Doubt - a poem

Doubt

By Christopher Michael

Doubt is my faith.

Doubt is my shield against the pain of a God that kills kids

Doubt turns cyclones that demolish cities into simply cyclones that demolish cities

Rather than unfair judgements from on high or from below

Doubt rips the heart from my certainty opening me to knowing

Then dissolving knowing until actions and decisions are paralysed

Leaving me ignorant of my power

Open to your decisions your actions

To blaming myself because I know I'm passive

Doubt holds me safe from the complexities of love

It pushes me outside myself to look back with anxiety

Pulling apart love's excitement and ordinary intimacies transforming them into techniques

Into hormones, electric pulses in fat lined nerves

Doubt keeps me small inside myself

Watching earthquakes of feelings vibrate inside me but beyond my sense of self

Hiding me from the risks of exposing myself to you

It's protection keeps me from standing up to face a world that might tear me to pieces

Or might feed and hug me just for being here

Doubt blinds me to the little things I do that make you feel it is worth going on

It arises from and teaches me distrust

Distrust of my senses, of my thoughts and feelings, of the history that made us

It leaves me alone in a claustrophobic lifeboat with clawing growling wilderness

Drifting in the flows that bind, connect and free

Civilization a ferment composting communion leaving words and actions

with meanings of mere thoughts whilst being is left lonely in Your absence

The Chakras and Comunication

Here is a summary of an application to Communication of the Chakras as the seven dimensions of being.

If you want to talk about these then leave a comment.

If you want more info. goto: http://thoughtfuloutsider.com/background/background.html


Communication.

The process of communication can be analysed in terms of the chakras – the 7 dimensions. It is a cycle. There is the separation and uncertainties before you start connecting (including the environmental and psychic background you bring to it), the motivation for wanting to comunicate, the form/medium you are going to use, there is doing it and listening, there is the larger effects it has on your life and sense of self and finally there are the limitations of conscious communication, the confrontation with infinity for example the things that weren't said yet affected the exchange or were said and whose meanings had unexpected effects giving birth to uncertainty thus starting the cycle over.

1. Fear and background. The background you bring to the situation before you start - including separation, aloneness, loneliness and the fears, uncertainties and considerations that come to you before communication starts. What are the things that are likely to interfere with the communication process? From the environment, both social and physical/natural? Emotional noise and other blockages?

2. Desire and motivation. What are the reasons you want to communicate? What do you want to achieve? What are the pleasures you'll get from success? How do you get motivated and motivate yourself?

3. Form and structure. What language? What medium or media will you use? What are the unique characteristics of the media you are going to use? How will the message be affected by these characteristics? What's the best way to use them? This includes the sensual forms of the
language you use as mentioned in by Tantric psychology, NLP and the `Languages of Love' book.

4. Action and emotion. Start the communication process – connect. How does the status and power exchange play out?

5. Communication and Listening. Listen for and learn from the immediate feedback you get from the process. What were the immediate messages you got? Did you feel respected? Did you respect them?

6. Meaning. What are the broader effects of the communication on yourself and your partners in the process, including your relationships, your view of yourself and of them? What are the stories you shared and that underlie the communications? What are the stories you built together? What were the deeper messages that came to you afterwards or at the time?

7. Infinity and limitation. What are the limitations of the situation? What are the rules and underlying structures that represent its boundaries? What didn't you learn that you'd like to have? How did you both handle misunderstandings? What were the areas you noticed were
'no go' zones? Things that sparked each of you in a way that made you uncomfortable or that were problems? What are further things that you need to communicate about?

Thus the cycle starts over…

Buddhism: the Middle Way and the Five Precepts

The Core of Buddhism: The Middle Way and the Five Precepts

There will be people who will find my ignorance apparent in this piece especially if their practice is based on scholarly study and I'd happy to here them. I'm a practitioner not a scholar. I practice contemplation these days rather than meditation. To explain the difference to me meditation add skills and abilities through concentration and imagination whilst to me contemplation is the dissolution of the self through self examination. These two practices are interactive and supportive of each other but nonetheless different more detail later.

The Buddha said from the beginning his teaching was a middle way between the extremes of asceticism and hedonism which he had experienced in his life. At the time, and for many since, it was thought that living a simple house-holders or lay life was a life of sensuality and therefore sinful and hedonistic. This has meant that less extreme monastic living has been assumed to be what the Sangha (the community) referred to as the Middle Way, though today many Westerners would see all monasticism as an ascetic extreme. So the question is what works for achieving enlightenment? Is a Middle Way as we would perceive it in the modern era going to work or do we need to join the monastery as has been played out over the previous centuries, and in other cultures, when it had a different meaning?

If enlightenment is personal then is it possible the Middle Way is relative to your starting point, to your individual experience? Many believe that the long history of the monastic systems is proof of its effectiveness. Others say we are in a new era and that this asks for a renewed and reformed approach appropriate to it. You'll have to decide within your own practice what is right for you. Some aspects of tradition and practice still make sense however; otherwise you may as well start your own religion, Mystery or philosophic school and call it what you like. Many Westerners, and even Easterners, say that Buddhism is not a religion but it does function the same way for a large number of its believers. This is especially true of those who accept that supporting the work of monks in their enlightenment in temples and monasteries will protect them from their human limitations, their sins, their Karma, rather than doing the work themselves.

The core story is that the Buddha was a prince, named Sidhartha, who was protected from the harshness of the world because he was prophesied to become a world turning wise man or a great king. His father wanted the latter so strangely tried to prepare him to be a king without letting him experience the world outside the palace. One day he got away from the palace and noticed people suffering and it so shocked him after his pampered life that he left it for a life of asceticism, fasting and extreme discipline in order to discover the sources of suffering (Dukkha). Along the way he picked up five companions. Finally he reached a point where he realised his fasting was killing him. He sat under a tree and decided that if he died his experience of the truth would be different for it was the truth of life he sought. He decided to eat which upset his companions who left him to continue their search. He decided he would sit until the truth became clear and after a powerful experience of insight he was inspired to create a community, a Sangha, that would follow practices based on his experience of insight.

Consider this, the Middle Way starts at the moment Sidhartha sits under that tree and decides to give up everything he had learnt from his teachers, his father and companions, to search within his own experience (this is what i mean by contemplation, all Buddha's experience to this moment contributed to his decision and experience). He found his centre beyond the push and pull of his world of authority, culture, family and friends. This is important for us as practitioners because he went through the teachings of others, he didn't write them off without the experience of committed involvement. His version of the Middle Way was not "everything in moderation" it was "everything in moderation, including moderation", if you don't go to the edge how can you know the centre.

