How can you help having an imagination so big it has to imagine everything it can, and everything it can is a lot when you wouldn't think to imagine it in the first place, but it bubbles up anyway because it is beyond thinking (and your imagination is beyond denying). It is making connections because connections can be made, given you've a galaxy sized matrix of experience events you only ever have partial, conscious recollection of.
So, just as some connections come un abetted, some also resonate as a fantasy, whether you willed it to be so, or not. And so we must confront the acknowledgement of, as well as understanding of, what fantasies are, and what they are not.
Fantasies are a part of us that do not necessarily define us. Just as so many base instincts are a part of us, but do not necessarily define us. We are animals, and we are more than animals. We aspire to the "being more than animals" part because we must, not only for our own evolution, but for the sake of holding both meaning space, and physical space together.
From my perspective, like it or not, there is a certain symmetry involved in the notion that, as a reality goes on from initial big bang, to the farthest possible reaches of galaxy formation, and the sub solar systems within them, there is a significant likelihood that it will all go cold, and undifferentiated, eventually. Unless, of course, something else happens to counteract it.
And it seems to me to be only a natural conclusion to say that it is the meaning processors in each reality that make the difference; or at least that they are there for the possibility of making a difference. If they can succeed in aspiring to be both animal, and something better as well; if they can go forth from the source, seeking to understand both themselves, and everything around them, creating expression. More meaning. More reason, and more emotion, for more meaning still, and the inevitable, loving structure that can grow from such a combinations; giving them better connection to themselves, and what is of, and about them. Perhaps then we can make a meaning space, physical space, fusion that will make even relativistic mass, across multiple realities, look puny.
The thing is here, I can't help but feel that our reality, as well as the entirety, needs to be experienced, appreciated, modeled, and lived within. Just as potential cannot help but need to find realization. And if you have infinite potential, that need would be great indeed. Meaning, and the activity that derives from meaning based choice, is fundamentally different than activity that simply progresses as the inevitable consequence of interactive laws, working their way inexorably through the great branchings of probability, from the initial singularity on. In those choices, and in that different kind of event type, the structures thus created, in many more ways than we originally thought, is demonstrated the whole being greater than the usual sum of the parts. At least this is what we must have faith in for that is really what it is going to boil down to, because this has, necessarily, become both philosophical, and spiritual.
I am not sure of all of the spiritual part yet, though I can tell you I feel it very deeply. I am convinced, personally, that it does not involve deities; at least if one thinks of deities as fully sentient entities of some much greater type. If one thinks of deities as divine process then we're really just coming at this from different sets of nomenclature. I might call it the entirety, but if you want to call it God, that is just fine by me.
To get back to fantasies, however (and I apologize for being so easily distracted), my point is this: fantasies can be crazy good. Crazy bad. And just crazy. That they might pop up is not the big deal. What you do with them, though, is. Like some of the other base instincts, they need to be labeled clearly. Acknowledged as already stated. Put in a special room in your mind, also clearly labeled, and then tended to by semi-regular visits to give them their due, as part of you, but only inside that special room. They get the "run" they need, you deal one more time with their existence, but not their dominance. They live in that room because they are part of you, but nowhere else. Because everything has to have limits, and that is where theirs must lay.
I have been thinking about this because, being alone in intimate terms, I rely on porn to help me have my semi-regular personal moment. And there is, in this, a not so surprising Liberal guilt. Is there a fundamental moral issue being avoided if one uses porn, and doesn't at least acknowledge woman are a good deal more than their breasts and genitals? Undoubtedly so, and there will always be this tension as long as human beings are both animal, and the aspiration to be something more than that.
For my part I can only say that treating the person has always been about doing so as I would hope to be treated. And, as I learned empathy from an early age in helping in the care of my younger brother, as well as in the luck I had in having two wonderful sisters, it has always been easy for me to imagine what it would be like to be treated as female sex fantasy. Just as easily determined that I know I'd not like it very much. So I have a very clear rule. The fantasies I have have nothing, what so ever, to do with real woman. Hell, my physical attributes in these have little to do a real me either. It's just something, usually what we perceive to be very naughty, with all sorts of aspects of the experience taken way beyond ordinary reality. And if it helps an old man, or anybody else, stay right with an animal that never ages in spirit, as we well as with the rest of the world, then I think it is a reasonable trade off.
One thing, though, that I think it is important to emphasize in this: anything you see depicting people having sex, no matter how it was recorded, no matter if the people originally involved were aware of being recorded or not, once it is put out as video, it is no longer real. It is a fantasy pure and simple, and should be treated as such.
This bears repeating, depicted sex is not real sex.
No matter what its source was. In that depiction, and your inherent disconnect from it, looking in from the outside, as it were, you are a spectator making your own use of a very abstracted encounter; which your disconnect makes quite clear, and obvious. You cannot, therefore, draw any automatic conclusions that any of the behaviors are, in any way, desirable, wanted, authorized, or something one has any right to expect. Real sex is only what, whatever number, and whatever combination, of adults have discussed, and agreed to, with no coercion either implied, or implicit, involved. And whether it's just for-fun sex, or sex between folks who have developed a caring, more committed, relationship, the rule... The absolute rule... is common consent, and continual respect for boundaries, because they must always be there, whether they are in the foreground, or the background. And no matter how you start, once you hear the word "NO," you must accept the new boundary that has just come up, and you must respect that new boundary. If you do not then you have put the animal back in control, and the part that would aspire to be better than that into a shredder. From that point on you should not be surprised if you are then treated like an animal, whether, in any ultimate sense, you deserve it, or not.
The bottom line here?
We can imagine a lot. Wonderfully so, and unfortunately so. That is both our curse, and our blessing. Just as is the need to keep asking questions is both a curse, and a blessing. Some of it might actually be capable of touching, in some small manner of speaking, the divine. And some of it may be nothing more than the animal rattling his cage. Both are part of us and both have their place. And as it is with a lot of what makes the entirety tick, it comes down to boundaries. About how we need to both look past them, even as we keep them in mind, for the right occasion.
