60 days

I've only just got round to celebrating my 60-day milestone here because I've been frantic about my wife and whether she will make it over here from the US. It looks alright as things stand today but we will be desperately anxious until she gets here.

I have to say that abstaining from porn and masturbation has been easy so far. I have not had any serious desire for porn at all. It seems like something shifted when I joined the forum. I will never say I have cracked it because that kind of arrogance can lead to disaster. But to be honest I feel pretty confident at the moment.

Why is that? Because I have largely transformed myself. That means the structure of my consciousness has changed. The self that I experience now, the self-conscious self, did not exist five years ago. I was just a cloud of reacting fragments, completely controlled by my unconscious emotions. Now I am aware of myself. How? Quite clearly, it is through the Buddhist practice I have learned from my Master in Vietnam. I can clearly see the links between mind and body, thoughts and emotions, mindfulness and karma. I can leave the storm of whirling thoughts and come back to myself, my senses, the world around me. Today I was helping my Dad at his allotment (for non-UK readers, an allotment is a large plot of land where people can cheaply rent a vegetable patch from the local council). I stopped to watch a bullfinch and two long-tailed tits hopping around and singing in a tree. How can I describe the joy and beauty of watching those miraculous wild creatures?

The one big lesson I have learned regarding porn addiction, and what I can offer as advice to anyone who is really struggling to get started with their recovery, is that we have to deal with the root of the problem, and the root of the problem is fantasy. As long as we continue to indulge in fantasy, we will at best be holding back the torrent of porn addiction by force. Only by abstaining from fantasy can we remove the desire for porn. If you feel resistance to that idea, you might ask yourself why you want to hang on to fantasy.

Of course, it's almost or actually impossible to stop sexual fantasies arising in the unconscious mind. But when they do arise, we have the choice of whether to deliberately indulge in them or focus on something else. By ignoring the fantasy and focusing the mind on something else, preferably the body and the physical senses, we are witholding our assent from the reality of the fantasy. On the other hand, if we commit our desire to the fantasy, and take our desire for a mind-created image as real - which you can clearly see is insane when I state it that way - we perpetuate the cycle of false desire and false satisfaction. It's simply self-generated porn. A mental short-circuit.

There are bigger lessons to learn about desire in general, whether it's for food, money, health, worldly achievement or any kind of experience, about the I-want-this I-want-that mentality, the petulant child who sulks when he doesn't get his sweetie. These things are beyond the scope of this forum, but perhaps some people will be led to the path of liberation (which by no means has to be Buddhist: Buddhism is just a method) through overcoming the root of their porn addiction.