Courting the maiden

[JustLikeYou]

I had some trouble understanding how courting the ressources of others is not exactly what most STS entities would do by presenting themselves as charming and showing what others desire to see so that they freely give.

Is this past-tense to mean that you no longer have trouble understanding how this can be the case?

If so, cool.

If not, then it may help to think about the difference difference between what you understand courting to be and what Jade understands courting to be as a matter of the intentions and nuances of the person doing the courting, rather than in the most obvious outward actions. Yes, your STS depiction of the suitor presents himself charmingly and generously, but there will be subtle strings attached to his courtship.

In the sense that Jade intends the term, courting means that you spot a person who is beautiful, but whom you don't know very well. Eventually, you decide that you are ready to fall in love with her if she will have you. Then, you give her things you think she will want, whether affection, interest, gifts, praise, or just quality time. Most of all, you give her yourself honestly, without attempting to put on a show. If it turns out that she wants to be the person you fall in love with, then a romance will follow. This is as STO as it gets. Courtship in this sense is merely two people getting to know each other in every increasing intimacy. The involvement of sex is only one piece of the much grander picture.

You can, if you like, choose to interpret the word "court" in the manner you describe, which is more or less what the PUA community has become. Choosing this interpretation, however, will only increase the misunderstanding between you and Jade, because you will be using the same word in two opposite different ways.

And I will happily go out on a limb to proclaim the energy of this archetype to be expressly romantic, provided we understand that there can be a romance without physical sexual intercourse.

I'd say many catalysts can bring one to have to choose, self-realization does a lot and heightened awareness.

Self-realization and heightened awareness are the same phenomenon, but this can only come to you to the degree that you have intentionally explored your own feelings and desires. But how can you know what you really want and how you really feel unless you actually put yourself in situations to find out. One of the key lessons of this archetype is that we can't just will ourselves to be pure. We have to go into experience blindly, not knowing what we will prefer. We expose ourselves to all of our experiences this way: we explore music and movies to determine what we like. As our experience grows, our taste sharpens. This archetype is the end result of that slow process of experiencing and developing a subtlety of taste. What we find in the moment of the Transformation of the Mind, is that we are ready to draw a distinction in our taste for thoughts and feelings. We finally see how much it has cost us in some particular arena to try to be simultaneously loving and self-serving. It is this kind of realization that often brings people to decide to be vegetarians or to stop taking their lovers for granted.

Thus, in the end, the catalyst is of one variety: depth of experience in thought and emotion. We need to know what STO and STs feel like. If we don't, we simply can't choose. And if we try to force ourselves to choose STO, we will fail because it can't be STO if it is forced.