I was thinking yesterday about chronic emotion. What is it? How can, for example, anger be an emotion that often emerges from your being? How do you stay angry? Expressed biologically, anger is presumably some raising of blood pressure, the release of certain hormones, and the tensing of muscles not needed for the activity at hand. This is tiring.
Perceptually, within the vortex of experiences we only contain by filtering most of them out, anger is an artifact of pain of some sort. Anger and sadness are quite clearly linked. Anger, in important respects, IS pain. It is a perceptual limitation.
I feel sometimes there is this light in us trying to get out, and that with inferior emotions we build stone walls that limit our worlds. When our light shines out, the light elsewhere in the world shines back at us, but instead we live like animals in cages. We live in darkness, when we have access to an infinite supply of illumination.
How does this process work, though, and how do you end it? This is a practical question.
As I have often viewed the matter, it seems to me that the essence of Buddhism is applied psychology, with the intent of building mental health. He starts with a problem–life is suffering, which can be construed both as actual pain, AND as less happiness than you are capable of–and comes up with a detailed plan of action, which works in his particular case.
Consider the Heart Sutra.
form is not different from emptiness, and emptiness is not different from form. Form itself is emptiness, and emptiness itself is form. Sensation, conception, synthesis, and discrimination are also such as this. Śāriputra, all phenomena are empty: they are neither created nor destroyed, neither defiled nor pure, and they neither increase nor diminish. This is because in emptiness there is no form, sensation, conception, synthesis, or discrimination. There are no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, or thoughts. There are no forms, sounds, scents, tastes, sensations, or phenomena. There is no field of vision and there is no realm of thoughts. There is no ignorance nor elimination of ignorance, even up to and including no old age and death, nor elimination of old age and death. There is no suffering, its accumulation, its elimination, or a path. There is no understanding and no attaining.
What is he saying? How can form equal emptiness? Why are there no eyes, ears, etc? Why is there no ignorance and elimination of ignorance? What have you accomplished if you claim nothing exists? Why is this text revered, and not rejected as the rambling of some opium-addled fool?
Logically, several points can be made. First, that when he equates form with emptiness, that is his whole argument. The rest of it is just clarification. He (the author, who may not have been the Buddha) is simply being thorough.
Secondly, the universe works the way it works. Water flows downhill in a gravitational field. When we think, we use mental structures that are partly mechanical, and partly free. Since we have to live in bodies which come with some programming, we are all more or less already cyborgs.
The task of a spiritual teacher is to free people. It is not to tell them how he does it. It would be perfectly consistent to tell people something that was not true, if the end result was that they finally saw for themselves what IS true. You cannot ever see through someone else’s eyes. You cannot inhabit their worlds for them.
One of the features of our mind is dichotomous thinking. We are programmed to process things, in many ways, as binary. O’s and 1’s. Good and evil. Friend and foe. Group member and outsider. Acceptable and unacceptable.
Logically, how would a clever teacher prevent his teaching from being corrupted? By calling his teaching a non-teaching. By refuting his own first premises.
Why would he do that? Because to him the essence of thing is always beyond words. Your words therefore MUST be contradictory in some ways, lest this point be missed. This is the point of the Zen koan, although I would question how many people that process has actually enlightened.
Further, think of any form. To take an obvious example, let’s imagine a tree. This tree is in constant movement. It is constantly taking water and nutrients from the ground, absorbing sunlight to create food for itself, and growing. When it sleeps in the winter, it is simply breathing more slowly.
Take a rock. It is composed of trillions of atoms, each of which is in constant flux. Most of matter is in fact empty. If you imagine a football field, the nucleus of an atom would be roughly the size of a golf ball at center field, and that might even be exaggerating. The rest of the field: emptiness, surrounded by electrons the size of grains of sand, in constant motion. Actually, we are not even sure if visualizing electrons as things which “exist”, per se, is even accurate. I think most physicists think not. It is simply a useful heuristic in teaching chemistry. The “electron” more or less “exists” simultaneously throughout its valence shell.
So does a tree or a rock “exist” as a form? Yes and no.
Can I see? Can I hear? It would appear so, but can I see X-rays? Can I hear what dogs hear? Do I see when I sleep? Do I actually possess the mental processing power to see everything in front of me? Am I not forced by the limitations the mechanical structure I call my brain places on me to choose the objects of my attention, more or less consciously?
Do I feel what I feel? Does not the same problem arise? Can any of us say we operate our bodies without ever exerting unnecessary tension, that we are perfectly efficient? Do we not have many selves, competing for attention, as hypotic researchers seem to have shown? Who are we, in the end? This question is at the root of the Buddhist doctrine of No Self.
And if you do not exist, can you be ignorant? Can you grow old? Can you die? Can you be a Buddhist, following the 4-fold Path? Can you read the Heart Sutra? No.
Is he not saying “Not THIS: THAT, dummy!!!!”?
We do not exist in our minds. Our minds work on words, and words are needed for communication, but clever words lead to their own cessation. They extinguish themselves. The Buddha was trying to put out fires, and confronted with a herd of cattle who would not have needed him if they could see for themselves. His only possible way forward was facilitating a way of living and perceiving that made that more likely.
Here is what I believe: I believe that we are all eternal beings, all of whom are capable of reaching God–who I visualize as the root of the possibility of form, and a source of endless light–and of travelling anywhere in the universe. Yet, we forget that here on Earth. In an endless existence, this doesn’t really matter, but you have to do something, and teaching is one of those things. It doesn’t really help anything. Souls always get rescued. Nothing, really, can be done. But the process of moving is endlessly delightful.
The Buddhists have this idea of Bodhisattva’s, enlightened beings who have no need to return to Earth, but continue to do so. And why not? Once you realize that all pain is illusory because temporary, in and endless expanse of time and motion, then it doesn’t really matter where you are, or what you do. Any time and any life anywhere is acceptable. Love–what we call love, I should say, since if you are following me you realize that “love” doesn’t exist either–is the primary reality, and it is omnipresent.
Which brings me to the grain of sand and a metaphor I have used before. The task of oysters is to be useless. It is to exist at the bottom of a body of water, reproduce and die. Most oysters everywhere are able to accomplish this.
Within some, however, an accident happens. A grain of sand is introduced, causing them pain. Everywhere it moves it scratches. Every day, all day, the pain is there, and it won’t stop until they are able to create a barrier between their soft inner parts and this chafing intruder. So they build a wall around it, and day by day their burden lightens. They still have an intruder, but now it hurts less. Then one day they are harvested, killed, and their intruder taken and sold at a jewelry store.
This grain of sand, for us, is the desire to impose our wills on the world. It is grasping and clinging to one form and not another. It is clinging to an identity, to a place, to a way of living, to social standing, to success (or as far as that goes, to failure). If we consider things properly, within the manifest truth of impermanence, this is foolishness.
This is not to say we should not have a place and a time and a way of living. It is simply to accept that shit happens and that there is no use worrying about it. It is to view life with humor and good taste, regardless of what it holds in store.
This is the way to live. I sure as hell have not achieved it, but these musings help me better calibrate, I think, in that direction.
I hope somebody reads this, after all that work, or I will be mad as hell.