So, I've used NoFap (& semen retention) for months at a time to great effect. It gives you energy. It drives past many blockages into fixing all the clutter and delay in your life that you didn't have the momentum to break through before.
Then I read Reich's Character Analysis and Selected writings. They throw a lot of light on sexual energy and why NoFap might not always be good for you. I think they also provide new important info you won't find in other spiritual schools. I'll give a brief account of his theory and then discuss implications for gathering loosh and beocming powerful.
To sum up, he realised that patients only improved by means of Freudian therapy if they had 'Orgasmic Potency'. That means their overall energetic system working well enough that orgasm could flow through it like an energy wave, unimpeded. Most neurotic patients are either impotent, have premature ejaculation, or have some hateful malformation in their attitude towards sex which invariably comes with a measurable muscular blockage.
For example, somebody might be unable to really move the muscles in their chest properly during breath. This is an entrenched and deep habit on an organismic level, and it stops full breath of the rushing of pleasurable sensations up past their chest, through their whole body, in orgasm. The whole area is rigid, inflexible, and visibly restrained. If you look at people with this in mind, you can really see what parts of them are blocked and how it *is* their character structure. Energy blockage is always visible.
For example, a girl might always hold her breath when she's upset, and kind of draw back inside and not express. This might develop over time into being chronically inexpressive and hard to get to. If you probe, you can find a total rigidity in the throat and chest, arising from the early family circumstances as in Freud. She might have not been listened to, or not had a way to word her feelings, so she protects her deeper intuitions a bit like a chrysalis protects a growing butterfly. Except the shell never breaks like it was supposed to.
Some patients got better by talk therapy alone. But what determined whether any patient did was muscular armoring. Break that down, and the neurosis broke down.
Reich later developed this into ideas of orgone energy, a bio-life force which fuels the whole body. It is essentially prana.
Reich said that all neurosis was driven by sexual energy. Fuckups in the 'libidinal economy' fuckup the whole character. He didn't really get much into retention, apart for mentioning 'sublimation' as a potential route 'not suited to everyone' and therefore 'unsuitable for psychotherapy'. His aim was healing by 'bigger and better orgasms' in loving sex.
So: implications. I noticed that although NoFap *does* have a lot of power, it can also increase tension and drive the growth of neurotic behaviors. I became a lot more emotionally unstable with it before I was deeper into hermeticism. It seems to provide energy to you as a whole but also to messed up systems in you which can become kind of tumorous. This is what Reich would conclude, as well.
From an estoeric perspective, if you're not purified you can feed psychic parasites that come along for the ride. It drives any process of change, hence all traditions using it, but they all want to shape somebody in a particular way, and you might not yet know how you want to be shaped or would best be shaped. True purpose requires truly free and flowing character.
The electric organism functions by a process of tension>charge>discharge>relaxation. You're unlikely to achieve this cycle with retention until you've got pretty far into energy work. Until that point, NoFap can, along with providing progress, make you uptight and worsen some problems. And you could just never get to some issues that are shaping your consciousness on a deep level if you keep up retention without having a full Kundalini breakthrough.
If you then give up on NoFap after several months, in an uncontrolled way, your grown character blockages combined with how fapping and spilling loosh messes with you can take you weird places. Bizarre fetishes, etc.
So: an alternate route seems to be working with Reichian therapy, and sex if possible (or I guess just msaturbation to loving sex) until blockages are cleared and your system is flowing, and *then* building through retention in a way that won't fuel neuroses.
Or alternating between one or the other at the right time. Another benefit of this it that you can combine things like the IX with Reich to keep within a high magical context, honoring the importance of your seed and its power.
Retention is probably the preferable route overall and long term. But Regardie valued Reich and lots of High Occultism and Medieval Indian Tantra (see Kiss of the Yogini) uses ejaculation. So maybe Reich's models can be used during these phases of practice to great effect, at least.
(By the way, I wrote this in a kind of hypothetical tone, but I've put it all into practice. It seems to work for me. I think retention is best pictured as something like the Queen of Cups: a reflective, empty, but potent energy that goes whatever direction you take it in. If you're doing NoFap for spiritual reasons, you'll make spiritual progress, but you might not realise it will amp up other parts of you you hadn't intended it to, until you've reached mastery).
By the way, anybody who wants to do this practically can find Reich's exercises, passed down via Regardie, in Hyatt's Undoing Yourself DVD series. You can get most of them by torrent.
Ignore Hyatt. Everything he says is really unsourced Reich. Reich was the exoteric genius who had his books burned by the US gov in an incinerator and tested his theories experimentally. Regardie adapted some of it to an occult training context, adding in a few other elements, but never published the exercises clearly.
They take about 10 minutes daily and 1x or 2x weekly half hour to and hour sessions. Do that with whatever sex you're doing, and keep up your normal practice (IHH, meditation, magic, etc.) and the healing will happen automatically.
You can also do Reichian whilst doing Retention and NoFap and will make a lot of progress, but you need the full tension>charge>discharge>relaxation cycle to complete the healing.
>>17434Also made a massive omission in OP. I mostly meant semen retention or celibacy as practiced in spiritual schools, not NoFap, could be wrong at times.
Mostly I would still say don't fap if you can have sex. But it might be right if you have tension blockages. And if you can't have sex, NoFap might build the blockages. So Fapping is probably not ever the best option, just sometimes necessary. I would try both and test it out. I know some Yogis and Tantrics and rituals fap, and it could be right for some people for their whole life, so I'm not being absolutist.
>>17437I meant how's your subtle body, how consciously can you channel your energy towards different ends, how much of a deliberate affect can you have with it in creating forms. Basically, how skilled are you esoterically.
From your answer, one place it could fit into this model is that the body works in cycles, and tension>charge>discharge>relaxation is a major one. You might be stuck at tension/charge. If your energy isn't freely flowing and conscious, it's possible that Reichian work could help in the process of making it so.
I haven't met you though so I'm just offering a suggestion that might help as you figure it out on your own.
Are you doing any Kundalini or Qiqong practice, or using any physical elixirs?
