I remind you that when concentrating on the external world, you should also be fully aware of your body (see Zen Training : Methods and Philosophy by Katsuki Sekida.) Otherwise, no special skills are required ift when focusing on something, you lose the feeling of your body.

And you can really be aware of your body only by denying the outer world - the context - zazen in fact is a total denial of everything. That's why spiritual practices have always attached great importance to such challenges as dousing with cold water, for example. Otherwise, you can easily concentrate on a sexual object, but it will dissolve your self - to what 'elimination of dualism' could this possibly refer?

The Hell Gate

See also
The Main Obstacle,
One Wonderful Technique,

 and here

So, What Makes the Female Aspect So Special? 

Let me remind you my thesis: if you have mental problems, obsessive thoughts, for example, you can't just remove them like a sick tooth leaving everything else as it was: you have to change yourself, change your attitude to the problem - sounds logical, but what does this really mean?

From my own experience of depression, if you feel depressed, in the end you still feel better, and only then you can change something. But if you already feel good, is it necessary to change anything?  And if yes, in what way? The first step, therefore, is to realize that you have problems not only when you're depressed but also when you're feeling high so the recovery will require much greater changes than just getting rid of some unpleasant symptoms. When we're depressed, we're obsessed with unpleasant thoughts, but the very thought obsession usually begins when we're feeling high - that's when we usually get seduced by tempting, happy thoughts, and later when we're exhausted, nightmares overtake us.

This is a general rule: unpleasant thoughts are preceded by pleasant ones; before unpleasant thoughts invade, pleasant thoughts must already prepare the ground for them: make us malleable. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin: pleasant thoughts are the cause of unpleasant - somehow they are associated - there is some reason why we became attached to our nightmares. So to get rid of a neurosis, you should start with its pleasant aspect - this at least will deprive the unpleasant aspect of its energy. What seduces you - I called it the female aspect - acts as a Trojan horse when it comes to entering within you, and the same substance is also the reason why negative experiences associated with it linger inside of you, so to reverse the neurosis, you should start again with its pleasant aspect.

Those dark sides of our personalities that Freud describes (and which shock some so much that they refuse to believe in them) manifest themselves only when we're merging with someone, that is, when we're creating new or maintaining old ties (any relationship, even altruistic, has its dark side.) But this doesn't mean that we're doomed to such duplicity: when seeking independence, we sever ties, we can well be honest with ourselves and others.

I already noted that I don't consider the human personality as a mixture of male and the female substance, as Weininger does. But some Buddhists also believe that to become a Buddha, a men needs to get in touch with his female aspect, a woman with her male. OK, but in any case I don't think that the correct practice should make you homosexual: the trick is to integrate the components properly. And if you meditate by my method, everything fall into place: then you cannot say that you're a man in the classical sense if only because you lose the desire to dominate and no longer worry about your status; on the other hand, you're also not a woman if only because you don't tempt anyone, don't let anyone inside you, and become completely indifferent to what others think of you.

I don't want you to get the impression, from what I wrote, that I see the human personality as a mixture of male and the female substance, as Weininger does. Instead I prefer to think of it as the result of two conflicting desires: the desire to deny the environment (which approximately corresponds to Freud's ego) and the desire to merge with it (which corresponds to id and super-ego.) In particular, the conflict between ego and super-ego is, in other words, the conflict between individual and collective consciousness.

I prefer to talk about bonds, not attachments

It seems that everyone already understands that being attached to things is wrong. But somehow when it comes to attachments to people, especially our relatives and friends, even Buddhists don't dare to call things by their proper names. Therefore, to be clear, I will use the terms 'ties', 'bonds',  instead of 'attachment' whenever possible.

One Wonderful Technique

I continue describing the technique that will allow you to handle your mental problems - if you think you don't have any, perhaps you don't need this practice and this post is a reminder that for that you should already be sufficiently prepared. It's also about why the correct Zen practice is better than psychoanalysis, and in the end, I'll outline in general terms how works the very process of understanding, which would be just pointless philosophizing if in the following posts I weren't be going to give concrete practical recommendations how to have such an experience.