Banning myself from Political discussion for 7 days...

No need!

I think that was productive. I just have a big mouth and it is time to close it on that subject. LOL

Well, if you look at Jeff's post on the intuition vs projection thread, you will see how Alex Berzin defines and qualifies the term "clear and aware." Then I think you can see that one can engage conflicted emotions as they arise and experience their purification. One way to do that is to engage without ego grasping. So if you can accept responsibility for, and achieve non duality with the emotional and cognitive appearance and concentrate on its emptiness, that is engaging, but with the result of peace. The first part, accepting responsibility and being non dual with the appearance is most the battle, then one simply holds the non conceptual middle within the appearance, without contributing any will or aversion. And when that energy is purified in emptiness, that is the ultimate renunciation.

So whatever works best for you is best I suppose. But I think "renouncing and not engaging conflicting emotions" is a problematic instruction in a lot ways and may be a bad translation. The problem it the term engaging. A better term would imply not agreeing with or contributing to. It seems like "renouncing and not engaging" with their meanings and connotations in english, might cause a lot of people to gloss over and suppress emotions, and not accept responsibility for them. And when our practice is somewhat mature, we should not have to avoid meditating on difficult issues. I think we need to be completely detached from conflicting emotions, but still be able to observe and engage their appearance in the way that Berzin explains and qualifies those terms, whether or not we experience emptiness.

I suspect all of what I just wrote about emptiness, refers to the "result which teaches the benefit of peace." Which may be a way of saying there is both a Sutra level and a Result as Path level in the transmission.

But Alex Berzin is always refining and qualifying tibetan to english translations, and frankly a lot of translators aren't.

What is so interesting about this conversation to me is the chance see how someone else interprets a teaching, and I think that is a little like having a glimpse into your mind and practice. Of course we have known each other for nearly thirty years and had a lot of conversations about Buddhist ideas, texts, teachings and practice, but still there are differences that underscore that everyone's point of view is unique and uniquely valid.

So with engagement, it had not really occurred to me to look at this from the side of method, and cultivating compassion, which does involve evoking feeling. Another of many examples of this is the Dalai Lama suggesting imagining oneself as a fish being dragged by a hook in his mouth. But what he says about that is at first it may seem too intense, but if you stay with it, that intensity rapidly diminishes. So method or wisdom, they both lead to resolving conflicting emotions, and bringing peace, and that is how these teachings are designed to work.

So for me, on the question of conflicting emotions, to engage or not engage, the problem I have with saying do not engage, is that one has to engage emotions in a detached fashion to resolve them. And from that point of view, the drive gear is too wilfull of an example and engaged to be married too attached. So precisely avoiding those, but still accepting responsiblity for, and looking into the emotion as it arises works to disolve it. I would call that engagement, and like I said I think we need a term that means we are not letting these emotions drive our thoughts or actions, but working to resolve them and the issues/delusions behind them.

Even just feeling things, letting oneself feel an emotion, but not believing the cognition, the story it tells, and not letting it drive us deeper into deluded thought and feeling, but staying detached from those, that will also dimish and work to reoslve the emotion.

The point is to purify our conciousness, clear it gradually of conflicting emotions and in order to do that it is my experience that I need to engage them directly but still stay detached from them.


But this is all in the context of Jeff's quote from Alex Berzin as well, so I don't want to divorce it from that. Part of my point is the difficulty in accurately translating Tibetan or Sanskrit to English. It takes a lot of qualifying and explaining. If we just settle on a term, and never question how it is glossed in the context and language of Tibetan, I think it is easy to get wrong ideas about what these great practitioners are really saying.

Your wording seems accurate to me, Rudy, and I agree that is an important distinction, though love an compassion can be understood as attitudes and motivations perhaps even more than emotions according to their use in Buddhist teachings and texts. Even so, there are undoubtedly countless examples of appropriate and positive feelings.

Conflicting emotions refers to negative attitudes or emotions. I think it is short hand for greed, craving, jealousy, anger and hatred. I am not sure if it includes the 3 poisons (ignorance, attachment and bias) or not? But these are at the root of the other five, and according to my teacher, fear is classed with anger, as it is based on the perception that something is undesirable.

Is that how you understand conflicting emotions?

Regarding "engaged," above, Alexander Berzin uses it here, but in another context which suggests more than addressing or recognizing the "conflicting emotions," which is how I tend to think of it in regard to your example of experiencing them, Matt:



Also, for me, this note from Thrangu Rinpoche's commentary on the 3rd Karmapa's Distinguishing Consciousness from Wisdom, a note specifically regarding the kleshas, may be a fuller understanding of the "conflicting emotions," of the above original quote since it sources the Tibetan definition:

One can combine aspirations with nonduality and emptiness, though. In effect that is the wisdom that we call the union of wisdom and method. For example, a person can know that all desire is ultimately for enlightenment, or one can combine nonduality and emptiness with the aspirations from Shantidiva's Bodhisatva text (for example), where he says things like let me be a slave to anyone who wants a slave and basically volunteers for all instances of suffering. So that is an aspect of engagement, we are truly accepting responsibility, no longer (for the moment anyway) caught in the mindless and endless cycle of seeking credit and avoiding blame, or even seeking happiness and trying to avoid suffering. These latter two are the root of sentience, of separation, of delusion. And what distinguishes Wisdom Consciousness from sentience, ordinary thought and emotion from clear light, are not just different levels of purity and insight, but these great differences in motivation.

right insight+ right motivation results in the union of wisdom and method, and that is not a passive state, but rather truly engaged. Obviously, it means a non grasping kind of engagement.

Specifically one is engaged with something (the object, which can be all sentient beings), or rather not separate from, because strictly speaking in emptiness there is no thing or other or even self, but that does not mean in practicing the union there is only nirvana. Even at that level there is witness, a conscious self. As my teacher said once, "we do not dip down into our own nirvana," and that is the difference between the mediation of a Bodhisatva and an Arhat. For the union, there needs to be someone present to have right motivation, in nirvana the sense of self is completely absorbed.

Rudy wrote,


It seems to me that the emotions are "conflicting" because we tend to experience, primarily, one pole of a particular pair of emotions, which, in a way, is fuelled by its opposite. For example, we may focus on hope, though a hope arises with a fear.

One of the ways I was thinking about this is that ignorance has a way of dividing and conquering us. By "ignorance," here, I'm specifically referring to attachment to a self which, when unrecognized--or in our case, more likely forgotten about due to a lack of mindfulness --takes a view of acceptance or rejection in regard to the eight worldy concerns, which fuels emotion.

I think their conflicting nature is more evident when we think we see both sides to a situation and, when making a decision about it, experience both sides of the base of the emotion. The more intensely we feel them, the more conflicted we feel, the more confused we become.

Ignorance is often glossed as "delusion" and is a characteristic of the animal realm. Ken McLeod has sometimes called it "instinct," which I think works well when we consider attachment to self and a seeming instinctual reflex to protect itself.

Matt wrote:


I like this image. I find this type of thought helpful especially in anxiety situations, since I am prone to attempt to escape instead. It also brings to mind the "hook of compassion:"