So his teachers became consultants on his path to insight but he was his own authority. As with most of the great ancient teachings this one wasn't written down for around two hundred years and after that new Scriptures have appeared over the centuries based on the continuing revelation of saints and oral traditions building into a group of canons that represent different schisms some arising out of cultural difference and others from adapting to changes through history.The largest difference is between the northern practitioners (in China, Tibet, Japan, &etc) who call themselves Mahayana meaning great vehicle, a statement of pride on their part because they suggest that the Theravada practices of the south (in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand and Cambodia) are called the Hinayana or lesser vehicle. Within each of these two major splits there are many smaller sects or traditions that descend from great saints and follow particular stories and use their own versions of meditations and contemplations.

The Noble Truths 1. There is Suffering (Dukkha) 2. The Source of Suffering running away and running towards 3. That freedom is possible 4. The way to freedom the eightfold path The Eightfold Path Right View Right resolve Right speech Right Action Right livelihood Right Effort Right Mindfulness Right Concentration

But across all the differences there is a basic teaching that remains consistence and are agreed upon as being central to Buddhism of every stripe. These are the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path and the Five Precepts. The differences are in how the different traditions put these teachings into practice. Though theoretically the Buddha is supposed to be different to other teachers in that he did not speak of gods as absolute unchanging masters of the universe, his story and person acts as a model for practice and legitimates teachings in all the traditions, and has a role similar to that played by Goddesses and Gods in other traditions. As in both India, with the Vedas, and the Biblical traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the ongoing revelation of the Yogis and Saints continue the growth and application of teachings, so Buddhism has its Bodhisattvas, Arahats and others who renew and develop the teachings.Central to Buddhism is the gaining of the experiential insight of the Four Noble Truths as an individual. The teaching says this is available to you through the Eightfold Path but as you can see in the boxed summary it is fairly abstract. What does Right mean in each context as a way of living? If you consider deeper you see that the whole eight steps are interconnected and that the order is somewhat arbitrary though there is a logic to this order as it is generally written. If you have the right point of view on a situation then you will think rightly or have the correct resolution, say the right things and act the right way and so on.

So one of the disagreements that divide the traditions is: How do you get to the right view? For some it involves replicating the Buddhas and the various saints lives. This may mean doing the intense ascetic practices that led him, as the greatest teacher, to the tree. There are nearly as many meditative and contemplative practices as there are teachers. In fact the Buddha is said to have enlightened 84,000 people and that there are that many paths to nirvana. You have some that focus on developing strong multi-sensory imagination like visualisation, hearing, feeling, even smell and taste. There are those that focus on powerful physical disciplines like Martial Arts, Yoga and other practices. There are those who are anti-imagination focussing on the experience of the moment through the senses, those who try using irrationality and spontaneity as in Zen Koans, those who use rationality, study and argument, those who use moral practice and living, and there are those using magical practices, ritual and such.

Finally there are people who use the gift of self, some think of as love, surrender to the great teaching and teacher. There are other approaches, as well. The lines between practices are not always clear and are often integrated together so that love, defined as surrendering to a great teacher, gives you the motivation to achieve the intensity of practices coming from any of approaches mentioned.

Buddhist Tantra

The Tantric traditions are based on the recognition of a number things that are central to Buddhism. Firstly, the cooperative and complimentary duality that is the source of suffering, in the second insight of the Four Noble Truths running away and running after things, feelings and peoples; secondly the power of the senses, imagination, and emotions in our experience of life and Self; thirdly the interactive and interconnected nature of the Self as an individual expression of the whole through our relationships with individuals, groups, culture and even the metaphysical or spiritual realms. Lastly and possibly most importantly is the power of sex and desire for both positive and negative effect on our karma (history as an expression of a morally intelligent universe of laws) and dharma (practice in law).

Even celibates have to cope with this power. Tantra suggests that we address it directly rather than the way that many traditions approach it, which is to avoid it by calling it sin, making it an enemy with the practice and teacher as the weapon and ally against it thus focussing on the perfection of practice in the hope that it will protect the practitioner from its terrible influence. As you would expect for a tradition that focuses on duality this latter practice does have a role for many practitioners whose lineages have been influenced by the morality of their cultural context. So they focus on the symbolic and philosophical aspects and on expressing their love and passion in their connections with spiritual beings, like Goddess/Gods, Bodhisattvas, and others, with invocations and channelling. Buddhism does not deny the existence of Gods and Goddesses it just says they are as subject to the laws of mind (Dharma) and universe (karma) as we are, just on a different scale.

Others use practices in a way that dissolves the power of sex by objectifying it through exercises that turn it into just another bodily function that has the same level of importance and emotional power as your hands. It becomes an energy that is used as a tool, and as such a separation is created that protects the practitioner from the vulnerabilities it brings with it. And finally their those who work towards allowing it its full power and not only enjoy it but can participate in it with another expression of duality, that is a deep detachment that does not come from suppression but comes when you are truly comfortable with yourself in your own skin, in your own emotions, flaws, fears and desires bring maturity then comes spirituality maturity that goes just that much deeper.

The Five Precepts

The five precepts are the basic minimum disciplines, some might say commitments, for you to start and continue during your practice. They cover the values at the core of the Ten Commandments without the God stuff and merging a couple together into values statements. Each of the many sects and tradition has other precepts you make if you become a monk (around 230 all together). Many traditions use them in a way that would seem to contradict the teaching of the Middle Way as we look at it from our world of comfort.

The cultures that have taken up Buddhism in the centuries and millennia since the insight under the tree were warrior cultures based on a highly stratified distribution of wealth and knowledge with the majority leading hard lives of poverty. What we considered extreme in our world would seem natural and reasonable in their world. In fact the monastery was an retreat from the real extremes of the outside world. We know that the Buddha was a revolutionary in his time challenging the caste system and including women in his community and making fun of extreme ascetics like those that were vegans, and who ate only fruit and vegetables that fell from the tree on their own account thanks to gravity. As Buddhism has moved from culture to culture it has adapted, been refined and renewed. So that we see Chan, known here in the West as Zen, arising out Mahayana in the north to resemble Theravadan practices from the South, yet it was a reform movement because of the corruption of association by Buddhists with the power elite in the third, fourth and fifth centuries in China. Like all reform movements it traced itself back to the origins of Buddhism in India, when Buddhism had left there four or five hundred years before.

