The Latin root of the word decision itself means “to cut off from alternatives”. So built into the very nature of the way we think about making decisions is a form of aggression against what
is, and against possibilities other than what you think you want. Our spiritual seeking itself seems built on the premise that we are somehow unique from the Truth, as if somehow we have become separate from God.
When I contemplate nonduality it leads me to wonder whether anything is really fundamentally distinct from the Tao (as well as whether anything is fundamentally united with the Tao but that’s another story). Perhaps it’s arguable that some behaviors are typically not a common expression of an individual’s harmony with the Tao. For example, my struggle with quitting smoking. But perhaps this only appears to be a struggle at odds with the Tao when, ie: the aggregates of my mental phenomena are dancing in such a way so as to occlude the perception of fundamental unity and nonduality, etc.
I think it will improve my health, well-being and spirituality to quit smoking now. Waiting for complete harmony with the Tao before I begin may take more than this lifetime and will continue to lessen the quality of this one. I hope through tools like hypnosis and spiritual practice I can bring the parts of myself into harmony with this decision after the fact.
My spiritual life over the past decade has been an ebb and flow back and forth from more overtly “magickal” practices to the more “mystical” and I think the ideal is to find a balance that is personal. But especially without the direct influence of a teacher it’s hard to know when I am working a different angle because I am just bored and lazy or wether my Self is naturally striving for a needed equilibrium.
I think the identification
I-am-my-body occludes awareness of Original Self, Enlightenment, whatever you want to call it. Really anything that is appended to
I-AM is probably a description of an identity-addiction. But the
I-am-my-body identification is very powerful IMO because it’s built into our language; the way we typically talk to ourselves in our heads and the way others nearly always speak with us. It’s also built into nearly all of the
memes of society. It’s so strong, often the mere thought that it might not be true is ludicrous and horrifying. So fear is added to the identification cycle. Clinging to anything that strengthens the identification becomes more desperate. Thoughts, feelings and behaviors that feed this
I-am-my-body identification build momentum. Some patterns of clinging become so dense and out of control we call them
addictions.
IMO, one of the most powerful ways to strengthen identification with body-as-what-I-am is to unmindfully engage in sensual acts. This is why I don’t believe that it’s as simple as just retain your Jing and you’re fine.
Now, before you start yelling at me and say I’m moralizing, let me clarify. Because by sensual I don’t mean pleasurable. I mean anything involving the ordinary senses. Mysticism takes a bad turn IMO when it confuses pleasure and sensation. They are not the same because pain is a sensation just as much as pleasure. It’s not as simple as “just avoid the fun stuff”. You can just as easily get addicted to pain, dullness, numbness, etc. as to pleasure.
So you have masochist Buddhist celibates with giant hemmoroids from too much sitting and marks on their bodies from being beaten awake during 6 hour Zazen sessions. And I don’t think I have to go into how nutso Christians can be about their love of pain. Even their best mystics.
But I think us Taoist perverts make the opposite mistake just as much. Thinking that sexual-cultivation practices are a license to seek as much pleasure as possible. I don’t think is the original enlightened intention of the practices.
I think the intention was to teach you how to indiscriminately say “yes” to all sensation and thus come to realize the true nature of sensation as being inherently empty despite the values we temporarily attach. This is perhaps the scariest, most disorienting thing about sensation; that it’s just amoral feedback that has no value except for what we attach to it and how we react to it.
But can you really overcome an addiction that is blinding you to The Truth if you are still participating in it?
For example, can you overcome the addiction to smoking but still smoke every day? Chemical addictions alter the structure of your brain chemistry. If you are still smoking every day, how do you know you have overcome the addiction until you
test yourself through a period of
abstinence? Otherwise you’re probably just rationalizing. Modern addiction theory even goes so far as to say it’s nearly
impossible to overcome powerful drug addictions without abstinence and
the help of others because of the rationalization factor in a chemically altered brain. It’s like trying to fix a broken tool with the broken tool itself.
Sex is arguably a drug as powerful as any. How do you transcend an addiction to sex if you are still participating in it?
This is one of the virtues of the right-hand path; it is practical and direct. Quit your body-identification strengthening addictions, your drugs and your sex, and deal with shit head-on.
But I am on a left-hand path. A path that includes sex. And I’m happy with that. But regardless of my present situation, I feel it’s important to incorporate practices that “relinquish grasping and aversion”. And I find that the practices that actually end up helping me the most are in this vain, ie: emptiness meditation. Because true there is only Now, but someday that Now may involve an experience of being brittle and elderly and blind and with a shriveled penis barely able to piss in a pot. And it would be nice if that were experienced more or less as just another phase of this strange journey and not the bitter ruin of my entire cultivation routine.
