and another comment outside our other thread: in a small synchronicity i was in an on-line discussion group earlier this morning exploring some of the contradictions of being a christian with the 'problems' of opposite values being expressed in the bible.
early on the moderator said that 'love is not an emotion or feeling: it is to act with christ as your guide. love can only be expressed by doing.'
yes. our elaboration of that discussion is that love, true love, is only 'seen/felt' in action that is done with appropriate eccentric energy — that is my paraphrase, as he absolutely would not put it that way. and the only way to be appropriate with our use of (life force) energy is to practice the removal of 'avidya' improper seeing and the other 4 kleshas. see my fuller response in my comment in the thread below.
Hola, tom. Great update. Great to see you working intentionally with the yama brahmacharya.
Yes, love is not what our fictions have led us to believe. A very wise person once described it this way: no trust, no respect, no love. If you put love first it enervates the first two and destroys the relationship.
I've also been quiet in my writing. In part because I am in the process of eliminating my dependency on eyeglasses. Very challenging. And more challenging and somehow energetically related is removing the malevolent energy of feminism from my heart, mind and body. Extremely challenging and somatically painful. I've come to the awareness that it is perhaps the most emotionally and psychologically imprisoning and schismogenic ideology we have been enculterated with. I will begin writing about that soon as I work that ideology out of my system and bring my eyes to better than 20/20 vision with eye-yoga, mantra and pranayama.
I hope you had (will have) a great trip back to Germany. All the best as you continue your emancipation into life as it is.
I had to look up the term yama brahmachary, it seems we use a very different language :D but does it mean the wise use of life force? If that's the case, that is definitely what I am doing!
And all of a sudden I really feel like I can direct those energies back to myself whenever my thoughts and emotions wander to someone else, it's quite the magic trick!
Are you sure you are codependent with your glasses? Codependency is a limitation right and it sounds to me that not using glasses is the limitation - I mean, you can't write and you love writing!
yes, that is what i mean, with my own slight qualifier. i prefer the adverb 'appropriate' use of our (life force) energy. and your description of your self and then taking the time and intention to see what you had been doing is the key. there are times to be active and forceful, physically and otherwise, and times to be firm and gentle and times to be soft with strength. i've come to understand that wisdom is to be appropriate in our use of energy, what i call 'appropriate eccentric action'.
as to the eyes. superficially your argument makes sense, and yet it is removing from my self the responsibility to be fully free. my eye glasses help me to see words on a screen/page, yay, i'm free to read. and what i have somatically experienced with taking them off as part of the process of relearning to see — think of someone relearning to walk after an accident or stroke — is that the eyeglasses were and are a shield/barrier that stopped my seeing from being fully a part of the seeing and seen environment: they kept me separate in a very tangible and energetic way from fully participating in life.
that's on the physical / energetic level. what is perhaps more important is that they were/are being used as a crutch or, more accurately, a statement of how i had taken into myself the demand or direction or intention that there was something in my life i was refusing to see. that energy of denying truth in visioning something was taken by my body, when sustained long enough or if empowered with sufficient psychic energy, as the demand from me for my eyes to stop seeing truth of that and more generally truth. as whole creatures, demanding denial in part of our experience bleeds into the other parts to varying degrees. and so it was that each time i 'fixed' my eyes with new glasses, within a year or two or three, i 'needed' stronger glasses.
i wrote an essay of that discovery after being slapped sidewise by an extraordinary synchronicity that slapped me in my face with a towering pile of self-disgust that i had unconsciously(?) refused to acknowledge or to see since childhood.
i have written about that journey, if you are interested, in substack.
"Righteous Disgust! What’s in the Air Down Here?: How to Mine the Mine and the Not Mine of My Own Disgust Inside and Out"
since we had our time together i have expanded my awareness very significantly and with that changed my instruction. (i think you would have had an much expanded experience now! to teach is to exercise the depths of learning!)
and as if by synchronicity that includes the 'problem/opportunity' of the the kleshas, the 5 causes of all suffering described in the book 'the yoga sutras'. although the writer, patañjali, was very cleaver because there is in reality on one cause of all suffering, with the other four powerful and important variations on the first of them, which is sanskrit is 'avidya'. 'a' means not and 'vidya' is the root of the verb 'to see'.
