That observation speaks volumes, if you let it.
Now, to be careful with language, I used the word, "sense", not the word, "idea" or the word, "concept" -- each being further from the essence than the preceding.
I used the word, "sense". That's a feeling thing. By feeling, I don't necessarily mean, "emotion". Emotion is one kind of feeling. "Gut feeling" (to use a common term), is another. There's also musical feeling and a more general aesthetic feeling. There's intuition. There's the feeling of integrity and that's the feeling of wholesomeness. It's a kind of balanced self-content.
I use the word, "wholesome".
"Wholesome" is an old-fashioned word: "whole"-"some".
When someone is whole, they don't need anything more.
Apart from the interesting connection between, "whole" (which implies completeness) and "some" (which implies partiality), the word is out of use (or in disuse) at the same time as "not needing anything more" is a rarity.
The world is crazed with needing more -- and unfortunately the ones who emotionally need the most -- the very wealthy -- cause the unfortunate ones at the bottom of the economic heap really to need more. The great sucking sound at the top creates a wealth vacuum around the ones at the bottom.
Back to the genders' lack of a wholesome sense of each other.
Wholesomeness makes going deeply safe. Unwholesomeness is unsafe.
This "crazed with needing more", the opposite of wholesomeness, is disturbing on an ongoing basis. It's disturbing to oneself and it's disturbing to others. It is a state of relative insanity or at least an epidemic of stress that has a smell and an atmosphere all its own.
However, instead of cleaning up their unwholesomeness, and its stink, unwholesome people seek to cover over their inner stink with pleasing smells, pleasing sights and sounds and objects and the endorphins (brain soothing chemicals) of triumph or buying things or Prozac. They engage in unwholesome behavior to escape their unwholesomeness by seeking experiences -- such as a SuperBowl win, or a war, or a new lover, or high office, or lots and lots of orgasms, or wanting a different partner, or just, stuff.
It's a futile effort. The fruit of unwholesome behavior is entrenched unwholesomeness and so they need more and more to cover up the growing stink of their own unwholesome inner state. Such is one origin of greed ( in its out-of-balance form ). It's a sorry state, a pathetic state, if it weren't so tragic and so common.
And this pile-up of insanity affects both males and females and shows up as as the average male and female character. Nice on the surface, but scratch a little deeper.
An unwholesome approach to life mis-represents (fails to represent) a wholesome male or female nature. Unwholesomeness gets taken as, and is championed as, normal. There are so few examples of wholesome individuals. It's even socially correct to behave in unwholesome ways. Wholesomeness has largely gone by the wayside. It's insane, it's nuts, it's sick. Unwholesome individuals consider themselves to be wholesome. They can't help it. They don't know better.
The problem between the genders, where it exists as a common social "flavor", has much to do with the results of an unwholesome state of life, as I have described. They can't really perceive each others' depths. That's why the sexes aren't often very attractive to each other -- whichever the sexes, by the way -- or why their attraction is superficial and short-lived.
That brings us to, "depth".
I wonder at the depth of love commonly experienced, by people. Have many people got any idea of the psychic depth to which love can reach, penetrate, and permeate? or is "love" largely a social agreement to make available certain kinds of gratification?
As the song goes:
... in a restless world like this is
love is ended before it's begun
love is ended before it's begun
and so often midnight kisses
seem to cool in the warmth of the sun.
Those who have not known depth cannot know what I mean by the word. Those who do know depth recognize what happens to depth when integrity breaks down in a relationship.
Those of us who have sacrificed our integrity for the sake of acquiring someone or something actually did so in the hope of experiencing greater depth as a result. When we did that, the one who would have experienced those things in their wholesome form ( our wholesome self ) is no longer wholesome. There's a fly in the ointment.
Those of us, of unwholesome inner stink, who seek an alternative to our inner stink in the fragrance of another, can never plumb their depths without also plumbing our own depths.
That's the price.
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