To act on and live by the Five Precepts we also need to consider the conflict between the traditions as handed down and the teachings as recorded then there are the insights of our own practice. My practice tells me for instance the idea of detachment and the Middle Way is not the same as the dissociated absence of emotion, feeling and passion resulting in an inner blandness, a grey state of nothingness, that seems to be where many teachings point. This seems to me an immature understanding of humanity, of the essence of mind in all its beauty. The Middle Way means being centred in your Self, a detachment that has you responding with clarity and wisdom to inputs from your relationships including your culture, family and friends, recognising and understanding their manipulations without giving into them, being able to connect with the core truth of that moment for all of you, not letting your Self be reshaped by fear and desire but also not being cut off from them allowing them to be part of communicating with the world and your Self as a mutual exchange.

So we can except without question what our teachers tell us from their teachers and the traditions they embody with the surrender they are used to in Asia or we can listen to them as one input, read widely and contemplate and meditate to gain insight into how the Precepts can be lived as an expression of the Middle Way, as a path to, an arrival in and a journey from your centre, your moment of being. When you read this what feelings come up, what are the uncertainties, and what do you feel like doing to help you with those feelings, what happens if you sit with those feelings in mindfulness intensifying your awareness of them by focussing on the feelings as sensations with the breath as your magnifier? This is mindfulness.

Here is what my insight has offered me on the Five Precepts as expressions of and practice towards my Middle Way.

• No killing of any creatures - means not contributing the general atmosphere of fear, intimidation and violence. There is also not participating in a mentality of achieving things via short cuts via controlling non-negotiated selfish ways. It means being willing to act from a mindfulness of the largest view of your life including the others you relate to, even when they are enemies. This does not mean you don't defend yourself when attacked by someone who does not share your values, but it does mean that if you are called to it then you do defend with respect for the enemy maintaining your centre, your values, and your sources of meaning so that you can maintain your Self in the biggest meaning of it.


• No stealing - this means respecting boundaries, expressed as honest exchanges of energies through clear communication based on a sense of positive awareness of your limitations, meaning that you are willing to negotiate ways, not just with others but with your Self, around and though those flaws and limits. Again it is about having a larger view of your identity as inclusive of the people you are interacting with because the way you deal with others, including their belongings, reflects your sense of your Self.


• No sexual misconduct means respect for your own and others physical and emotional experiences. Sex being central to taboos around the world this precept has often been enforced as a way controlling people. Some teachers avoid talking about it, yet you would think that it fundamentally important to apply insight to it. For me the central point is consent, based on honesty, knowledge for all participants of consequences emotionally and physically and on the emotional and intellectual capacity to give consent. The traditional interpretation of this precept for the sangha, the community focussed on insight practices, has been celibacy. This was, in my opinion, a product of the moral culture surrounding Gautama Buddha at the time and since. The Buddha's wife was one of his first converts after the original five companions on his ascetic journey. Though different traditions have quite sexist stories about women's involvement in the path, the truth is that he set up nunneries and there has been a long standing stream of Tantric Buddhism that has been very confronting for those who pay homage to moral Puritanism. This is not to say that Tantra necessarily involves sex as the West assumes but it can be a path for turning marriage into a way to mindfulness.


• No Lying means aligning your words, your actions and experiences, including inner life. The active version of this is promise-keeping, which many put into a special category of communication, for Buddhists, actually for honourable people, every time they communicate, in anyway, they are making promises, "giving their word" as we say. This is different from making a mistake which is a natural outgrowth of our limitations as sentient beings, what is important is how you handle your flaws. To give your word you must:
  1. Know who you are in all your vulnerabilities strengths and weaknesses;
  2. Allow for the reality of others, allow for their influences, and;
  3. Allow for the unexpected.
  This precept means you should be honest and clear when you commit to the precepts.



• No intoxicants meaning that the truth is relative to your state of mind effecting the capacity and quality of your consent, and your ability to meditate and contemplate with clarity. Something to consider is that some practices and relationships are intoxicating and can be used to avoid responsibility and so can be considered covered by this rule, it is here connected to the sexual conduct precept. The Buddha made this clear when he realised that the truth of suffering he sought would be different if he died as a result of fasting before he sat under the Bodhi tree to await insight. He also, according to my teachers, had a habit of avoiding questions about the supernatural and the metaphysical by saying how is this relevant to you achieving enlightenment now? Some people use this rule moralistically as part of social control but this is anti-Buddhist because the teaching of detachment and the Middle Way means that none of these rules can be laid down as unbreakable rules for puritan perfection. This is demonstrated by the rule that begging monks had to eat whatever was on the table of the donor, including meat as long as it was not specifically killed for them. In fact the story goes that Buddha died from food poisoning from eating pork. If you are receiving honest teachings from any tradition (even non-Buddhist) that are truly based on love and concern for you as a person, that is compassion, then they will support and develop your capacity for discernment and trust in your own judgement so that you work through your own experience to an understanding of what is good for you and good for your partners in life, even those that are strangers who walk past you on the street.

The Middle Way is to be centred in your own point of view with mindfulness of how that Self comes into existence through Karma - that is your history in the broadest sense including cultural context expressed through relationships, language (understood as multi-sensory symbolism, not just limited to words), power, status and authority. Whether or not you include reincarnation isn't relevant because whatever your inheritance it is there in your life as you experience it and you are dealing with it anyway.

Shared Contemplation1

SHARED CONTEMPLATION

Source: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University

con·tem·pla·tion (P) Pronunciation Key (kntm-plshn)n.

1. The act or state of contemplating.
2. Thoughtful observation or study.
3. Meditation on spiritual matters, especially as a form of devotion.
4. Intention or expectation: sought further information in
contemplation of a career change.

contemplation n 1: a long and thoughtful observation 2: a calm lengthy intent consideration [syn: reflection, reflexion, rumination, musing,thoughtfulness]

As you read these words how do you construct meaning? Where is the responsibility for that meaning?

I wrote them. So in the most obvious sense I chose each word in response to a feeling, an idea, a collision between these two that inspired me enough to make the effort to type them. But where did that impulse come from? Another collision and marriage: my past with my present and with a variety of fantasies for my/our future - like being understood, like being helpful, like feeling less alone, like being impressive, like being loved, like having you turn up to a workshop, like having me not turning up to a workshop alone – any and all of these and probably more that are in the symphony or soup of things that will run through my head through the process of writing.

