Exhaustion and Discernment

We have already noted many times that the Western Path is, first and foremost, the art of liberation through action, a method to exhaust gilgul by changing the very paradigm of action — replacing an ineffective mode of realization, which creates new ties and accumulates debts, with an effective one that fully “discharges” the energy of desires.

This means that on this Path, three skills acquire special significance:

• identifying desires,
• seeing the energies involved in their realization, and
• the skill of correctly directing these energies.

In other words, first of all it is necessary to learn to properly listen to oneself and recognize the impulses arising in the mind: which of them are essential, coming from one’s own depths and necessary for further development, and which are instilled from outside and formed to dissipate energy or satisfy someone else’s needs.

A far more complex skill is discernment of energies. Indeed, one of the drivers of gilgul is the constant striving for novelty, for experiencing as much experience as possible, which in itself is true and constructive, but is easily distorted, turning into a desire to learn “all shades of grey.” In other words, the mind tends to take for “new impressions,” new interactions — modifications or simply other manifestations of previously experienced contacts. This may happen for two reasons:

• as a result of a lack of clear awareness of the interaction being carried out — not fully experiencing or understanding it — so that the essential, principal aspects and signs of this contact remain unrecognized, and therefore its actual repetition doesn’t feel like a repetition, but is perceived as something new; or
• due to misplaced attention, when secondary or external qualities seem to be important aspects, while inner qualities are overlooked or undervalued.

Accordingly, the Magus needs to learn, first, to clearly be aware of when he is dealing with new energy, a qualitatively new interaction that opens up new aspects and possibilities in his mind, and when he is “marking time,” looking at what has already been experienced and recognized from different perspectives; and, second, to correctly understand when an interaction has already been fully experienced — that is, when its essential aspects have been identified, from which all secondary and external qualities can be inferred without directly perceiving them.

It is clear that each interaction, each energy, when considered ‘linearly’ is inexhaustible, has countless forms and aspects, and if one experiences each separately, gilgul would have no end (which is what is observed in reality). Nevertheless, it is not difficult to discover that all these countless properties and manifestations reduce to a limited number of basic properties that, in turn, follow from the phenomenon’s underlying logos. And if direct perception of the logos is a difficult task, requiring a high level of development of the mind and the possession of developed abilities, then perceiving the basic eidoi is not supernatural, and is accessible to most Pathwalkers, even those at early stages of their development.

Finally, the third important skill is the ability to bring things to completion without creating new and unrelated processes or energy streams. This skill is well described by a famous Zen saying: “when you wash a cup — wash a cup,” that is, do exactly the thing you are doing at the moment, without being distracted by extraneous matters. It is important not only to find the optimal way to realize the desire that has arisen, but also not be distracted in the course of its fulfillment by secondary and accidental matters.

Then, when all three skills are attained, when the Magus learns to correctly distinguish desires from whims, to understand what in a desire is essential, and to realize it in the most appropriate way — his actions become a path to liberation, leading him to the heights of his spirit.