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Escapism / routine distractions.

Discussion in 'Self Improvement' started by elevate, Oct 8, 2018.

  1. elevate

    elevate Fapstronaut

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    Too often we try to numb, dull, distract, and escape from the pain, problems, and negative experiences of reality. The anxiety, tension, adversity, fear that we feel when faced with adversity is there for resistance to make us stronger, but that potential for growth is untapped when we choose to escape from it rather than stick with it. It dulls our edge and instinct for living in reality. It feels uncomfortable so we tend to try to erase it from our lives rather than working through it to become a better person. PMO is a form of escapism that this community has in common. It's what we have used to condition ourselves to become idle, content, and comfortable by escaping reality. Escaping any potential for negative experiences, but also escaping any potential for positive experiences.

    I love what this guy wrote about here.

    “Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn't about truth, love, or the divine.

    If you take on these disciplines for a few weeks, as well as any other disciplines that may particularly cut through your unique habits of dullness, then your life will be stripped of routine distraction. All that will be left is the edge you have been avoiding by means of your daily routine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is the hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living your truth, rather than hiding form it.

    Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel. And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control.

    Instead, feel your suffering, rest with it, embrace it, make love with it. Feel your suffering so deeply and thoroughly that you penetrate it, and realize its fearful foundation. Almost everything you do, you do because you are afraid to die. And yet dying is exactly what you are doing, from the moment you are born. Two hours of absorption in a good Super Bowl telecast may distract you temporarily, but the fact remains. You were born as a sacrifice. And you can either participate in the sacrifice, dissolving in the giving of your gift, or you can resist it, which is your suffering.

    By eliminating the safety net of comforts in your life, you have the opportunity to free fall in this moment between birth and death, right through the hole of your fear, into the unthreatenable openness which is the source of your gifts. The superior man lives as this spontaneous sacrifice of love.”

    ― David Deida
     
    Ra's Al Ghul likes this.
  2. Ra's Al Ghul

    Ra's Al Ghul Fapstronaut

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    Great post. I'm against any philosophies/beliefs where you're asked to deny reality and live in a bubble.
     

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