How come these scratchings on a screen or page make sense to you? Well obviously you learnt to read English at some point. But as you know that's not enough because we've all read stuff in some book of mathematics or philosophy or economics or whatever that was in English and made no sense to us at all. There was a whole history of feelings and research, trauma and excitement that came together in this moment for you to be interested enough to keep reading and then to have some kind of response to these words. You may think I'm being thoroughly boringly obvious and be waiting for a point or you may be finding this insightfully exciting and shovel each word in like a glutton or you could be somewhere in between, just wondering, mildly interested.

So then where did English come from or for that matter where did any language come from? Some traditions would have us believe that their particular language was created by Goddess/God and is sacred. These languages like Sanskrit, Pali, Hebrew, Latin, Coptic (Ancient Egyptian) or Arabic are special because they express things or make magic that can't be handled by the ordinary languages we speak today. And I have to say that belief is a powerful thing and I have seen and experienced things that are quite striking and sometimes it was the belief that the language had a special psychological affect that helped it happen. Once in the past before most people could read and write, just being able to do these two made you a magician. That's why they were saved as a skill for priests and aristocrats.

Languages exist between us, in us and in history. They are created by their users as they cope with the intersection between the personally and culturally known (and therfore past) and the unknown (therefore present and future). Habit is born of the Known and so we can relax. Poetry is when we make and stretch the language to cope with the real (the unknown) as we perceive and share it.

When you are having an argument with someone who's important to you, where does the power of what they say come from? When someone you love tells you beautiful things where does the power of those words come from? When they come into the room where does the power of their presence come from? Where is the relationship between presence and words said? Who's responsible for it? In modern philosophy and psychology they talk about the "inter-subjective", in some jargon they talk about co-creation as words to cope with the shared nature of existence, of language, of meaning, of culture and history, of reality.

You can spend a lot of time exploring these two ideas and realities. They are Tantric concepts. They force us to ask questions about where we begin and end. It's the Warrior who asks these questions, and must know an answer in order to feel comfortable. Of course the "I", the "self" exists, it makes decisions and has responsibilities. Someone has to, they must. There is a "me" inside here, I can feel the thoughts I have that are so hard to get out into the world. I struggle to find the words to say what I feel and mean, then I have to manipulate "my fingers", "my tongue and voice box", "my body" to share them. I have to take action day after day at work so I can get to own "my house" or take "my holiday" to deal with my responsibilities, my kids. I sit down to meditate, to contemplate, to think, to seek enlightenment.

How do those words make meaning inside you? Where is the controller, making decisions? Do something – move your attention to your toes or look out of your eyes, listen with your ears. How did you do that? Who did it?

This is not to demolish our sense of identity as some would have us take these experiences. As so many traditions would have us do. They call it the "ego" without actually discovering what the original coinage was supposed to mean or exploring the ramifications of psychic surgery that is the equivalent of cutting out your heart. There are plenty of people in all kinds of traditions, including Tantra, who will try to convince you the sense of separateness, of individuality is the enemy.They'll ask you to hand the resultant uncertainty, if you believe them, over to their teaching, practice or book.

Our, yours and mine, aim is to make us bigger, to expand our experience of ourselves simply by being together in the world now. When you sit alone and another person walks into the room, what happens in the first fraction of a second of their presence? What is the cascade of feelings and thoughts that tumble through you? Do you try to hold onto the sense of who you were so that you know yourself? Why? What was so special about who you were before they walked in? When that other walks out of the room what happens in that same fraction of a second after the leave? Do you try to hold on their presence, onto you as you were with them? Don't just leave it at the sense of their energy/aura when you do this include the thoughts and feeling deeper down. What is the difference between different people as they come and go?

How do you know that you can talk about some things with some people and other things with other people? It's not in the words, is it? It's as if there are pathways that are blocked off between you. Can you talk with them about those blockages? Can you experience the way you together create these pathways and blockages?

This is where Freud and the early Psychoanalysts got it wrong. They thought that their "patient" was alone in creating the dynamics of the therapeutic exchange, projecting onto the blank slate of a therapist who thought he was truly objective. This fantasy is what some people do to escape the human reality of their teachers by projecting divinity onto them. The teachers' participation is to keep all contacts ritualised so as to avoid their humanity being noticed. Some of the spiritual practices of Tantra, in my flawed human understanding, are to lead us to a shared contemplation which allows us to move from the narrow internal singular perspective to a larger shared perspective that includes and embraces that singularity but takes in the others using all the available media of expressions – verbal, non-verbal, energetic, etc.

We can do this with neat games played in workshops, through one-on-one therapies and counselling approaches (although they start with a problem-solving/healing attitude that has some dangers to it, we'll talk about another time) one-on-one teaching (with another set of dangers too, which will also talk about later), through real friendships, and loving in families and partnerships. Even battles can sometimes be great teachers because you get very clear feedback from people who honestly don't like you, if you allow yourself to receive it.

The Middle Way in the Buddha's Story

Buddhism is called the middle way, but what does it mean?

The story goes that the Buddha lived the hedonistic life of a prince until his
late twenties then he gave it up, leaving his family to spend seven years
seeking out wise men and doing their exercises – involving fasting and other
extreme meditative and physical techniques. We don't find out much about what
kind of work he did but we do know that he got to the point where he felt
worried for his health and he got frustrated with his progress. He had two
simple questions: "what is the source of suffering?" and "how can we be freed
from it?" He had all kinds of interesting experiences but didn't feel he was
gaining the insight he sort. Along the way he picked up five companions who
shared the disciplines and travels. They had made an oath to stay together and
go all the way.

He got so frustrated that he thought he'd stay near the tree he was sitting
under and do nothing, including eating, until he found the truth he was looking
for. He got to the point where he was prepared to die if it would answer the
questions. But he felt the truth would be different if he gained it during or
after death. It was life he wanted insight into, not death. Somewhere in this
struggle a woman offered him some food, rice. He decides that he needs to eat in
order to maintain his health, and divided the food into portions so it would
last. His friends deserted him because they felt he had betrayed them by giving
up the fast.

