There are, or have been, a few threads posted over the past few days specifically about sexuality and generally the problem of desire (some people want to get rid of it and some are worried that practicing will make romantic "love" go). I wonder if most people who are attracted to some kind of spiritual path have a love-hate relationship with the idea or possibilities of renunciation, which ultimately is either embraced or rejected along the way. (Or used to reinforce the sense of one's self as a 'failure.')

This got me thinking about what renunciation really is and what it really means, especially as I increasingly switch from meditative, or "Buddhist" practical modalities, to an actualist modality where there is absolutely no renunciate strain to negotiate whatsoever. Of course Daniel argues quite effectively against the limited behaviorial/emotional model for arhats in MCTB, but the sense that one must "give up" something to "get" arhatship persists, I think, in many Buddhists circles and/or thinking. And, anyone reading the Actual Freedom Trust website will have come across all the articles interrogating Richard about how much coffee he drinks, how many cigarettes he smokes, etc., etc., on and on, in an attempt to show that to be truly liberated, in either sense, one must eschew anything considered to be a sensual pleasure.

The other day while out on a walk I was popping very quickly in and out of PCE mode, so that the effect was kind of a fluttering in the brain... (that's the best I can do describing it...) And somewhere in that process I got the distinct feeling of the difference between the two modalities in relation to the question of "renunciation." Being in the actual world is so vastly different from being in the world of the mind, that to be consistently in PCE mode feels to me, almost literally, as if I have "left" something, left another world behind, or come into a new existence. For me, it is a feeling like when you move to another country, or another state, and you have new friends, a new job, a new house, perhaps even a new look--but much more extreme than this.

What feels like it is left behind (re: renounced) in PCE mode? Pretty much everything that used to motivate me falls away and what is left is everything that is always already available, which is staggeringly abundant. The word renunciation has a very negative connotation to it, I realize, and for that reason alone might be unappealing to some. But renouncing something, especially something that is destructive, is a good thing, actually. For example, while doing hardcore meditation, I definitely felt that I had a "goal," ultimate liberation, arhatship, etc., and this had its own texture of feeling which I won't belittle with a label, but my point is that it was affective in nature. When I was successfully meditating,I felt as if I were "making progress," as it were. However when in PCE mode, I don't have any feelings about progress whatsoever; it is its own state that it is already so glorious that a sense of satiety sets in that I've never really felt in meditation.

My understanding of attaining arhatship was always that if one wanted it, one would not get it (because of the mechanism of desire, despite the confusion that caused with the application of the idea of 'right effort,' but I digress)--so in some ways the actualism methods feels much more to me like what I thought arhatship was and I wonder, often, if it doesn't offer what people want most after all? And, as a literary critic, I am unable to resist the temptation to re-contextualize and analyze traditional Buddhist teaching and wonder if the blunt aspects of renunciation--the homeless life, if you will--wasn't the crudest form of a operational switch that is not behaviorial but is about how the brain works, so that all attempts to transform one's world (what needs transforming? if you can really *see* it, it becomes clear that it is already perfect), which is the cause of so much suffering, becomes a distant, primitive memory. Perhaps this is the ultimate renunciation, not a life of homelessness, but a life of harmlessness?