Freedom from Pornography is essential to health and happiness

New post on Health 4 Thinkers

Freedom from pornography is essential to health and happiness by health4thinkers - Kay Stroud

This year Youth Week in NSW announced their partnership with NSW Health for National Youth Week 2015, running from 10-19 April. Their website advises that governments across Australia are committed to improving sexual health outcomes and are making every effort to inform young people how to prevent sexually transmissible infections (STIs). However, the website states that they have stopped short at addressing the cause of the problem.

It is suggested that the proliferation of online pornography is compounding the problems associated with promiscuity. This article reports a surprising advocate for a pornography-free society, while asserting that knowledge of our mental and spiritual nature gives the ability to be an agent for change within ourselves and in the wider community.

Who’d have thought that the clearest voice to raise concerns about the film “Fifty Shades of Grey” would belong to Russell Brand?”

In an honest and heartfelt video Brand said he didn’t like the way he felt about himself after watching pornography. So, instead, he’s trying to blaze a trail in learning how to close the laptop and turn off, what he calls, the “waves of filth.”

“This cloud of pornographic information … is making it impossible for us to relate to our sexuality and our own psychology and our own spirituality,” Brand said. “It’s jarring and distracting… (and) really difficult to remain connected to truth.”

Brand is clued-in to the fact that pornography has stealthily entered the conversation, in the media and on social media, and is proliferating like some socially infectious disease. But like many today, he became “infected” by it when he was young and most impressionable.

He cites the latest research which found watching porn leads to an exaggerated perception of sex in society, diminishes trust between couples, results in abandoning hope of sexual monogamy and promotes the belief that promiscuity is a natural state.

While trying to tackle the harmful effects porn has had in his own life, Brand has become a change-agent for a healthier society. He is joining the groundswell of people tuning into this spiritual millennium.

Each generation gets the opportunity to come to their own conclusions about the place of sexuality in life. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s most young people were caught up to some degree in the ideals of the hippy generation. Some of those ideals have certainly left a positive legacy, but the so-called “sexual revolution” proved to many that sex for sex’s sake was not all it was cracked up to be.

Instead, we eventually discovered we could only find truth and happiness in a relationship that was built on honesty, loyalty, selfless giving and care for our partner’s happiness … all of which I have come to consider to be divine qualities.

We needed to upgrade our thinking to acknowledge our mental and spiritual side, just like Brand advocates.

At the end of the 19^th century - an era that has recently been losing some of its reputation as strait-laced - a shrewd observer of human nature commented on the less overt but similar problems of her day.

“In the present or future, some extra throe of error may conjure up a new-style conjugality, which...severs the marriage covenant, puts virtue in the shambles, and coolly notifies the public of broken vows,” wrote Mary Baker Eddy, adding that this would fly in the face of “...common law, common sense, and common honesty...”

That honesty, the noted thought-leader wrote, “is spiritual power”, because it has its source in the divine Mind.

She also made the connection between such spiritual thinking and how healthy and content we are - doing better when we take a step away from the human reasoning which chooses paths that seem easier or more self-satisfying, to be guided instead by motives like honesty and love.

Like Albert Einstein, she laboured to “know God’s thoughts,” eventually leaving behind a life of sickness and dead-ends as this deeper understanding of divine reality dawned on her.

In my own life, I’ve found her book Science and Health unlocks a life-changing view of men and women as actually being the sons and daughters of God, the divine Mind.

When we’re awake to this spiritual nature of ourselves and others, the need to objectify women or to allow ourselves to be objectified, to seek women as trophies to validate masculinity or to allow ourselves to be used in that way can no longer motivate us. And the temptation to seek out porn will fade away. We won’t spend hours locked away, wasting opportunities to climb a mountain, cook a meal, become a volunteer or laugh with friends.

The truth is that we each have an inherent spiritual strength to enable us to shut that laptop down when we need to.

This article was published on Online Opinion.

health4thinkers | April 10, 2015 at 4:10 pm | Tags: divine qualities, femininity, Fifty Shades of Grey,honesty, infectious, marriage, Mary Baker Eddy, masculinity, monogamy, National Youth Week,NSW Health, pornographic, pornography, promiscuity, psychology, relationships, Russell Brand,sex, sexual health, sexual revolution, sexuality, spiritual power, Spirituality, upgrade thinking, Youth Week NSW | Categories: Christian Science, Health, Health policy, Kay's posts, Lifestyle diseases,Mary Baker Eddy, Mental health, Science and Health | URL: http://wp.me/p4fkgi-13A