Joe: When asked about myself I sometimes say that I am politically, spiritually, emotionally and financially independent. ‘Emotionally’ meaning that I don’t need anyone to tell me what I feel, nor what to do with my emotions.
Jim: Just as nobody ever told you that you exist, nobody needs to be told what they think and feel because feelings and thoughts are experienced and known directly. People may not have a word for what they think and feel but rest assured they know what they are experiencing. I think you’re saying that you don’t like the idea that people tell you what you “should” feel.
Presumably a person who is suffering emotionally doesn’t enjoy it, although there are quite a few people who get a perverse kind of guilty satisfaction from their suffering. And it is possible that a person suffering emotionally doesn’t know how to stop it, in which case, a bit of advice from a qualified person might help. Yoga, for instance, is particularly helpful in this respect as it sublimates the energy into a positive pursuit i.e. samadhi. I’ve just published a book called “The Power of Know,” which is commentaries on the Patanjali Yoga Sutras, which present a program for mastering one’s emotions. I’ve attached a digital copy. If you want a paperback I will send you one.
Joe: As awareness is independent of them, it tells me all that I need to know.
Jim: So, what does it tell you about them? It certainly tells you that they exist but it doesn’t give you a name for them or tell you how helpful or unhelpful are to the Joe person to whom they belong, does it?
It can definitely provide illumination, but does a lightbulb comment on the activities taking place in a room? To say it does would mean that awareness had ideas and emotions, etc. which is to personify awareness, in which case there would be as many awarenesses as there are people, plants, animals, etc, which means the world wouldn’t work at all in so far as there would be as many realities as there are people and success would be impossible because there would be no common reality. In fact nobody would get out of bed in the morning.
Actually my experience, which is confirmed by scripture, is that awareness, which is me (I don’t identify with it because the “I” that would identify with it can’t identify because it is an inert material construct, an identity cobbled together from experiences real and imagined gathered by the body/mind entity and thrust upon me by society. I identify as awareness. As such I have no bio. I produce an apparent bio, however, to make it easy to navigate in society.
Joe: I do not inhibit or control the emotions and I let them have their full say.
Jim: That is because you are awareness.
Joe: But unlike commonplace stimulus response behaviour, which ‘acts out’ the emotions, as all emotions take place within the awareness of them, one can therefore make intelligent decisions about the information the emotions provide – hence emotional intelligence. Awareness is core – Emotions are peripheral.
Jim: Yes, they are. I like the word non-essential. The “one that can make intelligent decisions” won’t be awareness, however, because awareness isn’t a doer endowed with free will. Nor is it in anyway affected by what happens in life. It simply witnesses. So decisions are “intelligent” with reference to what? What Joe wants?
Jim: Not that emotions are unimportant, nor do not take center stage on occasion, even for prolonged periods, but that one is minutely aware of every emotion – the slightest tremor in the spider’s web, the slightest ripple on the Buddha lake-mind, abiding at the centre of one’s being as The Tao puts it.
Jim: If you are saying that you are actually the “Buddha lake-mind” I agree, as does Vedanta. There is a chapter in a 14th Century text called Panchadasi entitled “The Lamp of the Theater” which says that the light the illumines the stage of life illumines the presence and absence of objects great and small, center stage or in the wings, without comment.
Joe: The simple fact of the matter is that emotions are observable. And every emotion has a biography which can be deconstructed.
Jim: Yes, indeed. You can’t be anything that you observe, whether it’s is emotion or not. Ironically, this unquestionable existential fact is unknown to nearly everyone. And even most of the rare few who do know it, don’t know what it actually means in terms of their relationship to what they observe, which is to say their lives. So they suffer and enjoy according to their karma i.e. experience and are denied the direct steady “current” of bliss that is the nature of their true identity as awareness.
Finally, the question is whether or not it is worth deconstructing emotions. Why not just dismiss them as “not me” and get on enjoying the bliss of awareness, which in every way is superior to emotion.
I wonder if this not about the painful emotion called love? My experience, which is again backed by scripture, is that zero-sum human love is completely unworkable in so far as it fluctuates owing to subjective factors in both parties too numerous to mention, not to mention that it comes and goes as objective factors change.
On the other hand, awareness IS love. It is love free of emotion, meaning ups and downs, and it is never not present, which is to say that it is totally satisfying in the presence and absence of objects, people or pets or on any hook on which one wishes to hang the love projection. Because love is your nature and you, awareness live in this world, it is always flowing into the world of objects. As Beatles song goes, “Love is all there is.”
Love,
Jim
