Please no rules even be careful of your "own rules"; Your rules are made from your mind and influence by your life experience or your expectations about what the camino should be. If you live in the present moment, you will see every moment what you should do or not. I have seen many pilgrins crying because they put in their mind that they should go to Compostella and they were obliged to stop for physical reasons; others have decided that Compostella walk should be all the way with their backpack and not moving one meter from the camino even if they suffer and it would be better for them to finish the day in a more easy way; Cheating is a word that I have eared and it does not mean anything except that it does not fit with the "rules" or with your expectations; so please change your expectations rather then suffering and anyway be obliged to stop one day later. Your mind is not you , read about the non-duality and you will understand that you are not your mind since your mind is changing and influenced by so many external factors that are not you;
Yes well, it's why I speak of "a discipline" rather than "the rules", but still, if there's not some sort of guideline in how and why we do this sort of thing, then what would it mean ? There are all sorts of other activities where you can "do as you please".
To carry your pack all the way is a good discipline, including because if something unexpected occurs, which is likely, there you'll have it, not in some other location that Jacotrans will have taken it to. And so it is in fact a freedom to keep it with you always, albeit a heavy one, and not any sort of imposition against that freedom. Physically sick persons excepted as always.
Also people shouldn't be confused about the walking difficulties and needs -- all too often, I've seen pilgrims in distress, both on the Camino and online, because they've set themselves an unrealistic target in the relationship between how far they can walk day to day and what date they've booked their flight on. Fundamentally though, we should simply walk the sort of distances we're comfortable with instead of the ones that some guide or some crafty pre-Camino plan are trying to dictate, which BTW sending your pack ahead with Jacotrans and reserving your albergue is a way to impose on yourself, and rather give yourself enough time instead so that you can be flexible with it, including rest days when you're just too knackered to move on any further. You will sometimes be too knackered to move on any further, and pre-Camino planning that fails to acknowledge this doesn't work. How can you give yourself a proper rest day if you've already sent your pack 25km towards Santiago ? By getting on a bus or something ? This is not restful. Why not simply stay put where you are instead, and simply enjoy the experience of remaining and refreshing yourself in that pueblo ?
As for your comments about the relationship between rules and thoughts, our thinking has a ternary structure rather than a binary one, but duality is how we conceive of much that is outside ourselves. You are quite right that this is an issue with how some people think about the Camino, especially the first two weeks or so of learning how to become a pilgrim. But it's not that this binarity is wrong in itself, but rather that its limits and its purposes, its qualities and its flaws need to be properly understood.
