Pure Emotion

      I spent much of the day writing a bit of a fun play I had been inspired to write over the past week, in addition to reading in the sun. Outside, at the North York Central  Library, there was an interesting festival going on. I got lost in the music of the festival as well as reading Garma C.C. Chang's The Buddhist Teaching of Totality a second time. For a while, I had lost the perspective of self and others because there were no longer any voices 'overstanding' my experience.
     There is nothing particularly alarming about emotion, I realize, until there are "selves" attached to those emotions. What I mean by this is that too much of our interchanges have a strong distinction of self and others. We hear conversations like "I, unlike you, do this", and the idea is that one person is somehow superior to another in some way. And then the whole thing becomes a process of negotiating between what is mine and what is someone else's. This is where people start to blame others or take the blame themselves for things undone or not done up to standard. And this process only perpetuates strong sense of self. And notice that "self" here means multiple selves.
    But if one is not so hung up on the sense of self, what happens to emotional life? I find that it becomes somehow more clear. That is, emotions are no longer assigned to specific events or people. Instead, the emotion becomes something that is simply passing through and not being enmeshed in the concept of self and others. Direct experience of emotions is not so easy to achieve, however, because in daily life, there  is always a craving for a situation that is smoother and more pleasant. The result of this desire for something better is the growing sense that life is an obstacle to be overcome, or even an obstacle course. I wonder if you have ever had such an experience before, where you were rushing to get home to do something and started to perceive that the whole world were an obstacle to you reaching that goal. It's not that the world 'became' an obstacle. Rather, it is one's own desire for something in the future that makes the world into a sort of obstacle, or a heavy burden.
    I have encountered a similar kind of situation when I am in a rush to get somewhere. I notice that everything becomes an obstacle to me getting to my destination, rather than being a natural circumstance. When one is late for an appointment, every minute seems so critical, and even the stoplights seem like a punishment. But if I were not late for an appointment, would any of these things feel that way--as obstacles or punishments, or even objects of blame? This is to say that our attitude often depends on the kinds of ways we frame the circumstances.
    Chang himself offers a wonderful analogy to this relativity of things when he remarks:

To a man water is something tangible and definitely existent, but a fish living in the water may never feel its existence at all, just as men do not feel the existence of still air. The Buddhist tradition asserts that when a deva or god sees the water contained in a lake, he sees it as nectar not water; the same will become pus and blood when a hungry ghost sees it, and it becomes a poisonous liquid or fire when a denizen of hell sees it. This again testifies to the fact that water has no Selfhood. Conditioned by different common karmas, it appears as different things to different sentient beings. (p.87)

The point here is to suggest that things only seem terrible when there is an attachment to an essential thing that is behind that thing. If I am able to see that emotions aren't attached to any specific thing but are actually related to a whole set of emerging conditions, will I feel bad about that emotion? I probably won't feel so bad, because I would know that the emotion is not related to a specific object that is set against 'me' but is rather just arising from the conditions.

Chang, Garma C. C. (1977) The Buddhist Teaching of Totality: The Philosophy of Hwa Yen Buddhism. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.