42113. Why 'Letting Go' Is a
Bungee Cord
And The Secret Behind Blow-Out
Jobs
Sometimes one can hear the fine advice that
all one really has to do would be 'to let go'.
This is truly a great piece of advice!
If it would work, there would be no drug addicts, no jealousy, no wars, and the Funeral companies couldn't sell oak coffins...
'Addictions' are compulsive desires that conflict with the currently prevailing moral code.
Technically, there is no difference between
the structure of the deep-seated urge to own a
home or the burning desire of a sex criminal.
The former is likely to be ruined or incarcerated by mortgage payments for the rest of this lifetime; the latter may wind up with a lifetime sentence behind physical bars but may be pardoned and released after a year or less.
'Letting go' is like hanging down a piece of stone on a bungee cord. The urge, whatever it may be, will sit down there in suspense, swinging back and forth, just waiting to snap back.
Many people have the gift of a 'strong will'. They can push the compulsive desire away from them.
Compared to this configuration a cocked gun is very hard to fire. The desire has to be continued to be pushed away constantly and the slightest slip of attention will make the stretched bungee cord snap back right into the face of the unlucky guy.
The 'stronger' the will, the more one can get hurt this way. A driveless, willy-nilly drifting person changes his/her 'will' like a flag in the wind and doesn't have a problem with all this to begin with.
One twist in this bungee cord stretching game has been advertised for thousands of years but works with conjunction for another process (and ONLY then!!):
An appropriate way to 'treat' a desire can be to engage in the four wholesome states of the mind (sharing love, relieving discomfort, sharing joy, and equanimity). However, this works only if these states are actually entered. People who subscribe to the terrible belief that 'all life would be suffering' (cp. The Devastating Mistranslations of the Word 'dukkha') cannot enter these states sufficiently enough to heal their own (and others) wounds because if they would heal them, they (and the other Beings) would be happy and that would make it wrong to say 'all life is suffering' (quod erat demonstrandum).
One approach that does in fact work very nicely is being promoted by NLP teachers and they call it aptly a 'blow-out'process. Having seen enough scars in the mind of their clients, they recognize the danger of the bungee cord and emphasize to not use this process on oneself.
In a gross simplification, the blow-out process makes the clients, paying or not, exaggerate the objects of their desires beyond proportion in whatever appropriate submodality, such as size, weight, smell, sound, etc. If distance and/or movement is involved, those circumstances are considered as well.
At a certain, unpredictable point in the 'blow-out' process, the entire object of desire blows away in whatever direction, apparently blowing up the original attachment to it in the process.
This is the classic pattern of a threshold process, of course, and as long as the desire involved is not of a criminal of counter-survival nature there is no reason not to use it in self-processing. The worst that can happen is that the blow-out fails to occur. Now the chain smoker is buying four instead of three packs per day, increasing the tax income of the government.
But what exactly is happening? And what is the secret behind blow-out jobs?
It could be seen the following way:
Using a model, one could say that if a Being creates a desire (tanha), the desire acts like a beam of a Hologram Generator. It has a direction and intensity and will activate anything in its path that resonates. When it has found a resonating occurence in the Universe, it should be satified and then expire.
The problem occurs when there is an intervention before the desire has been fulfilled. The grim reaper happens to come along and chops off the person's head or some mean-spirited guy tries to prevent the person's desire in whichever way.
In the time the Being has its basic gear together after being hit this way, it has forgotten the purpose of the original desire and can't undo it easily, or, if he can, is too lazy to do so.
The more outdated desires stack up, the less they can be differentiated. If they become a nuissance, it seems easier for the Being to create a NEW desire that nullifies the effect of the original one with the forgotten purpose.
This may look like this:
Now, how does 'blow-out' work and why?
The solution is so trivial that it requires a true and fearless genius, primed with a massive dote of uncritical over-confidence, to find it:
If a desire is completely satisfied, it will cease to exist. Now, if the basic desire is not too hidden and can be uncovered with a recall process, imagining the object of either the desire or antidesire will be given some, but because of internal filters usually not enough, satisfaction. Overloading the perception system with a similar input that the desire vectors desire, can reach a threshold that will blow the single vector or any combination in pieces. If the pieces are still too big, one can repeat the process on a smaller scale.
Again, this blow-out works only if either desire or anti-desire are actually known.
Now, using this model, several other possibilities open up:
Under the right circumstances (namely when done correctly), temporarily giving up virtually everything or transferring it to a higher authority may collapse parts within the web of desires. Examples fot these, let's call them 'devotional' processes, are Subud's latihan, Hindu bhakti, and some forms of Christian worshipping.
The problem with these processes that they can make things worse when they are done incorrectly. In this case, the web construction is even more solid and anchored then before and it will be more and more difficult to break even little parts out of it.
Gotamo suggested an undercut: projecting the basic vibrations of attention towards the construct which will, when done correctly and long enough, reach the original desire beam and satisfy it, thus leading to its resolution. If this projection of basic vibrations is permeating the web of desire with equal strength and no preference of direction, both desire and antidesire in any construct are equally strongly hit and resolve.
The good news is that this principle works for every kind of desire, entity, circuit... you name it.
The bad news is that, even though simple enough, it is difficult to learn or even to communicate to others (there will be an attempt in another chapter).
In principle all that a 'desire' needs is attention. In a loaded case, any attention is overloaded by other desires and prevents a 'clean' attention unless the 'desire' is very small in spatial size and in energy, compared to the Being. This circumstance is being used in 'entity clearing' where a single blink of attention can suffice to clear the desire fragment or cluster. Splitting it up in basic vibration makes it easier, though, and by going through them cleans up the Being's attention until , in the state of 'equanimity', raw attention without attachments of remaining desires, can be given.
Nowadays, contemporary techniques can be extremely helpful in cleaning up the mind until the basic vibration and, ultimately raw attention, can be applied. Those techniques, currently most comprehensively described and summarized in Flemming Funch's Transformational Processing, require a trained and skilled facilitator for some but not all of the clean-up work to be done.
One drawback of modern systems is that the Being stops its progress once it cannot see anything alien to itself anymore. This can make it 'Blinded by The Light' far too soon.
A solution would be to merge the approach described in the 'Anatta (Non-Self) Principle' with the ladder of progress in contemporary approaches (bridges). Entering states of the mind that lead to undivided attention (equanimity) also increases the 'anatta' awareness as a side effect.
The most basic (and most powerful) vibration that can be used is 'love' (Pali: metta, Old-Greek: agape, Old-High-German: Minne). In English, 'love' means everything from the activities of porn-movie actors to divine love. In a surprising linguistic devolution, words that were once used to describe 'love' as a basic vibration of attention, have been lost in most modern languages. The same is true for what is now called 'compassion', which does not mean one is suffering with or for another person, but one radiates a trust in the healing abilities of the other (or one's own case). 'Sharing Joy', the third basic vibration, does not even have a perverted name in English. It could also be called 'confidence in the positive (happy) outcome' of what is going on out there and within.
From another, different perspective undivided, raw attention is sometimes called 'Peace in God'. If one could forget for just a little moment about the concerted efforts of greedy priests to bend concepts and twist around the meaning of words since nearly two millennia, one could even appreciate what a fellow named Paul wrote to his buddies in Korinthos, a most intriguing ancient city with perhaps the greatest number of temple prostitutes ever to pursue their divine work within a single city. (Note, that, Paul used the word 'agape' and not 'eros', of course).
He wrote:
Trust,
Love, and Confidence: these three.
But Love is the
most powerful amongst them.