There's more to the story but this is where the middle way insight comes from.
The insight was that there was a way between hedonism and asceticism between
fasting and feasting, the extremes. Everyone knows the saying "everything in
moderation" but they forget the part he lived which was "everything in
moderation including moderation" because if you don't go out to the edge then
you won't know where the middle is. This moment is the moment when he found his
centre. This was not the end though, as some people would have us believe
although it could be seen as the first step but if you look at the story the
beginning is the first of the noble truths – that there is suffering. Rarely do
we enter the path for fun usually it starts with suffering. In the Buddha's
story he's searching for the source of other people's suffering not his own as
most of us are. It's an indication of his special-ness as an aristocrat and
nearly enlightened being. It overlooks the problems of a life without real
challenge. Even though he was trained in the arts of kingship by his father the
challenges were safe and educational but not emotionally real.

What's interesting is that according to the stories the way of the Sangha, the
monk community, was what the Buddha setup. The monk's life is an ascetic's life
of humility, obedience and strong discipline - very much on the fasting side of
the mid-line, not really a middle way. Although it is true even today that the
extreme teachings of ascetics make his monastic approach seem mild, pragmatic,
respectful and empowering, even scientific.

In a later part of the story a detail generally goes without comment, the Buddha
returned to his family after his enlightenment and his wife was one of his first
disciples after the five companions had rejoined him. What was hidden about
their relationship? We'll never know. There are stories which are very sexist
about women's capacities for enlightenment that seem very contradictory to the
overriding values that shine through his teachings. He was even caught out on
this by his number one student, showing his humanity and that he had
limitations. He set up a Nunnery as a result but with the snide remark that it
would shorten the length of the time the teaching would maintain its purity.

The Buddha's teachings weren't written down until between two hundred and five
hundred years after he lived. Most of it can be relied on because in verbal
pre-literate societies important stories and teachings were closely guarded by
especially trained people but also everyone had much better trained memories
than we who have writing and other technologies as crutches. However, people did
change details their cultural and political paradigm would not accept or believe
as real. Sex and gender relations are so fundamental that even seemingly very
enlightened people in the past and today have been narrow minded about them.
Another thing to consider when talking about Buddhism's attitudes to sex and
gender and some of its teachings is that it was in a battle for survival as a
philosophy and religion (I know many people will be challenged by the "religion"
comment but for millions of people in Asia it functions like any religion even
though its teachings is different to most other religions). The political and
religious hierarchy of the Vedic tradition found Buddhism very threatening and
after five hundred year of struggle managed to kick it out the mainstream of
India.

Enough of politics and history, let's talk symbolism.

As mentioned the middle way represents finding centre. The Gautama Buddha hadn't
been allowed his centre ever. His father wanted to control his destiny through
controlling the experiences he had and the knowledge he gained. When he
discovered suffering he sort answers with his friends from all kinds of
teachers, wise men and their practices and found its true meaning from the way
he punished himself in his search. He even let his relationship with his friends
bend him out of shape. The middle way was born when he realised he was
suffering, when it was no longer an abstract idea that other people had. He
stopped and sat. The temptations of Maya have been portrayed through time as
being sexual and as fearful, because that's most people's most powerful desire.

In the modern era the idea there's something wrong with desire is seen as
unnatural. The second noble truth after you realise you are suffering is the
source of it, both avoidance and craving. Fear and desire the sources of
suffering only if they bend you out of shape through attachment. Attachment
meaning that you allow them to define you as a being. Craving after the desired
is a problem because the fulfilment of desire never lives up to our expectations
and is temporary. When you chase things or run away from them then you misshape
yourself so that the integrity of being is lost so that the external decides who
you are.

We have to be careful here because many teachings offer escapism by defining
this integrity as all-powerful (or nearly) choice. This is where the middle way
takes on another dimension of meaning - the line between the external and the
internal. Many techniques for meditation take the focus so far internal that
though they provide a blissful vacation from the everyday world they don't
actually release you from its suffering because your fundamental sense of self
isn't transformed. They cater to your suffering because the techniques are
motivated by it, the escape from it. There are others who, in asking us to
follow our feelings freely, leave us floating in the winds of the world around
us. They ask us to give up responsibility.

Talking about this mid-line has been a real challenge through the history of
Buddhism. Marriage and sex have been a very successful way of trying to get the
message across, as has battle and the warrior so we get tantra and martial arts
as symbols and disciplines. In Taoism the way a young sprout of bamboo or grass
can hold itself up against gravity being both firm and softly flexible in the
one moment has served the purpose. To find your centre is to understand the
boundary of your choice, of your will, your power and be able to sit with it, in
it.

The hedonist's way is a way based on chasing desires and drives us to the
external. The ascetics face inwards and can be considered a path based of
avoidance of the world by framing it as evil. In Zen and Tantra as with many
other esoteric traditions transcendence is both an external and an internal
path, not one or the other or neither. It is an embrace of and comfrontation
with the whole. Most teachings talk of detachment as the absence of attachment,
they teach a sort of dissociation, a disconnection from the realities of our
humanity. Can you be mindful of your inner dynamics and the your external world
and the interconnection, interplay and interdependence of the inner and the
outer, of fear and desirre and the rainbow of experiences that is daily life and
find the biggest version of ourselves. the version that includes all of these
realities. Nirvana is not an escapist void but a mystery that always remains
showing us the space between thoughts and the marriage of limitation and
infinity.

The Buddha's story tells us that after becoming dissatisfied with being a prince
and having all his desires fulfilled then becoming an ascetic and suffering the
frustrations of failure it was only when he stopped chasing after and running
away, sat still with the uniqueness and reality of who he was in the sensual
moment, as the practices handed down confirm, he was able to experience
Mahanirvana – the great transcendence, the great mystery.

For a summary of Buddhism's basic story and insights go to:

http://tantricwarrior.com/background.buddhism.html

Ingredients of Mindfulness

The Ingredients of Mindfulness

I know this is a long one but its worth it, I hope.

It seems a lot of people have a problem defining mindfulness.

In order to talk about mindfulness we have to think about our theory of consciousness and the problems of communicating about it. What is consciousness is a great question but beyond the scope of this meditation because it is an emergent property of biological entities and to explain what these terms mean would be a book in itself. It is possible to talk about the functions and processes of something without having to define it. For instance we used and understood how water operates without knowing what made it up for thousands of years. So we will be talking about the qualities and attributes of consciousness, its states and phases. It is part of developing a language and understanding for increasing our depth and maturity as people. We will be comparing and contrasting mindfulness with the different phases of sleep and qualities of wakefulness such as meditation, contemplation, heightened states caused by stress and desire, coma and the everyday flow of attention. Then there is the way our sense of self flows as the states change. But, there are some dangers we should be careful about.

