Is renunciation the best strategy?

Very intuitive approach. I find it makes the utmost sense to me, at least in how things work for my way of thinking.

I presume that this may possibly be slightly too 'deep' for some, especially the younger crowd. I think that for the most part, until you have experience dealing with certain life challenges, this stuff isn't quite relatable or ...difficult to truly comprehend because the abstractions aren't anchored by memories or feeling senses. The last quote, particularly..... I know I had heard it many times but I can definitely say that it holds far more depth and carries a significant weight to me compared to what it elicited in my youth. Back then it just sounded cool but I didn't feel the weight of it like reading a really good poem that speaks to your soul.


Sure hope I'm only being a pessimist, however.

 

Yes, "that which you resist persists." Of course, the idea of resistance is actually also different than renunciation. That leaves the other point of ignoring it, and of course he offers the alternative of seeing through it - which I think is actually what traditional renunciates actually do. It also doesn't seem to be a "thing" either, even a behavior, and not a "don't look" kind if ignoring but disinterest with awareness of what it is about and not indulging in it. Sometimes they talk about renouncing the self, or the very notion of an unchanging self. If that actually happens, what is there to resist or take a position against something? But it's also hard to be "for" porn not ideologically but even on a feeling level. If that renunciation is not just on a cognitive intellectual level but an existential thing, the very idea of being a sexual being may be called into question. I just mention that for context, I'm sure very few actually "do" it, and since it wouldn't involve identifying in any way you'd be neither for nor against.

I haven't read Nietzsche, but especially in this context with the Anthony De Mello quote and renunciation I can't help but connect the idea of an abyss with that kind of emptiness I guess. In that sense the abyss isn't so much identified with the monstrous thing, but that "third place" of non-identification. Perhaps here people tend to think a deep gaze from a person has something to do with sexuality, (not posting for that reason but funnily appropriate that the other person commenting has a iridology avatar pic) but there is a way a person or persons can make eye contact in that kind of seeing through to an unknown, rather than feeling seen as a person. People who are not that familiar or used to it seems to find it slightly disturbing and yet experience a bit of allure since it's sensed to be something very different. Some would say this is "pure awareness" - not awareness "of" something but awareness through one meeting awareness in another, without any cognitive content and without concern with personal identification at an intermediate level. As such, it would not be a "strategy" but touching into something beyond strategy or the basic duality of grasping and averting. There's a sense that it's something alive but not doing anything except "looking." Lets call this "gaze of the abyss." Whereas a personal gaze may be met with some form of being self conscious, maybe concern one may be judged (as in the case of PMO) this is about something existentially profound and undermines the foundation of considering one a mind, a self... I'd say there's more an awareness of what it does not involved in a kind of via negativa, and that is it doesn't involve something personal. So there isn't so much a thought of why is that person looking at me like that (if it's even from a person) or who is s/he - there may be some sense that question makes no sense because it is intuited that this is not personal in nature. Which goes back to seeing through - except here it's not porn or that general narrative, it is seeing through personhood itself.

 

That experience would be silent and still as one might expect, but one of the closest thing from a place of feeling might be this cover of Tomorrow Never Knows by the late Michael Hedges: