9

THE RIVER OF EMOTION

The burning flames of anger have parched the stream of my being.

The thick darkness of illusion has blinded my intelligence.

My consciousness drowns in torrents of desire.

The mountain of pride has flung me into the nether worlds.

The driving blizzard of envy has dragged me into samsara.

The demon of belief in the ego has me firmly by the throat.

DILGO KHYENTSE RINPOCHE

If the passions are the mind’s great dramas, the emotions are its actors. Throughout our lives they rush through our minds like an unruly river, determining countless states of happiness and unhappiness. Should we try to tame this river? Is it even possible, and if so, how? Some emotions make us flourish, others sap our well-being, others make us wither. Let us recall that eudaimonia, one of the Greek words translated as “happiness,” implies flourishing, fulfillment, accomplishment. Love directed toward the well-being of others, compassion focused on their suffering, in thought and deed, are examples of nourishing emotions that help to generate happiness. Obsessive desire, greed, and hatred are examples of draining emotions. How can we develop the constructive emotions while freeing ourselves of the destructive ones?

Despite their rich terminology for describing a wide range of mental events, the traditional languages of Buddhism have no word for emotion as such. That may be because according to Buddhism all types of mental activity, including rational thought, are associated with some kind of feeling, be it one of pleasure, pain, or indifference. And most affective states, such as love and hatred, arise together with discursive thought. Rather than distinguishing between emotions and thoughts, Buddhism is more concerned with understanding which types of mental activity are conducive to one’s own and others’ well-being, and which are harmful, especially in the long run. This is actually quite consistent with what cognitive science tells us about the brain and emotion. Every region in the brain that has been identified with some aspect of emotion has also been identified with aspects of cognition.¹ There are no “emotion centers” in the brain. The neuronal circuits that support emotions are completely intertwined with those that support cognition. This anatomical arrangement is consistent with the Buddhist view that these processes cannot be separated: emotions appear in a context of action and thought, and almost never in isolation from the other aspects of our experience. It should be noted that this runs counter to Freudian theory, which holds that powerful feelings of anger or jealousy, for instance, can arise without any particular cognitive or conceptual content.

THE IMPACT OF THE EMOTIONS

Derived from the Latin verb emovere, meaning “to move,” the word emotion covers any feeling that moves the mind, be it toward a harmful, a neutral, or a positive thought. Emotion is that which conditions the mind and prompts it to adopt a particular perspective, a certain way of seeing things. It does not necessarily imply an affective outburst suddenly erupting in the mind, which is closer in definition to what scientists study as emotion.

The easiest way to distinguish between our emotions is to examine their motivation (mental attitude and objective) and their results. If an emotion strengthens our inner peace and seeks the good of others, it is positive, or constructive; if it shatters our serenity, deeply disturbs our mind, and is intended to harm others, it is negative, or afflictive. As for the outcome, the only criterion is the good or the suffering that we create by our acts, words, and thoughts, for ourselves as well as for others. That is what differentiates, for instance, indignation caused by injustice from rage born of the desire to hurt someone. The former has freed people from slavery and domination and moves us to march in the streets to change the world; it seeks to end the injustice as soon as possible or to make someone aware of the error of his ways. The second generates nothing but sorrow.

As the Tibetan poet Shabkar said: “One with compassion is kind even when angry; one without compassion will kill even as he smiles.”

THE SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

According to the cognitive scientists Paul Ekman and Richard Davidson:

An evaluation of whether an emotion is beneficial or harmful is not the way mental states are divided by most psychologists. Instead there are two traditions for describing emotion: distinguishing among discrete emotions (e.g., anger, fear, disgust, enjoyment, etc.²) and distinguishing dimensions that are thought to underlie those emotions (e.g., pleasant-unpleasant, approach-avoid, etc.). Curiosity and love are typical examples of emotions of approach; fear and loathing, of avoidance.³

The same authors also say:

Even the theorists who categorize emotions as simply positive or negative do not propose that all of the negative emotions are harmful to oneself or to others. While most theorists acknowledge that emotions can on some occasions be harmful, this is not thought to be intrinsic to any particular emotion. The goal is not to rid oneself or transcend an emotion, not even hatred, but to regulate experience and action once an emotion is felt.⁴

Psychologists who study emotions from the evolutionary angle⁵ believe that they have evolved on the basis of their usefulness to our survival through their capacity to see us through life’s major exercises: reproduction, care for offspring, relations with competitors and predators. Jealousy, for instance, can be thought of as the expression of a very ancient instinct that helps to maintain the cohesiveness of a couple, inasmuch as the jealous party will keep rivals at a distance and increase his progeny’s odds of survival. Anger can help us rapidly overcome an obstacle that may be preventing us from achieving our desires or that may be threatening us. At the same time, none of these theoreticians has suggested that anger, or any other human emotion that has emerged in the course of evolution, may no longer be adapted to our current way of life. And yet they all agree that chronic or impulsive violence is pathological and acknowledge that hostility is destructive to one’s health.⁶ In one study, 255 medical students took a personality test designed to measure their level of hostility. Twenty-five years later, it was found that the most aggressive among them had suffered five times more cardiac events than those who were less irritable.⁷

For authors who consider when an emotional episode is dysfunctional, two issues predominate.⁸ In the first case, an episode is considered to be dysfunctional or disruptive when the subject expresses an appropriate emotion with disproportionate intensity. If a child does something foolish, his parents’ anger can have educational value; fury or hatred are completely disproportionate. Likewise, as Andrew Solomon writes, “grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.”⁹

In the second case, the emotional episode is harmful when the subject expresses an emotion that is inappropriate to a given situation. If a little child thumbs her nose at you, it’s better to laugh it off than to be sad or angry. As Aristotle pointed out, anyone can get angry. That’s easy. But to get angry “on the right grounds and against the right persons and also in the right manner and at the right moment and for the right length of time”—that’s not easy.

Whatever the scenario, for these psychologists the goal in dealing with our emotions is not to rid ourselves entirely of an emotion or to transcend it, but to manage our experience of it and the way in which it translates into action. Hostility, for instance, must be controlled in a way that effectively neutralizes a threatening individual while not giving free rein to unjustified cruel violence. Buddhism, however, goes further by saying that hostility is always negative because it generates and perpetuates hatred. It is entirely possible to act firmly and resolutely to overpower a dangerous person without feeling the slightest trace of hatred. The Dalai Lama was once asked about the best course of action to take when an intruder enters a room and threatens its occupants with a gun. He responded in a tone that was half serious and half playful: “I’d shoot him in the legs to neutralize him, then I’d go over and stroke his head and take care of him.” Although he knew full well that reality isn’t always that simple, he wanted to make it clear that vigorous action is enough and that it is not only pointless but harmful to inject hostility or hatred into it.

Ekman and Davidson conclude: “Rather than focusing on increasing consciousness of one’s inner state, as Buddhism does, the emphasis in psychology has instead been on learning how to reappraise situations, or control (regulate) emotional behavior and expressions.”¹⁰ Psychoanalysis tries to make the patient aware of past tendencies and events, fixations, and blocks that lead to the miseries of neurosis and prevent her from functioning normally in the world.

Buddhism takes a different position. It stresses enhanced awareness of the formation of thoughts, which allows for the immediate identification of an angry thought as it arises, and for its deconstruction the next instant, the way a picture drawn on the surface of water melts away as it is sketched. We repeat the same process with the next thought, and so on. So we need to work on our thoughts one by one, analyzing the way they emerge and evolve and gradually learning to free them as they arise, defusing the chain reactions that allow thoughts to invade the mind. This method, which presents some similarities with those developed in the West in the cognitive therapies of Aaron Beck and the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program of Jon Kabat-Zinn, is essentially centered on the present moment. It is therefore important, from the standpoint of mental health, to be alert to the way thoughts form and to learn to move beyond their constraints, instead of developing and analyzing the endless film loop of our psychic history.

