Fundamentally, tumescence is an internal, unmet desire to discharge energy. Tumescence will occur reactively or passively if unharnessed by attention, or beneficially if properly transformed and controlled by allowing it to be subsumed into the Erotic mind. Tumescence with passive attention self-perpetuates.
Trauma perpetuates trauma when held in passive attention. This disengaged attention only sustains harm, as the tumescence builds in the background. On the other hand, with active attention, we can meet and match trauma or tumesced energy, holding it to keep it from its habitual patterning.
With active attention, we begin to dissolve it—we can let it run so dissolution occurs, rather than allowing it to perpetuate itself. We are dissolving tumescence into consciousness by learning to meet whatever level of sensation arises. We are learning to maneuver our attention so it can meet reality however it presents, and so our attention becomes engaged and fluent.
The Erotic path offers another option—to meet trauma or tumescence with our liberated attention. Liberating attention sees any energy as valuable energy that can always be converted and harnessed, regardless of content. This process creates concentration of our active attention faculty, which eventually becomes the kind of attention that is capable of engaging with anything, no matter what the conditions are.
Liberated attention is charged to convert tumescence, so wherever tumescence exists, the attention will go there to detumesce. Liberated attention is not personal. We have moved our center of gravity from personal preference to the recognition that converting tumescence is the only thing that brings flow. We are surrendering to our indwelling, daimonic spirit—the deeper self that wants us to fully embody who we are. It is our intuitive self, rather than our rational self, that is determining how the energy should be used.
The attention therefore goes to work on any blockage. Even when the blockage is inside us—such as part of our identity or perhaps a romance that is “holding us together”—it will dissolve and destroy any artificial collections of energy.
As we increase the energy and equally develop the attention to hold it, eventually, all stuck energies will burn off and release. It will organically move from a system that self-perpetuates blockages into one that self-perpetuates dynamic flow. This is the most elegant solution: liberated attention will take all our congested material—grief, anger, irritability, frustration—and convert it into growth.
Through this process, we access the self beyond identity, which occurs as a mystical experience. Thus, our pain becomes the source of fuel for our growth in the conversion of tumescence.