The first danger is getting so abstract or dissociated that we talk about it as an object or substance apart from the real experience of our everyday feelings and states, our real relationships with real people. Although this kind of exercise definitely goes in that direction I am going to keep it to practical terms. Some people would move into descriptive metaphors that are not really relevant to your day to day experience of your self. This can be escapist intellectualism.

Another problem is covered by a relevant saying in Zen which goes something like “be careful not to focus on the finger pointing at the moon”. Metaphors and analogies are our fingers pointing at the moon of consciousness. Consciousness is such an intimate experience, the most intimate in fact, that talking about it means using metaphors. They let us try to describe to another something that feels unique and personal whose experience is different because they are sitting on their seat, not yours. It can feel like we are trying to explain how something works to someone who has never seen it before. Ultimately they have not seen us because we exist in history travelling from past to future and back, and from inside to outside and also back. So we try to encapsulate who we are in the languages of all the senses, touch, words and actions, which also live in our individual histories whilst remaining alone in your skin within the limitations of the moment.

It might be better to say that we are talking about your poetics of consciousness rather than theory, because we use the processes of poetry like associations and correspondences, metaphor, analogy and simile, rather the linear cause and effect of scientific logic. That is where many people’s ideas of karma and reincarnation fall down, because the Universe is not so simply as to say that history, values, morality and ethics work the same way as we imagine physical systems work with one cause leading to mappable effects. For example one person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist. Intention defines action not just in law but in spirit as well but intention is usually complicate. Simple lines of thought don’t stand up if you are willing to face nature fair and square. Otherwise we could arbitrarily say that all carnivores are evil or vice versa.

Every metaphor has its limitations and its effects on our perspectives. Quite often insight comes when we find a comfortable image that allows us a new point of view on a situation. Since we are social animals and metaphors are obviously part of communication they have social gravity and can have powerful influences in psychology, culture and politics, not to mention economics. Two quick examples – the machine and energy.

The machine is a metaphor first used in the 17^th century by many people across Europe including Newton. They admired the new fan-dangled mechanical clocks that had such neat, clean and precise actions and solved so many problems for people communicating. They were aware of losing the beautifully symmetrical hierarchies of the Christian world where they romanticized the same kind of tidiness – various levels of heavens and hells - in the previous two hundred years. The advent of Protestantism and the developing science of “natural philosophy”, as physics was called, had made Europe and the cosmos a mess of conflicting humanity rather than a centralised God inspired system. To put it back together they imagined a universe that ran like clock work at first God was still the clockmaker but over time laws replaced Him. This image took over. It was comfortable for the intellectuals and we are still living with it through such ideas as the brain as a computer. It has been useful to some extent but has also led to such strange depersonalising ideas as organising corporations, factories, and workshops for efficiency by treating people as cogs in machines.

The use of ‘energy’ as a component of consciousness is interesting. It started as “animal magnetism” in the late 18^th, early 19^th centuries based on a particular experience you can have between your hands or around your body that feels like when you are holding two magnets that are either attracting or repelling each other. As science developed the understanding that electricity was the source of magnetism the image moved to it in the later in the 19^th century. In the early 20^th century with Einstein and others energy became the essence and in the mid to later century people started talking about quantum mechanics and consciousness. As a metaphor these images serve a purpose to help point to the abstraction of our experience into what we call consciousness. It problem is that intellectual escapism previously mentioned, rather passionately and poetically experiencing feeling from the inside out we can dissociate from them and talk about “energy” as an abstraction separate from ourselves. There will be people threatened by this approach because they need the security of thinking their theory reflects reality, this poetic thinking is too relativistic.

Status also plays a role. The use of scientific metaphors has a secondary role beyond the insights they provide, that is a part of every educational and social use of them. Science is the primary source of knowledge in the Western world it legitimates ideas through not just its processes of testing but also, if you’ve studied its history and philosophy, through its politics. And in the spiritual path this cultural element has a role too. Our teachers and leaders seek legitimacy for their knowledge by aligning it with and seeking justifications from science’s position in culture (rather than through its processes).

Talking about consciousness is really talking about us, about the simple direct experience of your life as it is now as you read this in your particular moment of history. It is the source of our perspectives. The way we understand consciousness sets up our view of life because at base it is our understanding of our values and self. Underlying any conversation about feelings and experiences is an understanding of the self expressing attitudes and values which organise our relationship with the world. We live it but rarely speak directly about it. Its nature has an element of unfolding mystery and lost history, and therefore lost causations, which are always present. It can be that what seems logical and shareable to yourself is not always accessible to outsiders without your history.

If we want to try to approach consciousness directly let’s start with signs we all experience in some way, abilities such as: memory, choice, external to internal awareness, physical awareness (that is proprioception our sense of shape and movement), sensory awareness and imagination. In different states we have different intensities of each of these. Others will have their own ingredients they feel are missing from this list and some they do not believe should be included.

Is it reasonable to try to fit all the different states of experience onto a single spectrum? After all it is one mind expressed as different people. This is another danger because whether true or not this attitude can lead to disrespecting the unique perspectives each of us have. It is a form of violence to try to tie the world up in a single ribbon of understanding. This is the source of the ideological battles between religions and political systems who believe theirs is the one truth. It is the flaw in any attempt to make a theory of everything whether scientific, religious, spiritual or secular. However if we are careful and respectful in the way we approach consciousness we can use the knowledge offered to deepen our experience in a positive way (see even the spectrum we use for expressing our attitudes to different emotions and experiences is a scientific metaphor so imbedded we find it hard not to use it even though it suggests a digital attitude to the value of emotions. “Positive” and “negative” originate from the aforementioned studies of electricity 150 years ago).

Coma, sleep, meditation, everyday wakefulness, special heightened waking states (caused by intense stress and desire) – this is a progression that makes sense but yet is easily challenged because consciousness is nonlinear. On the surface this progression is based on the capacity for choice in relation to your body although meditation’s place will cause some controversy because it can be active or passive. And mindfulness, where does it fit? The capacity to connect and communicate with other people is one spectrum to use for measuring the qualities of consciousness as it interacts with bodily sensation and action. It would be shaped like a hill with the peak in the everyday wakefulness phase with the Coma end and heightened states ends both dropping off.

There are experiences which are much harder to fit on these spectra. Dissociative states where you feel conscious yet disconnected from your body whilst having varying capacities for making choice; coma seems to be in its own category too though the research is still unclear. All do not fit comfortably.

