Several Buddhist authors have written that emotions are not changed by meditation. They say that emotions are biological and so cannot be eliminated. I have never thought that it is possible or desirable to eliminate emotions, but neither do I believe that they don't change. I don't believe either of these two extreme positions: that they will disappear or that they will stay the same. Instead, I feel that something between these two opposites will be true.
You can say emotions are 'biological', but that doesn't explain why some people have much more of a particular emotion than others. With some people their anger is like a raging inferno, with others it is like a spark. I would even go so far to say that I have met people who don't seem to have anger at all.
It's better to think of an emotion as like a muscle. We all have the same muscles, that's biological. But we don't have the same size muscles. How big a particular muscle is depends on choices that we have made. The more we use a muscle the bigger it grows. If we don't use a muscle it will wither away, but never disappear.
Your emotions are not your enemy. Emotions are not bad but - like thoughts - we have too much of them and there is a compulsive quality. When I am doing something I try not to plan for the future, ruminate about the past, daydream or think about issues that I might have read about in the newspaper that morning. Instead, I try to be aware of what I am doing. It's not that planning is a bad thing, we need to do that sometimes, but it's usually better to be in the moment and aware of whatever we need to be aware of.
What is true of thoughts is true of emotions too. There may be times when desire, anger, fear or sadness are appropriate. We should accept our thoughts and emotions, but when we examine them they start to change.
Our relationship to our emotions is as important as the emotions themselves. Some would say it's our reactivity to our emotions that's the important thing, not the emotions. They don't spell out quite what they mean by that. Do they mean that you can have a raging temper but as long as you don't go round thumping people that's fine? Of course, it is better not to thump people if you get angry. However, that sounds like suppressing emotion or maybe dissociation. It doesn't seem healthy to me.
It does seem true though that we can witness our emotions but not participate in them. We can refrain from chasing after pleasant emotions and avoiding unpleasant ones. We can observe that they are not permanent, they don't bring satisfaction, and they are not essential to our being or part of us. We can do this while we are meditating and when we are not. It would seem to me that someone who chases after pleasant emotions when they're not meditating could be said to be 'compartmentalizing' his or her life.
Some Buddhists, and I think especially the nondualists, will say that lust and conflict are part of life and we should accept them. They may even think that an enlightened person can behave in an uncaring and antisocial manner. I think that the nondualists and some Mahayana Buddhists have got themselves into a philosophical muddle. It would take another post to sort that out.
At one level we should accept our emotions. Acceptance doesn't mean that we think they are permanent, or that we should leave them unexamined. Or that we think that when we examine them they are not going to change. Vipassana meditation allows healing of emotional scars, it's not just about realizations of the nature of reality.
There are some people who aren't interested in sex. You can't get more 'biological' an emotion than sexual desire. I'm not just talking about some Buddhist nuns. These people say they have lost interest in it and don't miss it. Are they deluding themselves? Are they merely suppressing their emotions? I don't think so. I'm not one of them, I have many sexual thoughts and I also have many angry thoughts. It would be quite nice to be free of them though, at least for most of the time.
I don't think that someone who has practiced the best meditation methods will need to live their lives through their emotions as most people do. People stimulate their emotions because it makes them feel alive. People feel most alive when they are in love. They want that. After a couple of years that feeling fades and that's when problems in relationships and families cause so much sorrow. People want to move onto the next partner to get that feeling back.
Someone who has made progress in meditation can have that feeling of aliveness all of the time without having to do anything. Without having to make those around him or her suffer. Some meditation methods don't deal with emotion in a satisfactory way.
I have quoted below from five Buddhist authors. The first three of these quotations are examples of the way some Buddhist authors treat negative emotions as biological and unchangeable. The last two are things I agree with.
After Buddhism by Stephen Batchelor chapter 3
You can say emotions are 'biological', but that doesn't explain why some people have much more of a particular emotion than others. With some people their anger is like a raging inferno, with others it is like a spark. I would even go so far to say that I have met people who don't seem to have anger at all.
It's better to think of an emotion as like a muscle. We all have the same muscles, that's biological. But we don't have the same size muscles. How big a particular muscle is depends on choices that we have made. The more we use a muscle the bigger it grows. If we don't use a muscle it will wither away, but never disappear.
Your emotions are not your enemy. Emotions are not bad but - like thoughts - we have too much of them and there is a compulsive quality. When I am doing something I try not to plan for the future, ruminate about the past, daydream or think about issues that I might have read about in the newspaper that morning. Instead, I try to be aware of what I am doing. It's not that planning is a bad thing, we need to do that sometimes, but it's usually better to be in the moment and aware of whatever we need to be aware of.
What is true of thoughts is true of emotions too. There may be times when desire, anger, fear or sadness are appropriate. We should accept our thoughts and emotions, but when we examine them they start to change.
Our relationship to our emotions is as important as the emotions themselves. Some would say it's our reactivity to our emotions that's the important thing, not the emotions. They don't spell out quite what they mean by that. Do they mean that you can have a raging temper but as long as you don't go round thumping people that's fine? Of course, it is better not to thump people if you get angry. However, that sounds like suppressing emotion or maybe dissociation. It doesn't seem healthy to me.
It does seem true though that we can witness our emotions but not participate in them. We can refrain from chasing after pleasant emotions and avoiding unpleasant ones. We can observe that they are not permanent, they don't bring satisfaction, and they are not essential to our being or part of us. We can do this while we are meditating and when we are not. It would seem to me that someone who chases after pleasant emotions when they're not meditating could be said to be 'compartmentalizing' his or her life.
