Ongoing refinement in every minute aspect of being alive is bedrock for a life dedicated to making progress, versus a life lived heedlessly, the usual way. As I have dug deeper into making progress, living here in my new home, refinement has become more and more the practical core of my practice, the nuts and bolts of Leela's way of making progress with love. Her guidance transforms the ordinary inevitable details of my life into a powerful program for progress.
I have to find the target before I can hit the bullseye. In Pigeon toed: a minimalist mistake I went through an elaborate process of refinement to adapt my walking to the uberminimalist water shoes Leela helpfully suggested. I was aiming at the wrong target. Not even the spiffiest laser sight will help me hit me hit a target to the north if I'm shooting south. In that case no refinement was needed. I already had the shoes I needed. I'd thrown them over for some alluring minimalist crap. Likewise I became homeless because I insisted on aiming at shared housing and couldn't find it. I had to get all the way desperate before I could accept that living alone was what I needed. Since I moved into my new home my life has been nothing but refinement. I'm learning to use my ordinary life in my new home as a tool for making progress with love.
Acquired tastes. My first acquired taste wasn't for food or drink, it was for the sensation of inhaling smoke: first tobacco, then cannabis, in the mid-1960s. At about that same time I acquired the taste for alcohol and chocolate. Looking back at all that, now almost sixty years in the past, it's pretty easy to see that acquiring a taste is a process in which my culturally addled thinking overcomes my body's good common sense which says, with simple eloquence, That's yucky.
Likes and dislikes. As I get free of acquired tastes and other mental distortions, my likes and dislikes gradually become reliable guidance. My real undistorted likes and dislikes come from the deepest part of me, from who I really am. They are honest visceral responses, my bottom line. I can't make myself like or dislike something or someone. But the mental garbage can be insidious. For instance, I had a longstanding idea I should like apples. Apples are good for you, an apple a day, pectin blah blah blah. But I don't like apples. I didn't like them as a kid and I still don't. I finally gave up on trying to make myself like apples; I never acquired that taste. Tobacco and booze were both acquired tastes. My earliest memories of both those vices were nasty. But I acquired those tastes, that is my thinking overruled my body's honest reaction. I acquired a taste for chocolate in the mid 1960s in Kenya, right about the time I started drinking booze. As a kid I much preferred vanilla. I finally stopped eating chocolate in 2021. Not because it was an addiction I needed to cure. I just got honest enough with myself to admit I didn't really like it anymore. Losing my acquired taste for chocolate is an example of my evolving tastes. Food that's good for me starts tasting better; old indulgences become uninteresting, even repellent. The idea of drinking alcohol is now deeply repellent. Evolving tastes are an example of making progress with love. The transformation of who I am via making progress is the only kind of change that's real and permanent.
Refined sensibilities have zero to do with highfalutin' anything. That species of so-called refinement is nothing more than a cluster of stuck-up assholes trying to one-up each other. In their mental perversion refined usually means most expensive. Leela, by contrast, demands I take a simple dish made with inexpensive ingredients and work on making the very best version I can using just those ingredients, nothing fancy. That I develop the skill and discernment needed to make these ordinary ingredients into something extraordinary. Refinement is appreciating the simple things in life more deeply, more subtly. No one gets refined sensibilities from education no matter how many degrees they collect. But there's no refinement without being well educated in a deeper way: developing skill and discernment. The refinement of taste and sensibility is a slow difficult process, just like making progress with love; the two reflect each other. Refinement is a heavenly virtue. It is a sign of development of the second kind.