden shifts in my environment because I “wasn’t paying attention”.

I love the verb “soak” in the context of describing the relationship of my consciousness and my body; introduced to it by a beginner meditation guided by Damo Mitchell of Lotus Nei Gong. I find him to be quite legit as far as spiritual teachers are concerned. As I write this, I notice again the familiar mental drifting from thought to thought. A therapist of a religiously scientific Western orientation might diagnose such tendencies to drift under some permutation of the letters A, D, H, D–an attempt to induce more “controlled“, “focussed” consciousness suitable for high productivity in the rat race. I’ve come to believe the root cause of such a diagnosis is unaddressed trauma.

This drifting from thought to thought is often my experience when I write in my journal. Thoughts to thoughts to thoughts till empty. If I were more ignorant than I am, I might confuse this emptiness with the emptiness or shunyatā of Buddhism, rejoice in having accomplished a great spiritual milestone & then seek validation of the same via a published tweet-storm instructing the lesser evolved on how to achieve shunyatā. Thankfully, I’m less ignorant, so I seek validation by employing cutting humor at older versions of my self.

I enjoy the slicing quality of sharp humor. I find that it brings forth an element of surprise which is quite enlivening. I experience it as complete silence and stillness followed by a sharp knife slicing through a supple piece of meat that is the build up of tension prior to the delivery of the punch line.

It happened again as I was waiting for more words to emerge. I was reminded of a recent moment when a pretty woman appreciated (or at the very least, acknowledged) my sharp humor. I found myself jumping from that memory into future fantasy land with her, noticed my own physical arousal & then came into awareness of the broader inquiry of what came first. As I did so, my consciousness expanded from being concentrated in the front of my brain into the fullness of my body, my physical arousal dissipated & this stream of words flowed out. Lends some credence to the link between sexual energy and creative energy, eh?

If my sex organs are not within the scope of my conscious awareness at the moment I’m with a sexual fantasy, how would I know if the thought occurred first or the physical sensation?

Is it possible to live a life free of periodic dissociation? To be always fully soaked in the entirety of the physical body? Is that even desirable when the dissociative floating around, hopping from thought to thought, feels so familiarly relaxing?

Does the question of “what comes first?” unconsciously assume the paradigm of causality–i.e. given two time adjacent phenomenon, the one that precedes is the cause of the other–an assumption that is deeply encoded in most theories of Physics–as contrasted say with the notion of “codependent arising”–i.e. two time adjacent phenomenon can arise co-dependently, neither being the cause of the other–a notion encountered in Buddhist metaphysics?

This is a present inquiry.