Awareness appears here a few times so we need to talk about it. Awareness is simpler than mindfulness because most people assume it means being awake; something everyone has a definition for, often in contrast to sleep or some other states apparently lacking it, like coma. Meditation at base is the execution of a technique and so has external metaphors that are comforting and in the last thirty to forty years is considered in the West to be akin to relaxation, because it is its most obvious measurable and useful side effect.

For those who practice meditation in a deeper way, especially in the West, it is like wakeful sleeping. It takes you to a kind of nether land between waking and sleeping because the aim is usually release from physical sensation without losing consciousness. The result is you slip sideways to a very different experience free of the limited feelings of your body. You develop focus to such an extent the object of concentration takes over your whole mind and you forget external experience, in fact you forget everything but the sensually imagined focal point – a sound (Mantra), a visual (Yantra), there are techniques using smell, taste and feeling or some combinations making multi-sensory techniques. This experience is different to both sleep and wakefulness yet has ingredients of both. The two can get confused as well because people talk about meditation in terms of different qualities.

Awareness can be deep or broad at one end through to superficial. Sometimes these categories are the product of social attitudes involving status play. Meaning that someone who agrees with you is very aware and someone who disagrees is superficial or lacking awareness. It is often a way of avoiding saying the person is stupid or has stupid attitudes or lazy or crazy and be part of conflict avoidance through condescension. Sleep also has phases and depths, light and deep, dreaming or not, lucid and ordinary often measured by your awareness and the intensity of imagination during it.

If we put coma and sleep at one end of the spectrum of consciousness, because of its relationship with the body - meaning that whatever awareness you might have of the external, your body is outside choice. Then put meditation because it is a wilful choice to release awareness of your body followed by everyday awareness, though some will put meditation on the heightened side of the spectrum. I put stationary meditation in this position because of the way the Westerners do it lying down or in a comfortable chair. In the East it is done in a different way - sitting up or standing so that it is more active. Then comes the heighten states that come with stress or excitement to the point where again you lose awareness of your body because your consciousness is so focussed externally that although your body is effected by your decisions sensual awareness takes a back seat to the sensuality of action.

Contemplation is different again from meditation it seems. Where meditation, as mentioned is a sacred exercise involving focussing on specific objects of mind (some will say spirit) contemplation focuses on the processes of mind/spirit. Although the word is sometimes used to mean ‘consider’, as a discipline it is the most common translation for the Buddhism disciplines of “djana” or “dyana”, and of the Chinese character “Ch’an” (old spelling) which in Japanese is pronounced “Zen”. In these disciplines you are given an object of mind (a Koan) to contemplate but unlike in meditation your master challenges you about the insights you are gaining. The answers are not verbal, linear, or sensible in the way your teacher at school would think. They are tests of your spontaneity, your freedom from history. You are asked to achieve the focus of meditation whilst maintaining awareness of your body and the outside. This is what is translated as mindfulness.

Walking and other active meditations are the other starting points for talking about mindfulness because they are also parts of the training for it. They use as objects of focus an action which asks that you be aware of your surroundings whilst achieving the intensity of focus achieved in meditation and the heightened awareness of stress and desire. It is why the Chinese, the Japanese and the Tantrikas use wrestling and other martial arts as part of their training for it.

Let’s start from the everyday experience of mindfulness. When we say ‘to be mindful’ it means to be extra attentive to the possibility of danger so it is a wilful choice to heighten awareness. For most people this is achieved by tensing, by getting stressed about the situation, they lose their sense of the choices being made. In martial training the aim is to achieve that heighten awareness with a relaxation and self comfort based on strength and self-knowledge. In Tantra it is desire and passion that is the metaphor for this balanced intense aliveness.

The heightened states that are the natural results of intense danger and passionate desire generally involve the feeling of being overpowered by your emotions because something from the outside has reached in and given you a very real external focal point. If it is possible to say that meditation is when daylight consciousness in which we normally live marries the night time consciousness of sleep then mindfulness maybe a state that marries that everyday state of consciousness with the heightened states of stress and desire.

In these heightened states we are usually not aware of our inner life. The focus is on the external and as a result we hear stories of people doing all kinds of miraculous things because they overlook the limitations that normally restrict them. Meditation and contemplation are focussed on the experience of life inside your skin. Both are connected to your culture because the meditation exercises are usually taught along with meanings that have a whole cosmology to them, a background which is part of their power. Even Transcendental Meditation where they do not teach you the meaning of the particular mantra is still couched in goals and possibilities and meanings for your psyche of the practice.

Contemplation is not analytical in the logical way of science as we described above, but nonetheless it is a process of breaking down consciousness experientially to get beyond culture and language to the deep sources of your experience what Zen calls the “essence of mind”. Mindfulness is building a bridge between these two aspects of consciousness broadening the experience of wakefulness to incorporate the moment in all its meanings internal and external, cultural and sensory. Even here the simile of the bridge is inadequate because you probably focus on the bridge and forgot that it needs supports and entry points on each river bank, or maybe it’s across a freeway full of cars. In that sense it is transcendent because it transforms our relationship with our sense of self, our cultural context and the body, that is the seat of the uniqueness best demonstrated by the fact that we have one set of eyes looking at a point and integrated in our experience as a singular point of view.

Tantra and Celibacy

Celibacy and Tantra

Celibacy and walking the the Way of the Lover

First publish in the magazine 'Living Now' in Australia a few years ago.

We hear a lot about the sexual practices of Tantra. But Tantra is much more than a therapeutic program for people having problems (or bored) with their sex lives. It provides more than a group of psycho-physical techniques to master the vulnerabilities of the erotic. Tantra is the way of the lover. It's about the way we define ourselves in relation to anything that we experience as outside ourselves, as other, whether it's spirit versus body, the mind versus the emotions, me versus you, good versus bad, allies versus enemies. As such it does not rely on having a lover and/or sex partner to be an effective part of self development. It is a cosmology based on a symbolic marriage, on embracing all the wondrous complexity of real life relationships. This marriage is about achieving a psychic homeostasis between all the various forces of the inner and outer worlds.

Of course, a sense of sexual mastery is foundational to anyone's self-esteem and personal power, since, after survival, sex is the second most important force within us. I believe you should not take up Tantra until you already understand what good sex is for you. However, we have to be careful not to be blinded to the deeper truths at Tantra's core because the sexual accomplishments it makes available are so exciting. This is one of the reasons why celibacy is considered valid in Indian and North Asian Tantra.