avidya is normally mistranslated as 'ignorance'. that is, imo, a very very bad translation because it largely removes agency. my translation of 'not to see', avidya is 'to see as true that which is false, to see as false that which as true, to see as either true or false those things which are neutral' and finally simply to choose to not see.'
with my eyes as an example, my refusal even to see a truth caused my eyes to suffer. and the manifestation of that suffering arose because in order to not see something uncomfortable and true, the action i took — reduced vision — caused my eyes to suffer and in turn reduced the quality of my vision life. that is described in the third klesha, which is to believe or act on the misperception that running away from discomfort will reduce suffering. it leads to addictive or other self-destructive behaviours. in this case, it was destroying my eyes and that is what created a kind of increasingly destructive co-dependency with eye-glasses of increasing thickness.
so, even while the process of undoing the damage of 50 years of denying truth and trying to avoid suffering, that process created a huge rift in my connection to life and created a huge hypocrisy in my teaching which began to include the critical importance of 'right seeing' in order to remove suffering. how the f* can i be teaching 'right seeing', avidya, while my seeing was false? amazing, and that in turn was a huge part of the change from experience an uncomfortable hip toa very painful one. all the while wearing eye glasses had telling me that i was refusing to see the truth of something in my life. in this case, and intern pool of disgust.
when i had the realisation, the 'enlightenment' i spent the next 5 days getting lighter with diarrhoea and a reduced level of hip pain. (that has since fluctuated as i continue to learn of other 'lies' in my life that i saw as true. a huge one, is feminism and the problem of having been a 'simp.' that is still a work in process, that i haven't written about yet although i've had recent changes and a huge reduction of hip pain — now almost nothing.)
this modification of my own awareness (perhaps some form of wisdom) has become a significant part of my current version of my on-line or in-person 48hr course, and will become foundational going forward in my evolution of my 3 and 11 day retreats.
we are living the bhagavad-gita wedded to the great apocalypse! all the best with what is changing. everything changes! with peace, respect, love and equanimous enthusiasm.
and another comment outside our other thread: in a small synchronicity i was in an on-line discussion group earlier this morning exploring some of the contradictions of being a christian with the 'problems' of opposite values being expressed in the bible.
early on the moderator said that 'love is not an emotion or feeling: it is to act with christ as your guide. love can only be expressed by doing.'
yes. our elaboration of that discussion is that love, true love, is only 'seen/felt' in action that is done with appropriate eccentric energy — that is my paraphrase, as he absolutely would not put it that way. and the only way to be appropriate with our use of (life force) energy is to practice the removal of 'avidya' improper seeing and the other 4 kleshas. see my fuller response in my comment in the thread below.
all the best.
Hola, tom. Great update. Great to see you working intentionally with the yama brahmacharya.
Yes, love is not what our fictions have led us to believe. A very wise person once described it this way: no trust, no respect, no love. If you put love first it enervates the first two and destroys the relationship.
I've also been quiet in my writing. In part because I am in the process of eliminating my dependency on eyeglasses. Very challenging. And more challenging and somehow energetically related is removing the malevolent energy of feminism from my heart, mind and body. Extremely challenging and somatically painful. I've come to the awareness that it is perhaps the most emotionally and psychologically imprisoning and schismogenic ideology we have been enculterated with. I will begin writing about that soon as I work that ideology out of my system and bring my eyes to better than 20/20 vision with eye-yoga, mantra and pranayama.
I hope you had (will have) a great trip back to Germany. All the best as you continue your emancipation into life as it is.
Thanks for restacking my dear friend :)
I had to look up the term yama brahmachary, it seems we use a very different language :D but does it mean the wise use of life force? If that's the case, that is definitely what I am doing!
And all of a sudden I really feel like I can direct those energies back to myself whenever my thoughts and emotions wander to someone else, it's quite the magic trick!
Are you sure you are codependent with your glasses? Codependency is a limitation right and it sounds to me that not using glasses is the limitation - I mean, you can't write and you love writing!
