This evening, after a good Kum Nye practice, I had this extremely pleasant sense of emotional omnipotentiality, which felt like magic. All of us live conditioned lives, lives dictated by what we fear and crave, by profit and loss, by honor and dishonor. In large measure, we are defined by and constrained by what we avoid and what we seek.
But behind this, there is the possibility of getting past all that, of feeling like you have simultaneously realized all your life’s dreams.
And I want to be clear: we assume that achievement, or sensation has to precede certain emotions, like pride, or wonder, or the sense of magic, but why? Can we not treat emotions as self originating, if the person is sufficiently skilled enough at “conjuring” them?
No Buddhist gets fully beyond the pain of loss. They don’t want to feel physical pain any more than anyone else does, but their path–when taught properly, and in my view it devolves often into simple masochism or empty ritual–offers an alternative. You can choose between this and that.