There is a certain weight, a certain gravitas, a certain flavor to making decisions based on what is important to your Primal Character. It’s because you think it’s you. You have self-identified with your Primal Character. You are either making decisions which bring in good things or you are making decisions that keep bad things away. Making decisions that “matter” to you is a very different thing than making decisions because of a “simple” preference.

Lots of people pointing to a thing, usually a live human being doing something, and slapping the “enlightenment” label on them.

What might Dojo say about, “enlightenment”?

First of all, there are two major forms of enlightenment, “dissociative” and “embodied”.

When you are completely self-identified with your character, things have to be defined in a certain way, things have to go a certain way, certain feelings are acceptable, certain feelings are unacceptable.

From a Buddhist perspective, the natural you is locked onto the wheel of samsara.

I don’t have to be in any way, do any thing, believe any thing, simply because I’m having an emotional response to something.

Emotions inform my reality.

Emotions are not my reality.

Fear is not the mind killer.

Fear is not the I-definer.

In Dojo, at a certain level of practice, you do indeed practice “self-immolation”.

It’s actually “character immolation”.

And if you’re not experiencing it as “self-immolation”, you’re not doing it.

From a Dojo POV, there is no reason why you can’t switch from one experiential state to another, at your choice. There is nothing hard-wired into human that says you have to stay where you are, experientially, until it’s done with you.

Sure, it might take some training, but it’s a doable thing.

It doesn’t matter where you’re at in the moment, you can choose to step off those experiential tracks and step onto another set.

The thing I love so much, that resonates so much with me, is, “I will not turn away.”

There is nothing to hide from.

There is nothing that needs to be ignored.

There is nothing that cannot be.

Damn but I love it when someone shows up at the gym and asks for help.

Not in doing specific exercises but to find out which ones are going to get them the most bang for their buck.

Out of all of the Dojo stuff I do, this is the one that I like the best.

Personally, I like dancing instead of answering.

AND

In Dojo, the invitations can look very, very, very different than the normative culture.

According to Dojo philosophy, the “real Dojo muscle building” is when it doesn’t go “well”, where the desired answer doesn’t show up.

“What’s really going to bake your noodle later on is….”

For me, relationshipping is transactional.

AND

Each transaction is a discrete event.

It’s not linked to “payback” or “need to balance”.

There is no scale that needs balancing.

You look across the room and your eyes light on a particular type.

The particularness of “this type” is not only that it has the “attractive” flavor.

It also has the flavor of, “there is a possibility of a give and take power dynamic that can have us get to a special type of experience”.

There is also something about, “This is not guaranteed. It depends on how well we dance together.”

“Sexual polarity” is not simply “turn on”.

“Sexual polarity” is not simply, “this is attractive”.

“Sexual polarity” is not simply, “call and response”.

So let’s set up an exercise where you get to trigger the pattern, feel the pattern wanting to do it’s thing and you do the thing that it’s so not wanting to have happen. You get to demonstrate to your selves that now is not then. Patterns tend towards “believing” that now is then, that the trigger that is happening now is happening in the same environment when the pattern was laid down.

If you are trying to explore a part of the human experience that you were taught to put away a long time ago, you are not going to know how to do it.

It is not going to feel natural.

The vocabulary is not going to spring into your consciousness fully-formed.

The skill sets are not going to magical appear, fully formed and operational.

It’s really, really, really going to help is you act “as-if”.