When people publish articles and books on Western Tantra, they will talk about the symbolic marriage of complementary opposites, yin and yang, female and male, good and bad, etc, but they rarely mention one of central dualities of sex - its presence and absence. In India they talk about the left and right-hand paths. The left-hand path is the path we associate with Western Tantra, its followers have sex, among many other sometimes confronting rituals and techniques - like speding the night with corpses for instance. Followers of this path are very rare in India and North Asia. The right-hand path is much more common and is the path of most ascetic Tantrikas. The right-hand path is celibate, involves many intense exercises and techniques which are designed to redirect, transform and transcend the power of sexual energy, of desire and craving, in order to fulfil spiritual and magical goals. It is a path away from, beyond and separated from the ordinary world, the world of the senses.

Since the sixties sexual revolution we have come to think of celibacy as unnatural. Part of Tantra's attraction stems from its mythological, moral and philosophical support for this very modern phenomenon, and also because sex sells. The two paths express the very duality which is central to Tantra by approaching the vulnerability of Sex and desire in opposing ways: Feasting or Fasting.

In Tantra the archetypal duality of relationships is symbolised by the Warrior and the Lover. The warrior represents the right-hand path and Lover the left. The way of the warrior is so strong because it uses survival as its central image with fear as its central emotion. It pushes us to define our boundaries. The Lover's central emotional drive is desire and love. It asks us to drop our boundaries. Where survival causes us to contract inwards to gather our resources, sex (desire) pulls us out of ourselves. Desire can push us to expand beyond our capacities. In its negative expression it can cause us to feel we are losing our sense of ourselves. Desire is at its strongest when the object of desire is absent.

Being single is as important an opportunity in Tantra as having a beautiful loving relationship. The central aim of Tantra is an inner marriage between the various forces within the self. Conflict between these internal elements can drain us of our power. Our external relationships are mirrors for that inner world. The intense desire that arises in the absence of the Beloved, when we are lonely or alone, confronts us with the way we compromise our integrity in order to seek fulfilment in other people or even in objects. But that longing can be a confirmation of the depth of your passion, your faith and your willingness to live a life of devotion to love and truth. One of the central conflicts of life is between the inner and the outer. A powerfully way it plays out is between a desire for something and fulfilling that desire. Where do you look for fulfilment (external or internally)? How do you gain inner fulfilment without being escapist? The practice in Tantric Sex of holding back on the fulfilment of sexual desire, redirecting and transmuting it for other purposes or for achieving greater ecstasy is both real and symbolic.

Symbolic, in that it points to a way of learning to change our relationship with emotion and desire. It can be applied to any emotional reaction or desire turning it into fuel for our greater purposes. It asks us to recognise that we are more than our emotions, more than our desires, more than our body whilst recognising how
important they are. Tantra does not ask you to suppress your feelings rather, to choose the path to fulfilling them, and to use them in a way that intensifies your experiences and maintains, promotes and celebrates the integrity of the self.

Celibacy has a role in Western Tantra but it has to be for the right reasons, with a clear intent, and is very rarely a lifetime commitment. Enforced celibacy is a power trip, celibacy must be a very personal choice. The power of sex in our lives means that if you are truly interested in knowing how it affects the flow of your destiny, your will, your emotions then celibacy has to be considered because choosing not to fulfil such a central desire can be a very empowering choice. However, if we choose it as a reaction against the pain caused by intimacy gone wrong, and we are being escapist, it can be dangerously disempowering. Celibacy, when used in this way can be as addictive as drugs and gambling, it needs to be practised with clear intent.

There are periods in our lives when we are celibate without feeling that we have made the choice for it. The feelings - rejection, anger, self-loathing, loneliness, even a sense strength and self sufficiency - which come up for us in those times can teach us as much, or more, about ourselves as the times when we have a deeply emotional connection with someone. People teaching Tantra are not giving the complete wisdom if they are not showing you how to use loneliness, or aloneness, and frustrated desire, as part of your path to the greater union which sex represents in Tantra.

Tantra in India has several roles. Most commonly it is as a path to extraordinary states of ecstasy through understanding, controlling and directing the flow of sexual energy, desire and its physiology. It also provides techniques to help ascetics deal with what they see as the distraction sex represents, to their spiritual evolution. Another role is the same as sex magic in the Pagan and shamanistic traditions - that is, as a way of focussing your psychic and physical energies for achieving particular goals.

The way of the Lover seeks to treat the self as an integrated whole, thus wholistic (rather than "holistic" from hole or holy as this other spelling suggests), not as a goal to be achieved, but as a reality now, by fostering self-acceptance and self-love. This means every day states of being are as important as the heightened states of meditation, sex and mystical experiences. It is interesting that when talking about spirituality many people are quick to use the image of the warrior but still seem to cringe when it comes to the symbolism of sex and the lover. The sexual techniques of Tantra are important, but the way of the lover is about embracing the greatest challenges rather than conquering them. When Jesus said "turn the other cheek" and Gandhi stood non-violently against oppression their respect of the enemy made them Tantrikas. Multiculturalism and democracy, in their attempts to create a politics of tolerance and inclusion of all points of view, are political expressions of the way of the lover.

More important than the great sex a little knowledge of Tantra offers, is the courage to continue to risk the pain of passion, vulnerability and love. When we are single, we can discover the meaning of the lessons of our relationships and integrate them. Some people speak of the love of God as if it's separate from the way we love life, family, friends and our partners, but could you cut a colour out of the rainbow. Love, especially self-love, is a subtle and difficult problem. The way we deal with being alone is as important as how we give ourselves to our external partners. How we treat those partners is a direct reflection of how we treat ourselves in our inner dialogue. For example, patterns of thought, desire and emotion can have unexpected implications. A case in point is, it is possible to interpret attempts at self-improvement as a form of self-loathing, because you are not happy with yourself as you are, you are seeking to push yourself to live up to an idealisation of who you should be, could be or identify with. This can lead to the desire to help or fix your partners without respecting their achievements.

At the same time personal development can arise from self love and the desire to build on your strengths rather than to fix your weaknesses. If you do not grow and strive, you stagnate and give up on fulfilling your potential, on the expansive power of desire. So when questioning all other things on the path of self-development it is important to question the reason we seek that development to ensure it is based on true self-respect. And thus rehearsing on yourself the love and respect you want to give to and receive from your partners, whether they are friends or lovers. These ideas are central to the esoteric practices of Tantra, as a way of the lover.