Today I have the audacity to comment on thousands of years of doctrine and tradition. This commentary has been building up within me for many years and reached exasperation point halfway through watching a documentary on yoga. The part that tipped me was a group of yogis that spend their days swing rocks from or getting their colleagues to stand on a pole attached to their penises. The aim is to kill desires one at a time.
To kill desire. What a gross misunderstanding of Buddhist and yogic philosophy. And this damaging belief is rife in many workshops and other content that I have studied. It reached a point where I have resisted reading about the very practices that I hold dear and do on a daily basis: yoga meditation and Kabbalah. Generally when I read these books something deep inside of me reacts. That’s my ego you may say.
My experience of the silence during meditation is that of wholeness, fullness and completeness. That quiet safe space revealed in Meditation is abundance and brilliantly alive. It is only our lack of awareness that veils it. Desire appears when there is a lack of awareness of this fullness of being. Which makes sense, when we lose our sense of completeness we would experience desire because there is a sense of incompleteness.
So there is nothing wrong with feeling desire in this our physical world. However, the pursuit of transient objects cannot complete us, it is only immersion in the wholeness of being that can. It is our mission to bring the energy of wholeness here. We have a wonderful array of spiritual technologies to do this, Kriya yoga and building the Tree are some of the best I know.
Mutilation of your genitals and other bizarre methods to suppress desire is not is not the path to wholeness and bliss that we seek. Killing the ego is also not it. After all, what is the ego and what is enlightenment? They are all concepts and beliefs that we personally may hold, and their meaning is often far from the intent of the original author. If you live and shape your life based on such mistaken concepts and beliefs, you are headed for disaster.
For example, one of my esoteric teachers said enlightenment is the ultimate purification. This is one of the most accurate descriptions of the aim of the spiritual practice and spiritual attitude I have yet heard. However, taken literally it has many implications that can have a negative impact on your life: does that mean I must be vegan, not watch tv or swear? Personally I find a well placed “fuck” very cathartic. Taken literally, it also negates the process of individuation, covered in another article.
I believe it is our mission to bring this Energy of Being into our day to day lives. It is our gift as humans because, as the Kabbalah says, our consciousness spans many worlds. At the deepest level is that wholeness. If we can resource ourselves from this place of fullness, a brilliantly alive life is to be had where greed and hatred have fallen away.
There is no greed because there is no fear of lack. There is no hatred and pushing away because wholeness of being is known as perfect harmony and inclusion. And desire is not killed, mutilated or suppressed but aligned to bring heaven to earth through loving, inclusive action. Let yourself be taught the real meaning of all these ideas, philosophies, concepts and beliefs by practising mindfulness meditation every day.