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Something that's been on my mind lately, the matter of acceptance and its place in the spiritual experience. We're all familiar with the saintly, gentle, all-accepting archetype of a spiritual practitioner- its a pretty hollow conception, especially given how easy it is to imitate (and most do). I remember reading a (apocryphal) story a while back where Confucious (sp?) and Lao-tzu are talking about the merits of their idealogical persuasion. Confucious says something to the tune of "Universal embrace of all beings without partisenship" and Lao-tzu replies: "Isn't that a sort of partisenship?" The problem arises when you set out to be all accepting, you end up rejecting the option of rejection, so it isn't true acceptance. Of course you could set out to accept rejection as a part of your all-consuming acceptance, but even then you'd be creating more duality as you'd unconsciously reject the option of rejecting rejection (or more likely, they'd use it as an excuse to slip back into their old mind of picking and excluding).
So how would one achieve a genuine acceptance? It can't be done as something to be set out upon, you can't just make up your mind to do it, because the mind will have to sacrifice one concept to create the option for the other. Under all this deciding of what to accept and not to accept, lies the subconscious mind, which obeys no limits of logic and accepts everything. The ego rejects that which it cannot reconcile with what it has assimilated, the primordial/intuitive/subconscious mind accepts everything, even that which contradicts the other things that it has accepted. It doesn't obey any sort of logical boundary. Acceptance isn't a decision to be made, a shift in thought that makes you more saintly, its not that. Rather it is an experience to be felt with intensity, it is intuitive, instinctive, wild. You can see it shine in the eyes of lovers, where they burn and drown in their passion for eachother. Where the cries of the profit-seeking ego are so distant that they exalt in their lover's weaknesses and faults as much as their strengths.
That is what you might call tantric acceptance. |
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