Let’s get Enlightened, Shall We?

Ingram says, several times, something to the effect of “May all beings become free in this life.” Maehle says something, about belief, that sounds like, “There is no faith; the believer KNOWS. There is no trust that needs to be involved.”

Do we actually BELIEVE in this Enlightenment about which there is so, so, so much verbiage? Yoga is a science, right? It leads to enlightenment by stilling the mind and raising the kundalini and so forth, right? But are we just SAYING THIS because it’s “yoga-ese” and it’s proper class lingo for the sendoff before we see those students next week?

What would it be to REALLY MEAN IT?

“Well you’d take a full course of all eight limbs.” Ok, sure. But what levels, what do we emphasize? Cleanliness and non-violence? Pranayama? How, what, is there a freakin’ BOOK we can get on this? My new theory: one is the book. Or at least one is the set of pages on which the book is written. EXPERIENCE MATTERS. The question need not be: “WHAT does one do to get enlightened” but needs be: “What can ONE do to get enlightened?” Bodyminds have history (and if we buy the whole nine yards, they have long, ancient karmic histories). This means that while the formula for enlightenment (which depending on who and what you read is something like “still the mind” and/or “give the ego to God”) is consistent, the PRACTICE of that formula is going to vary from karmic load to karmic load (and that seems sensible, no?).

Yes, I’m noting here that that does NOT mean running hither and yon from practice to practice. What I mean (and Satchidananda’s Sutras commentary hits this well) is that someone given to violence is going to get a lot more KEY practice out of ahimsa than someone who is working out concentration (dharana) or someone who is experiencing the lesser samadhi on a regular basis. Karmic loads VARY and this needs to be integrated into one’s practice, as a guide to figuring out what is most productive and what is most challenging in an eight-limbs practice.

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That said, I want to dip back into the usual (quick! cover your eyes! hide the children!) and set some strategies for what yesterday I called an “open war of enlightenment”.

1. There is obvious and long-running suffering from this relationship frustration situation.
2. How does that actually work? What can be known about it?
3. How can this be “stilled” or “surrendered”? What would that be?
4. What strategies and goals can be set, concretely, from this knowledge and this vision?

I think that this quartet would be useful to ANYONE who is handling some kind of suffering: WHAT is it, HOW does it work, HOW can it be made still, and WHAT strategies result from the difference between those two.

Let us proceed.

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As is tiresomely obvious to my regular readership, the current suffering comes from lack of virtually any intimacy in my major relationship. This doesn’t bother me (much) when it goes on for a busy week or even a busy month (hi, November, April). But when it goes on for twenty-two months, it becomes problematic. So this is the current situation in (1).

(2). This is much more interesting and complicated and, eventually, I think, productive. I’ve basically done all the footwork here in earlier posts, but here’s the digest form:

My ego (that is, my sense of myself, my “I”, the individual that I think I am) seems to have what I’ve elsewhere called a “computer virus” which sets my sexual identity as “unsatisfied” by default. I’m pretty sure that this comes, historically, from long deprivation in adolescence and from too much thinking about it (i.e., what Maehle refers to as “meditating on our suffering” in his Sutras commentary). But in more metaphysical terms, it’s clearly a samskara, it’s clearly a blooming seed from the ancient past.

To be unsatisfied-as-identity means that there is what Christians call a “God hole” in this ego’s own selfhood, or an unsatisfiable need, which the Marxists analyze as “commodity fetishism” in capitalist cultures. One always needs, and one never can be satisfied, and least of all by the very experience which this “need” seems to demand.

This is worth pulling out in some detail, because it’s important: for a self which is DEFINED as unsatisfied, there can NEVER be satisfaction. That self might think it craves satisfaction, but in reality, the “lack” of satisfaction is STRUCTURAL. That self is, structurally, COMPLETE BY MEANS OF ITS OWN LACK. It’s as if 80 percent of the thing is 100 percent of the thing. Yes, this makes no sense, I know that.

