"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone - Alan Watts
Small potential triggers ahead
Why, when breaking free from the PMO addiction it’s best to throw out of the window all the three letters? How I see it, following the words of Alan Watts, our minds are just like ponds or lakes.
When you come to a lake, it’s sometimes flat like a mirror and you can see your own reflection together with the sky and everything around unperturbed, just another reality confined to the surface of the water.
However, that’s not the usual state - lakes are usually wavy, disturbed by people seeking across them it, rights thrown into them or wind smearing their surfaces. Nevertheless, the surface is rarely calm.
Have you ever tried to smooth out the surface of the lake the way you smooth things like cement or iron it kind clothes? Didn’t work, right? That’s what happens when you introduce any P or M or, for that matter, possibly even O back into your life.
Nevertheless, there are several ways they might crawl back into your life even after you realise their negative impact on “smoothing your water”
You might be swimming in that pond already, doing PMO or even being in a chain of binge watching. You’re somewhere in the middle of the lake and every move of your arms and legs disturbs the surface. The only way to make it silent is to swim to the shore. Sure enough, you’ll be still disturbing the surface, but the direction of important at that moment - even if you’re struggling, you’re headed for the peace of mind soon enough. It requires patience and persistence.
But once you’re in the shore, you might want to see how the lake behaves, if it’s still made of water or maybe just solid glass… So you take a rock and, still standing in the shore, you there it in - watch P, do MO alone, whatever considered kind of edging or such. Before you notice, you start to pick up stones and skip then across the lake, trying out bigger and bigger ones and at some point the lake is just as disturbed as it was when you were swimming. You know you don’t want to sink back to PMO, your doing your best, but after throwing a rock you need to wait again… The magic trick is not keep in your mind you shouldn’t wet your toes.
Finally, you might be standing in the shore and know already that even throwing a single rock will make this beautiful mirror wavy and disordered… But still, gusts of wind come and go, whistle across the land and create creases on your cherished, can lake. I’ve already mentioned this earlier, but we’re living in a society that’s over-sexualized. It may be lingerie store, unexpected advert, beauty in a movie you’re currently watching - you name it. At this point you might be tempted to grab your iron and iron the hell out of this little wavelets traveling in across the mirror… But that’s not the way. Leave them be, just watch them come and fade away. You’ll find out that without your intervention everything goes back to normal.
I’m writing about it just as if it was the Zen road to Satori… And maybe kind of is. It’s not like calming the whole mind, only this small monster that’s been planted in our brains but whatever happened to each of us. There are full description of how the party to Satori winds and bends and my favourite one is Ten Ox-Herding pictures.
I’m mentioning then because the last step is called “Entering the Marketplace with Helping Hands”. There are two ways to understand that, coming from two parts of the title. “Marketplace” can be seen at the bustling, over-sexualized world we’re living in and returning to it means that we don’t have to guard ourselves anymore. I’m not saying that upon reaching this point PMO won’t affect us. The point I’m trying to make is that physical attraction of sex are part of our daily lives. Once we there, physical attraction should be directed towards real people, and we will be comfortable with it.
“…with Helping Hands” is the thing we’re already trying to get here, by helping one another in the way. Nevertheless, once at this stage, all the “mud” of the daily lives, even of those addicted to what we’ve left behind, won’t be this touching so touching to us. We’ll be able to get close to the issue without actually being affected by it.
So that’s that, I guess… Let the waters settle and, maybe one day, you’ll come back with Helping Hands to our Marketplace. I certainly intend on doing so!