Re: What does it mean to become noble concerning passions?

[luxmagus@...]

Hi,
Lori....great post once again. I felt much the same regarding the 
work of enobling the character. I had a great dread of it for a long 
time. I would look ahead at the work and get the feeling that it was 
almost impossible to do that. I simply had too many obstacles and 
too many things to overcome. I didn't feel like it was possible at 
least until I had lived quite a few more years. Something in me did 
not want to change. Once I started though, I found that the work was 
a little easier than expected, as long as you apply yourself and use 
the techniques given by Bardon, then the work isn't really all that 
difficult. It takes a certain diligence, but not really that much 
sweat. I did discover too, that many of my faults came in groupings. 
In other words I had maybe 20 faults related to lusts and maybe 25 
related to anger and irritation in some form or other. I learned 
that it is fairly easy to work with the base 
problem.....Lust.....Anger...etc. Rather than taking each little 
case separately. This has made the work go much faster than before 
because whole rows of the dominoes are falling rather than one fault 
at a time. For me the exercise of imagining the fault leaving you as 
you breathe out...from the whole body, seems to work wonderfully 
well. It has seemed to de-energize some of the larvae. I have had 
some success with the cold shower exercise and also with the 
autosuggestion, and concious food reception, but the breath exercise 
seems to work the best for me. I suppose there is also a component 
of willpower to it. Being aware of the negative habits and stopping 
them just as they start to come into existence on the mental level 
has helped too.
I understand your resistence to changing your reactions based upon 
a fear of losing your strength and command presence. I am a police 
sergeant and I felt much the same. I didn't want to lose my edge, as 
sometimes a display of furious anger can overpower people and get 
them to lay down a gun or knife etc. I did find that once I dropped 
that, I really seemed to have a better command presence. I was 
relying on a crutch that simply was not needed. A sort of quiet 
power came into being that wasn't there before in my personality. As 
you mentioned about yourself, I have discovered new ways of dealing 
with a crazy world. I am a long way from perfection yet, I still 
have many faults, but one by one I am working with them, and some of 
the biggest ones have already fallen away. I definitely see light at 
the end of the tunnel:-)
Blessings,
Jerry