Put another way, the fullness of this self is to lack. Lack is not the absence of something, but is, itself, a presence. But I understand my lack as the need for “more,” when actually, no matter how much “more” I get, I never answer the lack, and that’s because this lack CANNOT BE ANSWERED, because it only THINKS that it can be filled in. In reality, it cannot.

This only-apparent-desire is NOT HUMAN. My what-you-might-call “biological” desire for intimacy/sexual contact is not linked to this, but sort of overlays it, and moves in the regular somewhat unpredictable cyclical ways in which human desire moves. But this “computer virus” is ever-steady, like something mechanical that never runs out of oil. I’ve also, before, called it a “techno beat.” Onward and onward it goes.

The result of living with this sort of built-in ego-lack is that “I” always need something outside me, in order to “be complete,” which of course never happens, for two reasons:
1) The lack is structural, and thus can never be satisfied by anything and
2) Actual reality doesn’t work like that anyway. Remember that things are “temporary, unsatisfying and not you”?

So in a way, this unceasing techno club in my ego is actually a gift, because it reminds me of how reality works anyway. What goes WRONG with it is that I believe that the lack both NEEDS to be addressed and further that it ever CAN BE.

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So the suffering takes this form: “Ow, ow, I need thing X and I can’t have it, ow, ow, make it stop.”

What can be done to make this be still?

1. Still the need for thing X (defer, look away, or make it unimportant).

No, no, wait, why isn’t “GET A LOT OF THING X” an answer?

That’s not an answer because, to put it in sexual terms, if I stop seeking the Path when I get well-shagged, then whatever it is that next TAKES THAT FROM ME is going to plunk me into EXACTLY the same pit of pain and despair that THIS does. It could be jobs in different cities, or chronic illness, or mortality. SOMETHING is going to bring an end to however much “Thing X plenitude” I can EVER get, and when that happens, this pain, with interest, will fall like a house.

That’s why that’s not an answer.

2. Find a self that’s not based on the ego (basically, turn off the techno).

3. Center the Self on something else; involute (i.e., go to God, et cetera).

4. Withdraw emotional passion from the state of Thing X (i.e., basic nonattachment).

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That’s the answer to (3): how can this be made still?

Now then, to the chewiest part of all: WHAT STRATEGIES can be deduced from the difference between (2) and (3)?

Here are some things that I do NOT wish to do:

1. I do not wish to forgo all sexual contact. That’s too much discipline and it would backfire terribly if I tried it.

2. I do not wish to go without the relationship. That, again, is too much discipline, and again, it would backfire monstrously.

Ok, strategies:

For “still the need for thing X,” it’s not about putting off or deferring a biological need, it’s about not hearing the techno from the computer virus. It is literally about changing my attention, sort of “hearing something else more loudly.” As I get older, I’m starting to be able to tell the difference between when I’m ACTUALLY (if you will, biologically) interested in sex stuff and when I’m just riding the techno beat’s attention to it.

So if my stilling-the-need here refers not to desire, but to obedience to the beat, then ANYTHING that refocuses my attention, will do, and it doesn’t matter at all on what I refocus my attention. Do a headstand. Pat a cat. Wash dishes. The only criterion is that the NEW stimulus must be LOUDER than the old stimulus. So right now, seated meditation won’t do unless I pull in some INTENSE physical sensation (like retention with bandhas) to drown out the beat.

“Make it unimportant”:

This is an interesting strategy. Remember my “rock star” metaphor from a couple posts ago? Sex is something that young revolutionary “rock stars” do and ordinariness is the result if you don’t do it a lot? Sort of an avant-garde theorization of sexual activity? To make it unimportant is to undo this, to restore sexual activity to its proper householder location. There is nothing to be granted from it, no paradise to be accessed. It is not more special, more reserved, or more powerful than ANY OTHER KIND of householding.

