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“MAGIC MOMENTS” : Magic moments, when two hearts are carin’ // Magic moments, mem’ries we’ve been sharing … Time can’t erase the memory of // These magic moments filled with love … Magic moments filled with love  [Songwriters: Burt Bacharach / Hal David.  “Magic Moments” lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC]

“There’s a magic and mystery in positive events.”  –Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, psychologist

The term magic has a variety of meanings, hence there is no widely agreed upon definition of what it is or how it can be used.  However, some treat magic as a personal phenomenon intended to meet individual needs, as opposed to a social phenomenon serving a collective purpose.  The explanatory power of magic should not be underestimated, however.  Both in the past and in the modern world, magical belief systems can provide explanations for otherwise difficult or impossible to understand phenomena while providing a spiritual and metaphysical grounding for the individual.  [See “Magic” in Wikipedia.]

“It’s a mystery!”  –Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love

“…moments of epiphany, or revelation, of radiance…with meaning essentially wordless, for words are always qualifications and limitations.”  –Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“Persons who come for therapy do so because they lack power; they complain that they cannot achieve.  …  Patients want ‘magical knowledge,’ and no matter how correctly the therapist explains that insight is not magic, it still feels that way to the person when an insight ‘dawns.’”  –Rollo May, “Faust in the Twentieth Century” in The Cry for Myth (1991).

“There is no myth which is not the unveiling of a ‘mystery,’ the revelation of a primordial event which inaugurated either a constituent structure of reality or a kind of human behavior.  [But] when no longer assumed to be a revelation of the ‘mysteries,’ the myth becomes ‘decadent,’ obscured; it turns into a tale or a legend.”  –Mircea Eliade, “Preface” in Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (1957)

“MEMORY”:  Midnight // Not a sound from the pavement // Has the moon lost her memory // She is smiling alone // In the lamplight…  Memory // All alone in the moonlight // …I remember the time I knew what happiness was // Let the memory live again // … Tonight will be a memory too // And a new day will begin // …  –Andrew Lloyd Webber, T. S. Eliot, Trevor Nunn, Zdenek Hruby • © Universal Music Publishing Group, Imagem Music Inc.

interrobang  MagicalMysteryTourDoubleEPcover.jpgMagical Mystery Tour

 

“BEAUTY IS ONLY SKIN . . . .”

From Sexual Expression: A Manual for Trainers, 1981.

SEXUALITY: feelings of warmth, closeness, comfort, touching, security, support, love, affection, mutuality.

SEX: pertaining to genital behavior and reproduction, which may/may not include feelings of sexuality

EROTICA: about sexuality, including love, sensuality, touching, warmth, acceptance AND IS CONSENTING/CONSENSUAL; can be passionate, a yearning for a particular person and closeness. It is a POSITIVE CHOICE and FREE WILL.

Photographs, paintings, sculpture, films, literature, music, food, dance, drawings, or any other art forms that stimulate sexually or that one finds pleasurable for erotic feelings are considered erotica.

PORNOGRAPHY: about POWER, including force, coercion, torture, bondage, wounding, hurting, bruising, or humiliation. Such material shows pain equals pleasure, that we are conqueror or victim, that pleasurable sex is only obtained through some degree of sadism or masochism. Such materials place people in a position of feeling diminished and enraged, usually materials of vulnerability and dominance and LOVE IS NOT PORTRAYED, but rather violence against women, children, and people who are defense less or different.

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SEX = lust, libido (a need)
EROS = the drive of love to procreate or create; the urge towards higher forms or being and relationship (a desire)
PHILIA = friendship, brotherly love
AGAPE/CARITAS = love devoted to the welfare of the other, benevolence [Rollo May, Love and Will, 1969]

“May perceived the sexual mores of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as commercialization of sex and pornography, as having influenced society such that people believed that love and sex are no longer associated directly. According to May, emotion has become separated from reason, making it acceptable socially to seek sexual relationships and avoid the natural drive to relate to another person and create new life. May believed that sexual freedom can cause modern society to neglect more important psychological developments. May suggests that the only way to remedy the cynical ideas that characterize our times is to rediscover the importance of caring for another, which May describes as the opposite of apathy.

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Eros is the child of Ares and Aphrodite [Mars and Venus]
Eros is in conflict with Thanatos (death instinct).
The moment of greatest significance in LOVEMAKING is not the orgasm but rather the moment of UNION, the realization of transcendence of the self, the loss of self with another.

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