The essential point here is that we can never truly bring past events back to life. They survive only through the impact they have on our present experience. What really matters is the nature of our living experience, whether it is optimal or afflictive. If we become expert at freeing ourselves of all afflictive mental states as they take form, the actual content of the past events that might have triggered them becomes quite irrelevant. Furthermore, being able to repeatedly free oneself of such afflictive thoughts as they occur gradually erodes their very tendency to form again, until they stop appearing altogether. Just as our emotions, moods, and tendencies have been shaped by the accumulation of countless instantaneous thoughts, they can be transformed through time by dealing in a mindful way with such thoughts. “Take care of the minutes, for the hours will take care of themselves,” Lord Chesterfield once told his son. This is the best path to gradual change.

TOWARD A POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Until the 1980s, few researchers had focused on how to develop the positive aspects of our temperament. In 1998 a group of American psychologists was brought together by Martin Seligman, past president of the American Psychological Association, to form the Positive Psychology Center and to coordinate the various spheres of study that it involves. It was an attempt to broaden psychology’s field of study beyond its longstanding traditional vocation to investigate and, where possible, correct emotional dysfunction and mental pathologies. An analysis in Psychological Abstracts of the books and articles published on psychology since 1887 finds 136,728 titles referring to anger, anxiety, or depression, but only 9,510 referring to joy, satisfaction, or happiness!¹¹ While it is certainly important to treat psychological problems that handicap or even paralyze people’s lives, it is essential to note that happiness is not the mere absence of unhappiness. Positive psychology, as represented by this new generation of researchers, seeks to study and reinforce the positive emotions that allow us to become better human beings and to get more joy out of life. We may progress from a pathological state to a so-called “normal” one, and from a normal state to an optimal one.

There are several justifications for such an approach. In 1969 the psychologist Norman Bradburn showed that pleasant and unpleasant affects derive from different mechanisms and must therefore be studied separately. Merely eliminating sadness and depression is no automatic guarantee of joy and happiness. The suppression of pain doesn’t necessarily lead to pleasure. It is therefore necessary not only to rid oneself of negative emotions but also to develop positive ones.

We can take this a step further by asserting that it is not enough to abstain from harming others (the elimination of malice), and that this abstention must be augmented by a determined effort to help them (the development and implementation of altruism). According to Barbara Fredrickson of the University of Michigan, one of the founders of positive psychology, positive emotions broaden our thought-action repertoire, widening the array of the thoughts and actions that come to mind, including joy, interest, contentment, and love. These scientists believe that developing such positive thoughts therefore offers an indisputable evolutionary advantage, inasmuch as it helps us to broaden our intellectual and affective universe and to open ourselves to new ideas and experiences. Unlike depression, which often sends us into a tailspin, positive emotions create an upward spiral “by building resilience and influencing the ways people cope with adversity.”¹²

WHAT WE MEAN BY “NEGATIVE” EMOTIONS

The Tibetan word nyön-mong (klesha in Sanskrit) refers to a state of mental disturbance, torment, and confusion that “afflicts us from within.” Consider hatred, jealousy, or obsession at the moment they form—there is no question that they make us deeply uncomfortable. Moreover, the actions and words they inspire are usually intended to hurt others. Conversely, thoughts of kindness, affection, and tolerance give us joy and courage, open our minds, and free us inside. They also spur us on to benevolence and empathy.

