Intellectual Masturbation

This metaphor:
Of "intellectual masturbation."
As an insult...?

I’d like to work through this metaphor, in a sort of intellectual masturbatory exercise in itself. However, my intent here is not to jerk my brain off to some sort of epiphanic jism, but instead to revel in a more Daoist circulation of intellectual, libidinal energies; A meditative “edging,” a love-making with the holographic delineations of my own consciousness that has not conclusion, decision and execution as its goal, but rather the pleasure of ruminating as alone reason enough for beginning.

Here the ‘conclusion’ is the process of the rub and tug of mental play, ‘decision’ the diversity of pause and periodic punctuation across and in between sentences, and ‘execution’ the beginning of this rumination that has no end. Indeed, on some level, intellectual auto-eroticism (sometimes with a friend or few) without the dogmatic certainties of ego-orgasm (we know well the violent excesses of fanaticism and fundamentalism), may well be the very ‘yes!’ of life. To engage in wistful brain-play, to be constantly challenged, to always have our preconceptions de-stabilised (yet that we are relaxed), to always be stimulated by the fresh (without undergirding our fidelity to our previous lovers), to be tired but not drained, calm and yet enlivened.