The energetic arena
February 6, 2024
Quote
Let’s take an example: We meet someone whom we are attracted to. From the first moments, our mind will set itself in motion, get itself going, and we will form a strategy, a plan, expectations, hopes. Fears will immediately come into play. The fear of being wronged or deceived, of being abandoned, will surge up very quickly. We have not yet had the time to develop any real intimacy with this person and yet already our whole system has been put in a position of overabundance and failure. The whole energetic arena of the encounter is already a minefield of strategies, which are all the more disconcertingly surprising and distracting because there are two of us elaborating them. It can be said that this whole conceptual structure will minimize our chances of a true meeting, of a true connection. Corporality, being present to another, is henceforth jumbled up with an infinite number of encumbrances. Future actions will thus lack spontaneity and intensity—as if we are being tele-guided by distant beings. We will find ourselves once again in this situation in which two people lacking in completeness will, by a sort of mutual cannibalism, attempt to fill the void in their lives. Each will use the other from this perspective and, even if we pass through happy moments, the time will come where the sum of these strategies and blockages will completely paralyze the relationship.
Odier, Daniel. Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening
I found myself returning to this wonderful book today - thinking about the nature of freshness in relationships. What it would be like to bring a simple wholehearted, loving, compassionate presence to our encounters with others? With no expectations, no story, no future or past, simply spontaneous responsiveness to what the situation and person requires?
Links
It’s hypothesis day at links!
A hypothesis for how emergence happens at different levels of systems, and how biological systems at one level (e.g. cells) can communicate at higher levels of organization (e.g. conscious experience). I don’t know enough about bio-electricity to evaluate this idea, but I am intrigued by it and generally find Michael Levin to be one of the thought-provoking scientists working today.
Interesting hypothesis that some addicting things elicit a lot of wanting and not very much liking, exacerbating their grab. The liking / wanting distinction goes back to this classic Kent Berridge paper - the core idea is that desire and enjoyment recruit different brain structures and are dissociable. Basically, normal things that induce a lot of wanting also elicit a lot of pleasure when we get them, which in turn dampens wanting. Addictive substances (mmm Doritos) don’t elicit much liking-reducing satisfaction, even while keeping desire enflamed.
This thread from Johnny Miller asks the question of what determines whether a given peak experience leads to lasting change. It touches on one hypothesis - that change happens via a kind of memory reconsolidation. Briefly, when we remember something, it becomes plastic / amenable to change. Many therapy modalities (e.g. MDMA therapy, exposure therapy) operate on the idea that if we can expose ourselves to the traumatic memory / stimulus under conditions of greater emotional openness / availability, then we can create a new emotional association with that memory. It seems plausible, and in fact, one of the core advanced Vajrayana practice, called self-arising self-liberating, works this way. Basically you re-experience memories from the View of Buddha-nature, and when you view it as an expression of luminosity / clarity / wisdom, you can reconsolidate it another way. So in SA/SL you basically just let memories come up and let them liberate (“like a snake uncoiling”)1.
Is suffering bad?
Theravadan Buddhism (the first turning of the wheel of dharma) orients the goal of practice around the end of suffering. It’s hard to argue that suffering is bad, and yet, Vajrayana (the third turning) might offer a slightly different perspective. In this other perspective, samsara and nirvana are not separate, and there is a way to view suffering as a font of wisdom. Some harbor a pre-conception that as we become deep practitioners, all difficult emotions will cease and our lives will be nothing but joy and love and bliss. Even if such a permanent state were possible, Vajrayana might deny that such a thing is desirable. Instead, “difficult” emotions and their corresponding energies can arise as appropriate response to a situation. Even aspects like grasping, dukkha, can arise, transmuted2, as part of skillful means. What I mean is that ordinary suffering provides a tether of empathy and understanding that links accomplished practitioners with their fellow human beings, and can be a source of understanding and compassion. One can take a view that even suffering is precious in this way, and there’s no need to change state at all. If the goal of practice is not the end of suffering for oneself, but rather to express one’s Being for the benefit of all sentient Beings, then suffering could be itself an expression of primordial purity / perfection. Is this just cope? I say no.
Caveat emptor: don’t try this unless you have some stability in rigpa / awake awareness.
This is a core of tantric practice - everything bad is included and transformed rather than renounced.
I too loved Odier's book! Haven't read it in >20 years; I should revisit it.