the following is a passage from “Soul Mates - Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship“ by Thomas Moore, author of “Care of the Soul“. (yup, doing a little self-help 🙂 ) I just started it today but so far, it’s an incredible book. while he doesn’t directly reference tickling, I can’t help but think he would approve.
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There is often something playful about erotic experience. Invitations into deeper soulfulness often come to us in light, almost insignificant forms. This is an insight worth pondering: we are led profoundly into our soulfulness through the playful turns of life, and not necessarily or only in weighty matters. Heraclitus says, “Time is a child moving counters in a board game.” How different this is from the fantasy that life is governed by a stern, weighty old man! In fact, Eros is usually pictured as an unruly adolescent, a young man wildly dashing from place to place, or as a child, always unpredictable and uncivilized.
In an essay on fairy tales Jung mentions the “pathfinding ball” that, serving as a magical talisman, sets the soul in motion. Joseph Campbell commented often on the tale of the Frog Prince, which begins with a little girl losing a ball that bounces into a pond. Campbell sees this slight occurrence as an example of a mythic “call to adventure.” “The adventure may begin,” he writes, “as a mere blunder, as did that of the princess of the fairy tale; or still again, one may be only casually strolling, when some passing phenomenon catches the wandering eye and lures on away from the frequented paths.” Again one finds seduction an important theme in the soul’s progress.
To live an erotic life is to follow the bouncing ball, to allow oneself to be distracted and enticed by something playful and childlike, or, to be more precise, by life itself in its playful mode. Our habitual seriousness can prevent us from seeing, and certainly appreciating, the erotic lures that come our way every day. Our medically minded seriousness about sex can also prevent us from glimpsing the cure of our sexual maladies and opportunities for expanding our sexuality. We may take it all too seriously, with too much adult knowledge and sophistication. Sex can sometimes be and invitation to the soul to come out and play.
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There is often something playful about erotic experience. Invitations into deeper soulfulness often come to us in light, almost insignificant forms. This is an insight worth pondering: we are led profoundly into our soulfulness through the playful turns of life, and not necessarily or only in weighty matters. Heraclitus says, “Time is a child moving counters in a board game.” How different this is from the fantasy that life is governed by a stern, weighty old man! In fact, Eros is usually pictured as an unruly adolescent, a young man wildly dashing from place to place, or as a child, always unpredictable and uncivilized.
In an essay on fairy tales Jung mentions the “pathfinding ball” that, serving as a magical talisman, sets the soul in motion. Joseph Campbell commented often on the tale of the Frog Prince, which begins with a little girl losing a ball that bounces into a pond. Campbell sees this slight occurrence as an example of a mythic “call to adventure.” “The adventure may begin,” he writes, “as a mere blunder, as did that of the princess of the fairy tale; or still again, one may be only casually strolling, when some passing phenomenon catches the wandering eye and lures on away from the frequented paths.” Again one finds seduction an important theme in the soul’s progress.
To live an erotic life is to follow the bouncing ball, to allow oneself to be distracted and enticed by something playful and childlike, or, to be more precise, by life itself in its playful mode. Our habitual seriousness can prevent us from seeing, and certainly appreciating, the erotic lures that come our way every day. Our medically minded seriousness about sex can also prevent us from glimpsing the cure of our sexual maladies and opportunities for expanding our sexuality. We may take it all too seriously, with too much adult knowledge and sophistication. Sex can sometimes be and invitation to the soul to come out and play.
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