Chod is the Tantric–I think–practice of offering your body as a “Red Feast” to demons. You imagine yourself being dismembered, and flayed, and offered as food to any demons who want to take part.
Neel is distressed by the man seemingly losing his mind (her intent, by the way, had been to meditate near the body parts herself), so she finds his teacher, who is literally meditating in the middle of the night in a local cave, and he more or less tells her “he knew the risks. It is up to him now to realize that he is the one devouring himself. I won’t tell him.”
These are vivid images. Two nights ago I dreamed that Gwyneth Paltrow’s latest project was instructing her Goop team to engage in cannibalism. Last night the spirit was similar, but really without any defining images. If you are a sensitive sort, imagine feeling that sort of horror every night, and you get a feel for what my average night is like.
And it occurs to me that, in important respects, I myself am engaging in involuntary Chod. I am being forced to confront fear in a more or less pure form.
What is most likely the most primitive, basic fear engrained, embodied, in each of us? I would hazard a guess it is being eaten. Our fight/flight/shame and freeze systems are designed, in the first case, to prevent us from being eaten, and in the second–the lizard brain–to deal with the horror of it when we can’t avoid it. This is what dissociation does.
And obviously the amygdala response, and the lizard brain responses are related. It is my basic, not particularly knowledgeable–and I’m not at all sure that the best scientists working in the best universities really understand this either–understanding that what lasts in trauma is the shut down that happens when the lizard brain takes over. There is a push and pull in normal people between social consciousness–the front brain–and the lizard brain. In the middle are hypo-and hyperarousal, which give the most obvious affective signs of trauma, which is to say anxiety, fear, shame, chronic anger and unnecessary aggression, and, in tandem, periodic lethargy, listlessness, and emotional detachment.
In Chod you are more or less directly activating all this circuitry. You are offering yourself as food. In the long run–and this is a practice which might be done periodically and even regularly for long years–the fear subsides, particularly once, as the lama implied, the practitioner realizes that he or she is both the origin of the horror and the recipient, making it a loop that can be ended. This makes sense especially when you consider that Chod literally means to sever.
I really think that much of spiritual practice, in the beginning at least, consists in developing the skill to voluntarily control the fear systems. We know that yogis can learn to voluntarily do all sorts of amazing things like control their heart rate and even skin temperature. Why not their ability to feel fear?
As I have said often, within the Kum Nye system which appeals to me by far more than any other system of personal growth I have yet encountered, the goals are very broadly to learn relaxation, then mindfulness, then concentration.
Within this context this would equal, roughly, “cutting” yourself off from fear, learning to monitor yourself for recurrences, then over time learning to concentrate and expand the positive feelings which eventually drift into your awareness, once you stop pushing them out in fear.
Christ himself taught “always there will be wars and rumors of wars.” Most of us are not facing literal death every day–that might actually be a relief, in some ways, for some of us–but we are all growing older, knowing we will one day die. We fear discomfort, and even inconvenience.
Lao Tzu wrote “we lose by gaining, and gain by losing”. I can’t claim to know what all he meant by that, but that we fear losing more when we have more seems clear enough. In their own way, perhaps your local homeless people are more free than you. Most of them are homeless because they had demons they couldn’t handle, but not, I don’t think, all of them. There is no reason to be jealous of them, but if I might riff again on an otherwise tired them, you might want to “check your attachments.”
I get a little better every day, I think. It’s not easy. My life is not easy, and to be sure, these are not easy times.
I do think Trump needs to keep his cool, stay on message, and investigate the origins–if he can find honest people to do it–of all the present attacks on our society.
Joe Biden is the weakest, worst, most execrable and cringe-worthy candidate of any major party in my lifetime. I won’t venture to say in the history of our Republic, but he has to be on the short list. He’s a rapist, seeming pedophile, serial groper, the origin of any number of idiotic public utterances, very, very old, and losing his mind.
I saw a piece yesterday calling this the battle of good and evil. I would agree with that.
And what is evil, really? A spirit in a human body that never really stops identifying primarily with the lizard brain, which seeks out terror and destruction because those are the only things that make it feel at all.