There is a difference between compulsive attachment and healthy attachment. When I listen at church to Christian prayers, scripture readings, songs, I often am perturbed or taken aback by the sense in which there is a dominating pressure being exerted on me. I will describe this as an ontological pressure, in that the intent of the congregants is to press their thoughts or ideals onto the embodied world. Sometimes, though, I see breaks in this pressure, where truly it can be said that there is a spirit of grace tangible.

Even so, there is not an absence of momentum in such free moments, simply a different kind of momentum. What I feel in compulsive environments is a tendency toward closed-offness. Each word, sound, note makes me squirm and ball up. To accept the message requires opening myself to the message-giving process, which is quite thoroughly corroded with performance-based fear, tribalistic social norming, and anthropogenic possessiveness. In such a context, I hear the gospel as a self-perpetuating self-imprisoning. By placing oneself in bondage, it becomes possible to access a savior. So keep on presenting yourself as a slave specifically so that you can be set free every Sunday. The aftermath of salvation leaves one outside the need to be freed, and this is frightening and confusing. Once the snares of judgment have been done away, what is one to do with the will to evaluate? Many Christians collapse back into pre-salvation, and the celebration of the gospel becomes a mechanism for finding psychic security. You may notice that my critique sounds like an indictment of a human need, that the need for mental stability is somehow wrong. This may be a projection, an evolution of my protestant work ethic, my self-loathing. I may be speaking from a soapbox of judgment against the body. I don’t think this is entirely the case, since there is a way to live well.

This sense of control is not a uniquely Christian phenomenon; it situates more specifically in the context of judgment in general. For instance, I imagine getting up from my seat to grab coffee and feel wrong for not having done it. I see the placement of words on a page and feel wrong for it. I feel incapable, both of acting and of thinking rightly. I think of my master’s thesis and feel contrived shame from my advisor and from my incompleteness. I think of my imperfect means for hungers striving for perfection. I know in theory and in practice that life is art and there is affirmation for being simply in the being. I know that hungers evolve into obsessions because of the difference, the apparent disconnect between corporeal and conceptual forms, between sense and concept, between body and mind; and that such perfection-craving is fulfilled by the resurrection of the body in the idea, that life is its own law, that the hunger is content with the given forms prior to the conceptualized forms. Even so, the will to judge, dissect, dissever remains, resurges as a dominating voice. Even though I see the fate of such dualistic judgment, still I feel the freeze it desires to impose on my life.

The fact that I do not match up to its will is taken as an eternal truth that I cannot fulfill its will. This serpent wishes to bite even though it has already a resolution. Everything I do is subject to a thought. The serpent-thought claims this is so. “Everything you do is subject to me. I permeate everything. You cannot resist me because I apply to everything?”

How shall I deal with this? Shall I continually atone for it, extrapolating every moment to the furthest limit by existential argument? Shall I allow the critic to speak and drive my behavior? Shall I avoid reacting or doing anything in response to it, in that it is the commitment to actions aligning with it that perpetuate it? Shall I focus on cognitive restructuring? Is there an infection in me? Have I had enough water to drink? Is there a source of unnecessary stress driving this anxiety? Am I committed to some relationship with persons or things or behaviors that is hurting me and I lack awareness of it or I need to move on from it? Or is the thought so strong a presentation that its mere presence in the mind creates a concussive force that imposes its will, just as every denial of Christ reaffirms Christ’s work?

Previously, my transformation was attached to the searching for truth. My guilt and shame was transmuted into love from and for God. Now, this is no longer the case, since the guilt and shame have lost their attachment to object-forms. Previously, the archetypal form of Christ broke down the barriers for me and I was transmuted into psychic liberty. Now, this compulsive attachment is only partial and secondary. It is a band of raiders rather than a great army ruling the land. Is the very centralization of power problematic in this regard? Has my will to freedom become a great fortress and thus lost its permeability, or can permeability attain permanence and structure? Can there be a peaceful kingdom? Is the good guy always a rebel?

How does one act upon a need apart from an almost unavoidable sense of anxiety associated with need? Ongoing realizations of the self-nature is in order? Do I need more art in my life to shake things up?

I do not wish for a momentary imitation, in which every moment is involved with a work of focused attachment to change, but a structural imitation, in which all of me is not subject to an ontological pressure but instead is its own ontology.

How do we speak about nondualities against dualities? If I say, I want to think free of compulsion, is this without any judgment, any contemplation, any measuring of evaluation? Sometimes this is the case, but usually, the judgmental mind remains active in parallel. To cage up the cognitive faculty that performs such judgment is really to perpetuate its own divisive, controlling, isolating will reflexively, autopoetically, onto itself. The power to bind and isolate is the power of judgment. To stop all judgment is impossible. Rather, freedom from compulsive attachment means the locus of meaning moves from the . Thus, it is possible to have an opposition to duality that it is not itself a dualism. We have a logic of moving beyond mere duality, in which we do not totally abandon or exclude duality but instead condition it.

Even so, the strong judgment of dualism remains.

The voice of strong judgment takes correlative relations as causally determinative. It is a hypnotic power. Say something with no other evidence against it to establish ethos. “The sun is shining.” Then say something that evidences power. “You read these words because I said them to you.” Then say something that lays claim to the mind. “I have power over your mind. Even if you don’t listen to me you cannot avoid me because you have heard me once.” This is how all manipulation works.

What about correlative assertions of causal power that defy contingency? What is their nature? “I have the power to make you focus! I have the power to make you focus on whatever I will! You are a failure! I am all-powerful over your sanity! I can make you do whatever I want because you are wrong!” This is the narrative that sets up in the mind.