Nebuchadnezzar

We are created with a natural drive to procreate. From our earliest years we play a game of chase with the opposite sex, and as we grow older we leave behind the playground and enter into meaningful relationships.

Sex itself is not wrong, nor is it harmful. While it is true sex can be misused and thus lead to various forms of affliction from it by way of disease and psychological problems, sex itself is pleasurable. Within a healthy relationship it has its place as a natural and integral part of love.

It is common for individuals to seek after self-stimulation in the absence of the object of their desire or love. And for this act there are two main camps, that of seeing this self-stimulation as normal and healthy, and that of seeing this self-stimulation as self-abuse.

The mind is designed to be single and whole, without fragmentation of its parts. Conscious thought feeds the memory, and the memory combines with our senses and forms our conscious thought. The coalescing of our thought into a unity of mind is possible and occurs when there is an element of self-control.

The more we feed our memory with conscious thought through sense impressions that are formed in the mind by adapting memories already held within to create new mental formations, the more we add to the fragmentation or multiplicity of the mind.

Not all thoughts or sense impressions are negative, and not all that the mind accepts with or without self-control creates multiplicity.

If we add to our sense impressions and subsequent imaginary forms appearing in the mind as the result of these emotions, the mind then becomes formed according to the union of thought and feeling. The more this union is enacted for a particular action, thought, or event the more the mind is formed to think in such a manner.

The problem with lacking self-control of thought is that the mind, being formed according to this union, begins to dwell in the imagination of conscious thought rather than conscious thought in a pure manner. That is, the memory once enjoying the sense impression, now harmonized in emotion and thought, seeks after the pleasure of the object of desire. This seeking takes place in the imagination as a construct from the memory as a result of the union in question.

And so it is a person lives in a world of fantasy, for the imagination of the mind is naught more than mental images and is not reality itself. It is as far from thoughtful reality as a shadow is from a person. The more an individual lives in the imagination the more we say they are neurotic, and once the imagination has come to take the place of reality, it is psychosis that then must be dealt with.

It is a sign of mental sickness to live in the imagination at the expense of reality, and a sign of imbalance to lack the self-control (or self-determination) to think pure thought as opposed to imaginary.

Self-stimulation falls into this category, for by the act of arousing pleasure through the senses, adding to this the imagination of conscious thought uniting feeling while pulling the source of the union from the memory, a person will in one instance only become temporarily psychotic - simply because reality has been replaced with a mental construct taking the place of reality. If this process is repeated and a habit is formed, the union will dominate the mind and sickness will begin to creep in.

It is my assertion that self-stimulation causes insanity, but not this act only. This unhealthy union of which we are talking manifests itself in many ways, from dreams of winning the lottery, to musing on and nursing past offenses, to addiction and beyond. Even sex itself can lead to this same insanity when it is not enacted in the context of self-control, such as would be had in a relationship or marriage.

It is not expected everyone will agree with this, but all a person has to do is check the hair on palms of their hands to see how true these words are.