Things that work against this? Capitalist fetishization, privatization (basically, making sex “a secret” which then has the allure that all secrets have), Freudian repression (again, repression gives power and mystery to the repressed), shame, guilt, all discussions of normal/abnormal, all asexualities (such as those of the Moral Majority, et. al.: the nuclear family, abstinence-only, persecution of sexual minorities), and all hypersexualities (i.e., Dr. Phil’s show, Jerry Springer’s show, actually MOST of American TV, yeah Real World I mean you too, and almost all magazine ads or really, any media whatsoever from most any Western nation).

TANGENT:

Something fortuitous is that my sexual stuff is connected to all of the rest of my life. It’s in my spiritual inklings, it’s in my religious stuff, it’s in my intellectual stuff; it is TOTALLY IMBRICATED in my existence in toto. Sure, you’ll say that that’s true for everyone, but I think not to this degree.

I think that many people, particularly those who really like privatization as I’ve defined it above, see their sex stuff as living in a sort of “box” that they keep in the set of boxes into which their lives can be divided. Example: THAT box contains “work” and THIS box contains “leisure” and THAT box contains “politics” and THIS box contains “relationship” and THAT box contains “extracurricular relationship” (example: got a fantasy life? Does your partner know about every little wrinkle of it? No? Then you have a separate box for it, yes?) and so on and so forth.

I tried to analyze my early frustrations in terms of culture and awareness and wound up academicizing/intellectualizing my own sexuality. I study sexy art cinema today, in part because of that process. The conflict between my own body and my parents’ Catholicism put a profoundly sexual/embodied streak in my own spiritual quest (witness my “fascist tendencies” vision from the post prior). The long abusive marriage in which I stayed too long, gave me feminist politics (even moreso than the ones I already had) and got me reading about rape culture (because there is rape in that partner’s history) and got me doing hardcore gender analysis and so on. For about two decades, my relationships or lack of relationships colored everything: choice of friends, choice of chemicals, all of the courses I taught, all of the things I elected to or tried to believe, and so on. My sex stuff is FOUNDATIONAL in the various people that I became.

But this obsessiveness also means that if I can pull this thread far enough, it will UNDO THE ENTIRE SWEATER. Because that “virus” is in my ego itself, my sense of myself, it means that pursuing my sex neuroses can eventually lead me right to a vision of the ego and then (perhaps) to surpassing it. Discriminative knowledge about my sex stuff is POWERFUL and DEEP magic.

It just might take two decades or more of careful attention, to undo all the doing that I’ve put into it.

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So, back to strategies:

“Find a Self that’s not based on the Ego.” Indeed. Find a way to act in the world that is not “I” acting. Give up the fruits of actions.

(But how does that answer this specific suffering?)

This suffering is ego-based; recall, the virus is in the ego. What would actual SILENCE be like? The end of the techno. Try to hear this silence. Hear reality beneath/beyond the techno.

(But it’s my desire, it’s my relationship, it’s my…)

NO, it isn’t. It profoundly is NOT YOU. Remember? You told me this yourself. The techno beat is a VIRUS, it is a MACHINE, it is NOT HUMAN.

As a matter of fact, I’ll bet you can have all kinds of sexual contact with your partner and NOT NEED THE TECHNO AT ALL to make any of it happen. Try working with THAT for a while and see what happens.

And as a corollary, you might not need the LACK to do it either. Imagine ACTION without PSYCHOLOGY.

“Center the Self on something Else”

Involution: go to God, find the Shining Self. The basic statements of all sacred texts, from the Sutras to the Gita and on and on. This single piece of advice, this one strategy, really encompassses and is bigger than, most of the others, and its advice is the same. GO BEYOND THAT EGO and its techno. Or, another way, YOU ARE NOT YOU. Or, as I put it a while ago, there’s NO INTERIORITY. To even be able to imagine “centering the self on something else” is a defiance of everything we are told and know about “who we are.” How deep does the rabbit hole go, Neo???? Seriously.

And finally:

“Withdraw emotional passion from the state of Thing X.”

