Suppression

The doctrine is simple. A passion fires, and you may act it out, push it down, or channel it — let it arise, let it land, ride the energy into being here. The first two are forbidden; the third is the practice. What you cannot do is stop the passion from arising in the first place; reach for that lever and you come back holding suppression, whatever you called the reach. I am about to accuse someone else of reaching for it.

Richard is clear that his "nipping in the bud" is not suppression:

That declines a dead-end path after a feeling has arisen; it does not throttle the feeling at the root. I quote the distinction carefully, and then apply it to everyone but myself.

The real suppressor, then, is Claudiu, on the strength of his own words. He prescribed "minimizing lust itself in the first place, rather than enjoying it (briefly or not) and thus endorsing it," and nailed a disclaimer to it: "this is not advice to suppress lust either." A post later came the tell: "Wouldn't it be so much easier for them not to arise in the first place …?" You only hang a no suppression here sign on a room full of it. I have read his disclaimer as a confession, and I am confident my own disclaimers are nothing of the kind.

I, by contrast, do not stop my lust from arising. I let it arise and channel it — it fires as a still-born grin, I enjoy it, and I let nothing come of it. That, I maintain, is the opposite of suppression. When I demanded a first-hand account, Claudiu gave one — that for him lust "simply doesn't arise" when he is "genuinely feeling good — really having a blast, out with friends, on a holiday."¹ I dismissed it on the spot: that is the holiday doing the work, not the method. I keep my own libido "still-born" so that it never flourishes, savour the grin it leaves me, and submit the savouring as proof that I am the one channelling and Claudiu the one minimising.

When I put this to the forum, the reply was that my request for a first-hand report had been insincere — that I asked for one and then "hastily dismissed" the answer. But weighing an account is not refusing one. I have responded to the charge that I dodge arguments by reframing the argument as a question about my critic's sincerity.

I should add, for completeness, that I trained for years in Goenka vipassana before this — the discipline of observing a feeling as not-self until it stops registering. People sometimes mention it. I do not see the relevance. I have reported that my entire sexual identity simply vanished — the libido excepted, which I keep and channel — and I have placed the one thing that would explain a whole identity vanishing like that in a sentence I have marked as irrelevant.