[illumination]

Using these mind control techniques, I have successfully avoided using porn 100% since I started looking at TTF. But I don't feel that I am completely free from the addiction. The images and the conditioned responses are still lurking in there somewhere. Sometimes they pop up in my dreams, sometimes they try to creep into my daydreams. I feel like I have wrapped them all up in a barrier that separates them from my waking mind, and they have slunk away into some dusty corner of my unconscious.

The problem is that, wherever they are lurking, they still have all the power of a lifetime of sexual conditioning associated with them. Something in me still responds to them. I want to be free from them completely.

But nothing is ever eliminated from the memory, and I believe that the deeper it's repressed the more power it has. Suppression may be an effective emergency tactic to break addictive behaviour and to stop reinforcing the conscious patterns of association. But suppression does not suffice to burn out the poison altogether. And since nothing is ever eliminated from memory, the only possible solution is to decondition the response to the memory.

Tibetan buddhist scriptures speak of descending into hell to liberate the beings trapped there. By becoming a relaxed spectator of one's mind - so that what appears in the mind is regarded as just a sensory phenomenon like what appears in the other senses - it should be possible to allow the images to arise and observe the mind's response without getting caught up in it. The images arise, the mind's responses to them may arise, and then they cease again. They pop up like statues in a gallery and I walk past without giving them any particular interest. The power of this neutral stance is enormous.

Until recently I would have felt it too dangerous to allow this material to arise, but now I have reduced the strength of the behavioural conditioning I am starting to believe that it is both possible and necessary for me to move on to this stage. That is, not to seek out any particular images, but if they do arise, to allow them to pass through without getting involved.