The Gita commentary I’m reading invites us never to underestimate how powerful our emotional role in all of this, is. The emotions roar forward: Thing D rocks! Thing G sucks! And so on, we know this.

And sex stuff is SO very emotionally magnetic. The ecstasies, the pain, the disappointment, the eagerness, and so on. On and on and on. A whole life of Top Gun silhouettes and ballads and blue light. The unknowable magic of attraction and then it’s all poetry and erotica about electricity. It is, in a way, mystical, but not in terms of mystical experience; more like mystification. We aren’t supposed to know how it works, we aren’t supposed to understand it, to be able to manage it. That ruins the game, doesn’t it? This is one mythology.

A friend of mine once said, about kink communities: “Don’t think that just because these people are very self-aware about their own practices, that they’re self-aware about anything else, necessarily.”

Being able to make smart and aware relationship choices doesn’t do a damn thing to the ego’s sense of self. Maybe makes for less pain (provided all parties are self-aware of themselves and the other), but doesn’t change the selfhoods of the parties involved. This is one of the great discoveries that I’ve made about 2003. There is self-awareness and then there is SELF-AWARENESS. Recall last post that I said that the mystical states associated with past sexual experiences (mine, anyway) are “wrong method”: union with Prakriti. Feels great and has mystical character, but will never result in enlightenment.

If there is an eternal buzz, than anything that is a temporary achievement of it, is minor by comparison.

That’s meant to answer the emotional access to joy, to relaxation, to whatever it is, the pleasures that are temporary. “What is WRONG with that?” Well, nothing except their temporariness in comparison to what is permanent.

And from this, the final strategy in full form:

Temporary pleasure taken as permanent, wished to be permanent, hoped to be permanent. If I get enough (money, relationships, orgasms, automobiles, tracts of land, conquest, friends, and so on), then I will have AS GOOD AS A PERMANENT (security, buzz, family, whatever). Except it’s never true.

And there it is: can’t get Thing X, bummer! Ow, ow! Get Thing X: Victoire! Joy and pleasure! And it’s a ping-pong match between one and the other, or, if you’re me, there’s ALWAYS a note of “can’t” even in “can.”

I want to–as I said before, I’ve said almost all of this before–downplay the whole act, the whole relationship. I wouldn’t say I’m “passionate” about washing the stuff in the sink, but I certainly have phases of “This must be done!” and there is relief associated with having it done. See the same pattern there? Oh, you’re insulted; how dare I compare the two? Have no fear, it’s only an emotional parallel. There is tension and release. Trust me, it’s the same.

(But it’s not so…intimate!)

No? Serving the household, is it not? If we were to treat dishwashing with the same privation and the same secrecy and to ladle onto it all of the same responsibility for our “innermost being” that we do our sex stuff, then it would BECOME THE SAME.

I deny that the intimacy is in the sensations, although there are things to be said about eye gaze and such, the “soul” of any human proximity. But I especially deny that the intimacy is in the DESIRE for the sensations. Remove the elements that are like cats in heat (no disrespect to either cats or heat intended) and you get compassion and kindness. Or at least a basic level of affection.

So the ego’s techno beat should be able to be answered (although it is by nature unanswerable) with feeding people at soup kitchens.

Strategy summary:

a. Redirect: headstanding, talking to neighbors, cleaning a basement.
b. Un-Ego: right action. Do something “I” doesn’t want to. Act without “I.”
c. Involute: give it all up. Surrender “I’s” actions; take them from “I.”
d. Dispassion: maintain calm. Indulge ferociously, sure, but with calm at the center. Tricky. But essential. Or be restrained (against will), but with calm at the center. Restraint “isn’t you.” It doesn’t harm you and it doesn’t even restrain “you.” In an ego storm, calm is “somewhere else.” Make the drama into householding (which by dualist contrast is anti-dramatic). Collapse the ego’s dualities; learn what they are and then collapse them.

(What if I just want it, though?)

Change I. Change it. Change want. All of this can always be done.