All the best on your path!
hola, tom.
yes, that is what i mean, with my own slight qualifier. i prefer the adverb 'appropriate' use of our (life force) energy. and your description of your self and then taking the time and intention to see what you had been doing is the key. there are times to be active and forceful, physically and otherwise, and times to be firm and gentle and times to be soft with strength. i've come to understand that wisdom is to be appropriate in our use of energy, what i call 'appropriate eccentric action'.
as to the eyes. superficially your argument makes sense, and yet it is removing from my self the responsibility to be fully free. my eye glasses help me to see words on a screen/page, yay, i'm free to read. and what i have somatically experienced with taking them off as part of the process of relearning to see — think of someone relearning to walk after an accident or stroke — is that the eyeglasses were and are a shield/barrier that stopped my seeing from being fully a part of the seeing and seen environment: they kept me separate in a very tangible and energetic way from fully participating in life.
that's on the physical / energetic level. what is perhaps more important is that they were/are being used as a crutch or, more accurately, a statement of how i had taken into myself the demand or direction or intention that there was something in my life i was refusing to see. that energy of denying truth in visioning something was taken by my body, when sustained long enough or if empowered with sufficient psychic energy, as the demand from me for my eyes to stop seeing truth of that and more generally truth. as whole creatures, demanding denial in part of our experience bleeds into the other parts to varying degrees. and so it was that each time i 'fixed' my eyes with new glasses, within a year or two or three, i 'needed' stronger glasses.
i wrote an essay of that discovery after being slapped sidewise by an extraordinary synchronicity that slapped me in my face with a towering pile of self-disgust that i had unconsciously(?) refused to acknowledge or to see since childhood.
i have written about that journey, if you are interested, in substack.
"Righteous Disgust! What’s in the Air Down Here?: How to Mine the Mine and the Not Mine of My Own Disgust Inside and Out"
https://gduperreault.substack.com/p/righteous-disgust-whats-in-the-air
since we had our time together i have expanded my awareness very significantly and with that changed my instruction. (i think you would have had an much expanded experience now! to teach is to exercise the depths of learning!)
and as if by synchronicity that includes the 'problem/opportunity' of the the kleshas, the 5 causes of all suffering described in the book 'the yoga sutras'. although the writer, patañjali, was very cleaver because there is in reality on one cause of all suffering, with the other four powerful and important variations on the first of them, which is sanskrit is 'avidya'. 'a' means not and 'vidya' is the root of the verb 'to see'.
avidya is normally mistranslated as 'ignorance'. that is, imo, a very very bad translation because it largely removes agency. my translation of 'not to see', avidya is 'to see as true that which is false, to see as false that which as true, to see as either true or false those things which are neutral' and finally simply to choose to not see.'
with my eyes as an example, my refusal even to see a truth caused my eyes to suffer. and the manifestation of that suffering arose because in order to not see something uncomfortable and true, the action i took — reduced vision — caused my eyes to suffer and in turn reduced the quality of my vision life. that is described in the third klesha, which is to believe or act on the misperception that running away from discomfort will reduce suffering. it leads to addictive or other self-destructive behaviours. in this case, it was destroying my eyes and that is what created a kind of increasingly destructive co-dependency with eye-glasses of increasing thickness.
so, even while the process of undoing the damage of 50 years of denying truth and trying to avoid suffering, that process created a huge rift in my connection to life and created a huge hypocrisy in my teaching which began to include the critical importance of 'right seeing' in order to remove suffering. how the f* can i be teaching 'right seeing', avidya, while my seeing was false? amazing, and that in turn was a huge part of the change from experience an uncomfortable hip toa very painful one. all the while wearing eye glasses had telling me that i was refusing to see the truth of something in my life. in this case, and intern pool of disgust.
when i had the realisation, the 'enlightenment' i spent the next 5 days getting lighter with diarrhoea and a reduced level of hip pain. (that has since fluctuated as i continue to learn of other 'lies' in my life that i saw as true. a huge one, is feminism and the problem of having been a 'simp.' that is still a work in process, that i haven't written about yet although i've had recent changes and a huge reduction of hip pain — now almost nothing.)
this modification of my own awareness (perhaps some form of wisdom) has become a significant part of my current version of my on-line or in-person 48hr course, and will become foundational going forward in my evolution of my 3 and 11 day retreats.
we are living the bhagavad-gita wedded to the great apocalypse! all the best with what is changing. everything changes! with peace, respect, love and equanimous enthusiasm.
🙏❤️🧘♂️🙌☯️🙌🧘♂️❤️🙏