In addition, the disturbing emotions tend to distort our perception of reality and to prevent us from seeing it as it really is. Attachment idealizes its object, hatred demonizes it. These emotions make us believe that beauty or ugliness is inherent in people and in things, even though it is the mind that decides if they are “attractive” or “repulsive.” This misapprehension opens a gap between the way things appear and the way they are. It clouds our judgment and makes us think and act as if these qualities were not largely based on how we see them. On the other hand, positive emotions and mental factors strengthen the clarity of our thinking and the accuracy of our reasoning, since they are based on a more accurate appreciation of reality. Selfless love reflects some understanding of the intimate interdependence of beings, of our happiness and that of others, a notion that is attuned to reality, while selfishness opens an ever wider abyss between us and other people.

The essential thing, therefore, is to identify the types of mental activity that lead to well-being and those that lead to suffering, even when the latter afford us brief instances of pleasure. This investigation calls for a subtle assessment of the nature of the emotions. For instance our delight in making a clever but malicious remark is considered to be negative. Conversely, our frustration or even sadness at being unable to ease the suffering we witness in no way hinders the quest for sukha, since it leads us to selflessly cultivate our capacity to help and inspires our determination to put it into action. Whatever the case may be, the best means of analysis is introspection and self-observation.

The first phase of that analysis is to identify the way in which the emotions arise. This requires the cultivation of watchful attention to the unfolding of our mental activity, along with mindfulness of the distinction between destructive emotions and those that nourish happiness. This analysis, undertaken over and over again, is the critical prelude to the transformation of a state of mental disturbance. To accomplish this, Buddhism prescribes rigorous training in introspection, a practice that involves stabilizing the attention and heightening clarity of thought. This discipline is close to the concept of “sustained, voluntary attention” developed by William James, the founder of modern psychology.¹³ But while James questioned whether it was possible to develop and maintain that voluntary attention for more than a few seconds, Buddhist meditators have found that it can be developed significantly. When our discursive thoughts have been calmed through practice and our mind is clear and focused, we can examine the nature of our emotions and other mental states with great efficacy.

In the short term, certain mental processes—such as greed, hostility, and envy—can help us to attain what we think is desirable or attractive. We have also spoken about the advantages of anger and jealousy in terms of the survival of the species. In the long term, however, they hinder our development and that of others. Every incident of aggression and jealousy represents a setback in our quest for serenity and happiness. Buddhism’s sole objective in treating the emotions is to free us from the fundamental causes of suffering. It starts with the principle that certain mental events are afflictive regardless of the intensity or context of their formation. That is particularly true for the three mental processes considered to be basic mental “poisons”: desire (in the sense of craving or tormenting greed), hatred (the wish to harm), and delusion (which distorts our perception of reality). Buddhism usually includes pride and envy as well; together, these are the five major poisons associated with some sixty negative mental states. The texts also refer to “84,000 negative emotions.” These are not all specified in detail, but the symbolic figure gives a sense of the complexity of the human mind and helps us to understand that our methods of transforming the mind must be adapted to the enormous variety of mental dispositions. That is why Buddhism speaks of the “84,000 doors” that lead to inner transformation.

EXERCISE

Calming the mind and looking within

Sit in a comfortable position. Your body remains in an erect but not tense posture with eyes gently open. For five minutes, breathe calmly, noticing the in-and-out flow of your breath. Experience the gradual calming of chaotic thoughts. When thoughts arise, neither attempt to block them nor let them multiply. Simply continue to watch your breath.

Next, instead of paying attention to outer sights, sounds, and events, turn your “gaze” inward and “look” at the mind itself. “Looking” here means observing your awareness itself, not the content of your thoughts. Let the mind gently come to rest, as a tired traveler finds a pleasant meadow in which to sit for a while.

Then, with a deep feeling of appreciation, think of the value of human existence and of its extraordinary potential for flourishing. Be aware, too, that this precious life will not last forever and that it is essential to make the best possible use of it. Sincerely examine what counts most in life for you. What do you need to accomplish or discard in order to achieve authentic well-being and live a meaningful existence? When the factors that contribute to true happiness have become clear to you, imagine that they begin to bloom in your mind. Resolve to nurture them day after day.

End your meditation by letting thoughts of pure kindness embrace all living beings.