Some Buddhists, and I think especially the nondualists, will say that lust and conflict are part of life and we should accept them. They may even think that an enlightened person can behave in an uncaring and antisocial manner. I think that the nondualists and some Mahayana Buddhists have got themselves into a philosophical muddle. It would take another post to sort that out.
At one level we should accept our emotions. Acceptance doesn't mean that we think they are permanent, or that we should leave them unexamined. Or that we think that when we examine them they are not going to change. Vipassana meditation allows healing of emotional scars, it's not just about realizations of the nature of reality.
There are some people who aren't interested in sex. You can't get more 'biological' an emotion than sexual desire. I'm not just talking about some Buddhist nuns. These people say they have lost interest in it and don't miss it. Are they deluding themselves? Are they merely suppressing their emotions? I don't think so. I'm not one of them, I have many sexual thoughts and I also have many angry thoughts. It would be quite nice to be free of them though, at least for most of the time.
I don't think that someone who has practiced the best meditation methods will need to live their lives through their emotions as most people do. People stimulate their emotions because it makes them feel alive. People feel most alive when they are in love. They want that. After a couple of years that feeling fades and that's when problems in relationships and families cause so much sorrow. People want to move onto the next partner to get that feeling back.
Someone who has made progress in meditation can have that feeling of aliveness all of the time without having to do anything. Without having to make those around him or her suffer. Some meditation methods don't deal with emotion in a satisfactory way.
I have quoted below from five Buddhist authors. The first three of these quotations are examples of the way some Buddhist authors treat negative emotions as biological and unchangeable. The last two are things I agree with.
After Buddhism by Stephen Batchelor chapter 3
"Today we would understand these forces as part of the legacy of biological evolution, the embedded instincts and drives that enabled our ancestors to succeed in the competition for scarce resources and survive. They are summarized in the canon as the "three fires" of "greed, hatred and confusion" or the "effluences" (asava) of "sensual desire, being, opinion, and ignorance".
Gotama's awakening is said to have involved the "stilling" and "fading away" of these reactive forces and drives. But if such instincts are neurobiological functions of our organism, it is difficult to understand how they can be systematically overcome - "cut off like a palm stump," as many discourses claim, "never to arise again." Although Buddhist orthodoxy insists that these forces and drives have been eliminated in arahants and buddhas, another, less prominent thread in the canon offers a more intelligible account of the ceasing of reactivity."Why I Am a Buddhist by Stephen T Asma chapter 2
"The escape is not from our feelings, in this case, our attractions and repulsions about the beautiful and the ugly. These levers and pulleys are part of having a body, a brain, a personality. They cannot be entirely removed, only transcended - in the sense that wisdom can recognize our own womanizing or femme fatale tendencies (or our fear of intimacy), and then discipline can diminish these obsessive components from our romantic lives."Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha by Daniel M Ingram part 3
"When I think about what it would take to achieve freedom from all psychological stuff, the response that comes is this: life is about stuff. Stuff is about being alive. There is no way out of this while you are still living. There will be confusion, pain, miscommunication, misinterpretation, maladaptive patterns of behavior, unhelpful emotional reactions, weird personality traits, neurosis and possibly much worse. There will be power plays, twisted psychological games, people with major personality disorders (which may include you), and craziness. The injuries continue right along with the healing and eventually the injuries win and we die. This is a fundamental teaching of the Buddha. I wish the whole Western Buddhist world would get over this notion that these practices are all about getting to our Happy Place where nothing can ever hurt us or make us neurotic and move on to mastering real Buddhist practice rather than chasing some ideal that will never appear."Why Can't I Meditate? by Nigel Wellings chapter 1
"Acceptance is to see things as they really are in the present. It is the opposite of denying what is, wanting things to be different or resisting things as they are. When we accept ourselves as we are in our meditation we are present with whatever our experience is - physical sensations, thoughts and emotions - without the intention to change it for something we believe will feel better. By being accepting of what is, we can see that it is always changing.
Acceptance does not mean having to like what we experience, nor is it a passivity that means we'll never change anything. By accepting what is we place ourselves in the best position for making wise changes. Acceptance makes the space for the most appropriate actions."Journey of Insight Meditation by Eric Lerner Chapter 13
"What I had found deep within this mind and body was a process. The process manifests itself over and over again, birth after birth in endless forms. We aren't a soul or entity that exists and jumps from body to body. We don't transmigrate. We change. We alter moment after moment. We alter, and each lifetime is just another moment of alteration in this stream of energy. The alteration is not random. Randomness is not a characteristic of the universe. The universe is really mind. Mind precedes all, the Buddha observed. The mind has purpose, will. The will comes from desire, from hatred, from anger, from delusion. Or the will comes from love, from nonattachment, from wisdom. We become what we will. We are what we have willed. The stream of energy that is endless is a wheel. That is the image of suffering. We turn the wheel with our minds, our minds steeped in delusion and attachment. We come into being, into bodies whose nature is decay and suffering because we will that. This is the law of karma. Buddha said he was here to teach the end of this suffering, the way off the wheel. Nirvana is the end of becoming. It is just being. The body ends and the life energy requires no new body. The chain of birth and death is broken because the mind has been so purified of its attachments that it takes hold of no new form. This is deathlessness."I used to think that Eric Lerner had summed up Buddhism in the above passage but I realize now that not all Buddhists will agree with it. Daniel M Ingram doesn't believe in karma and reincarnation. He doesn't believe that the mind is purified of its attachments and no longer has desire, hatred or anger. He thinks that Theravada Buddhism got it all wrong in that. I think he has modified his opinion after writing Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha when he experimented with Actualism, which seems to have corrected some of the deficiencies in his previous meditation practice, but I don't think he has all the answers yet.
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