Identity and addiction

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.