That's a, 'not better but different' experience for me. Like choosing my favourite cousin, I can't they're different and loved.

Like your hierarchy.

Love your ethos and totally agree .

@LetzGetReal I agree. Rather self-pleasure than have bad sex.

so true

Yep... but love could be painful... while sex should simply be fun or not at all.

Then again...

@Godot sure you can have them both, in your dreams maybe....

Ah, so it would seem. However, I do still harbor some rather magnificent dreams. Guess I'll just keep dreaming while I search.

Krom!!!

@Redcupcoffee I do have that, at least.

Ah! but which way?

never had Red Lobster anything as yet. Shall I try it?I am a man, dammit. Men always cum. Sometimes CUM, but always at least cum. So cheese biscuits are probably - as I have never tried them, yet - just second best. Next time we meet, remind me to bring some.

Cheddar Biscuits are da bomb!!!!

It is.

I disagree with John Stuart Mill. You need both to be a balanced, healthy human being.

“We do not exist separately from our bodies. Neither do we exist in our brain cells alone, as if the rest of our physical being were a mere appendage to carry us about and gratify our desires. Our body is a dimension of who we are, an integral part of our humanity. To contract our sense of identity into one end of it, the head, is to follow the compartmentalized view of reality that is the legacy of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. That legacy has given us the billiard ball model of existence, in which people and objects are separate packages which bounce off each other without any relational existence. In this view, the body is simply another object. “We” are the light of reason and we live in the splendid isolation of the cortex. The more we retreat like this into a corner of ourselves, the more we live and experience life like a clenched fist.”

Roger Houseden - Soul and Sensuality: Returning the Erotic to Everyday Life.

D. H. Lawrence wrote about this in his novels in the 1930s, which at first blush is about sex. However

“His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, and instinct.”

An excerpt to illustrate my point:

“I wasn’t talking about knowledge…I was talking about the mental life,’ laughed Dukes. ‘Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain and mind. The mind can only analyse and rationalize. Set the mind and the reason to cock it over the rest, and all they can do is to criticize, and make a deadness. I say all they can do. It is vastly important. My God, the world needs criticizing today…criticizing to death. Therefore let’s live the mental life, and glory in our spite, and strip the rotten old show. But, mind you, it’s like this: while you live your life, you are in some way an Organic whole with all life. But once you start the mental life you pluck the apple. You’ve severed the connexion between the apple and the tree: the organic connexion. And if you’ve got nothing in your life but the mental life, then you yourself are a plucked apple…you’ve fallen off the tree. And then it is a logical necessity to be spiteful, just as it’s a natural necessity for a plucked apple to go bad.”

If you can spend all your time devoted to thinking and you don't need any physical touch of some kind, I suppose you can do that, but it will catch up to you at some point.

@Sciencemama

Sure, absolutely. But I will always value the furthering of my mind over the furthering of my body. Everything is mind, because mind makes everything.

I want to point out that your profuse use of such a reference hit diminishing returns on honesty very quickly. It is called parsimony, use it.

However, I question myself when living as a mind will also hit diminishing returns. When my mind refuses to work as I want it, I guess that will be a symptom.

Now, tell me where my logic was wrong?

I agree with @sciencemama, and I didn't get past "I disagree with John Stuart Mill..."

Just kidding, about the "I didn't get past..." I went back and read her remarks. Quite eloquent.

@DZhukovin I didn't say your logic was wrong. I am saying you can do what you want. I said I disagree John Stuart Mill's with the pleasures of the mind being superior to that of the body.

By the way, John Stuart Mill was precocious and had extensively studied but that didn't seem to stop him from falling into a severe depression by the time he was 20.

"...Mill’s experience with severe depression during the years 1826–27. He remarks that he seemed to have nothing left to live for, that pleasures are insufficient to make life desirable, and that he frequently asked himself if he could, or if he was bound to go on living."

He kind of is the prime example of what I am talking about. It's wonderful to use our minds, but not to exhaust ourselves doing so. One reference said he seemed to be helped by Wordsworth's poetry. Idk.

I spent a long time in an analytical field (molecular biology, microbiology and some chemistry) in my formal education. I am also an autodidact and spent time learning different schools of pyschology, philosophy, and Eastern spirituality.

I also noticed a great deal of disconnection between human beings, as well as self-alienation. It is almost inevitable that if you don't become grounded in your physical senses, that you will lose a lot of joy that is to be had. I don't mean sex necessarily.

There was a small book about "how to be an intellectual" which happened to be written by a Catholic priest. I didn't choose it because of that, but because he talked about how in order to keep well-balanced, you needed to not forget what your body needed as well. No longer did you have to lock yourself up in a room of books and starve yourself.

I understand the feeling of intellectual pleasure. And I know it can be overdone. And I know that balance is key and I feel that we aren't meant to deprive ourselves of the pleasure of the body.

The person that only thinks and never feels is dry and brittle indeed.

You can have that if you want it. I don't. Spending countless hours in study was great, until it wasn't anymore. I like attending to my body's needs too.

@DZhukovin
Do you really want to “exacerbate” these effects Einstein??