Emotions are the path

[Bindi]

13 hours ago, Apech said:

 

I see what you mean - and it is true that beginner Buddhist would be taught like that - but in later stages, or at least in vajrayana there is a different approach.  I think the insubstantial water is essentially pure but is contaminated by our emotions. 
 

 

Yes, I agree, metaphorically speaking pure water that has been contaminated by mud. 

 

Quote

 

One stage in dealing with this alchemically would be to let it settle but this would be followed by transformational processes.

 

For me this is the active part of the path, and an area where effort is needed. I don’t personally believe in letting mud settle at all, I prefer a more psychoanalytical approach, akin to climbing up a high and very steep mountain, and not stopping until you get to the top. 
 

It was a Western Buddhist and psychotherapist who coined the term spiritual bypassing after noticing this tendency in Western Buddhist groups. I rather like the idea of a grounded Western spirituality made to order for us and our particular Western mind-set, having as it’s starting point the thoroughly Western concept of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, and going from there. 

 

Quote

 

From my own experience I would say that we have a bundle of emotions which we are particularly attached to - and we tend to rotate through them in certain moods or thoughts or states of being which have the effect of either agitating us or making us stuck.  Both have the effect of robbing us of an awareness of our true selves. 
 

 

Yes, I can see this, the question is really what to do about it, what method do you employ out of the hundreds that are on offer. 

 

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Releasing from the 'stuck' state is a heart thing - where if you get it right there is free circulation through all the centres and channels which lays the ground for integrating energy and awareness.

 

Honestly, the three dantian model works very well for me, first unstick the mental and emotional entanglement in the belly, then at the heart level, then at the head level. This was the path that was most natural for me anyway. 
 

If you get it right and there is free circulation through all the centres and channels, well then...   

 

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Something like that

 

 

Yes indeed  

[manitou]

On 9/21/2020 at 9:23 PM, Nungali said:

Anyway, we all know our beliefs have little to do with reality  .... wait ....   we all know  some other people's beliefs have little to do with reality 

 

 

Beliefs and realizations are two entirely different animals.  One is gained externally, the other internally.  The result we seek finally occurs with a realization.

[Nungali]

Yes  -  what is required is a realization about our beliefs .

[idiot_stimpy]

From a non-dual standpoint, emotions cannot be separate from the one pervading reality that is currently effortlessly being right now.

 

I love the Dzogchen path, and although I cannot speak on its behalf, I love how all things great and small, that present itself are already primordially pure, thus nothing needs to be done.

[Michael Sternbach]

In the Hermetic view, potentially destructive emotions are basically the distorted image of positive emotions and emotional attitudes respectively.

 

Thus, when we experience hate, we may actually be aspiring to developing love, according to the mandate of our soul or higher self. Or we may be inclined towards criticism in order to understand tolerance, or towards fear for learning courage, and so on.

 

Hermetism indeed includes methods of transmuting one into the other which are alchemical in nature. One of the texts that talk about this is the famous Kybalion.

Edited September 26, 2020 by Michael Sternbach

[manitou]

Experiencing hate or any negative emotion is a perfect way to work on self.  One determines what it really is that's bothering you - and why you rubbed up against that person.  Once the memory or tendency is found, it can be easily reversed.  Awareness of what lurks within our conditioning starts the process - the tendency will see itself each time it rises and ultimately the body makes the decision that it's not productive to be unbending.  

 

The enlightened mind accepts life as it is - this is possible after the ego is diminished.  Which happens after we've diminished our tendencies to protect our ego.  And I agree fully with Michael - love is always trying to break through - the tendency coils higher and higher, despite the minefields.

 

Edited September 26, 2020 by manitou

[dwai]

I like how Rupert Spira says, “learn to sit with your feeings”.

 

[manitou]

Nice find, Dwai.  Such a good topic, sitting with feelings.  He's got a good point about resistance being futile and making things worse.  Actually, nothing feels better than a good cry -- full stop, full monty - Cry.  To cry so hard that no sound even comes out of your mouth.  Like you are in the complete grips of acceptance of something that is utterly unacceptable.  

[Michael Sternbach]

I agree, Manitou.

 

When dealing with intense emotions, it is best to accept them for what they are and "dance" with them.

 

The water course way as it were.

[Geof Nanto]

22 hours ago, Bindi said:

It was a Western Buddhist and psychotherapist who coined the term spiritual bypassing after noticing this tendency in Western Buddhist groups. I rather like the idea of a grounded Western spirituality made to order for us and our particular Western mind-set, having as it’s starting point the thoroughly Western concept of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, and going from there. 

 

I like that. For me what works well is Daoist praxis for my ming cultivation and Jung’s psychological insights for my xing cultivation. 

[Geof Nanto]

5 hours ago, manitou said:

And I agree fully with Michael - love is always trying to break through - the tendency coils higher and higher, despite the minefields.

 

Yes, that's where emotional work should lead us. I realised a few days ago after writing my long post on the previous page that the OP title is another way of saying love is the path. However the word ‘love’ is such an abused cliché it’s become almost meaningless. It no longer has emotional power. The love I’m referring to is not the tame, domesticated, sentimental opiate that passes for love in contemporary society.

 

Now I can read the following passage of Jung’s about love and deeply feel it. It resonates with my own hard-won inner experience after decades of alchemical transformation of my own chaotic emotions. Whereas when I first read it about 30 years ago it scarcely registered with me:

 

At this point the fact forces itself on my attention that beside the field of reflection there is another equally broad if not broader area in which rational understanding and rational modes of representation find scarcely anything they are able to grasp. This is the realm of Eros. In classical times, when such things were properly understood, Eros was considered a god whose divinity  transcended our human limits, and who therefore could neither be comprehended nor represented in anyway. I might, as many before me have attempted to do, venture an approach to this daimon, whose range of activity extends from the endless spaces of the heavens to the dark abysses of hell; but I falter before the task of finding the language which might adequately express the incalculable paradoxes of love, Eros is a kosmogonos, a creator and father-mother of all higher consciousness. I sometimes feel that Paul's words 'Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love" might well be the first condition of all cognition and the quintessence of divinity itself. Whatever the learned interpretation may be of the sentence "God is love," the words affirm the complexio oppositorum of the Godhead. In my medical experience as well as in my own life I have again and again been faced with the mystery of love, and have never been able to explain what it is. Like Job, I had to 'lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer" (Job 40:4 f .)

 

Here is the greatest and smallest, the remotest and nearest, the highest and lowest, and we cannot discuss one side of it without also discussing the other. No language is adequate to this paradox. Whatever one can say, no words express the whole. To speak of partial aspects is always too much or too little, for only the whole is meaningful Love "bears all things" and "endures all things" (i Cor. 13:7). These words say all there is to be said; nothing can be added to them. For we are in the deepest sense the victims and the instruments of cosmogonic ‘love.’ I put the word in quotation marks to indicate that I do not use it in its connotations of desiring, preferring, favoring, wishing, and similar feelings, but as something superior to the individual, a unified and undivided whole. Being a part, man cannot grasp the whole. He is at its mercy. He may assent to it, or rebel against it; but he is always caught up by it and enclosed within it. He is dependent upon it and is sustained by it. Love is his light and his darkness, whose end he cannot see. "Love ceases not" whether he speaks with the "tongues of angels," or with scientific exactitude traces the life of the cell down to its uttermost source. Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names at his command, and still he will involve himself in endless self-deceptions. If he possesses a grain of wisdom, he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown, ignotum per ignotius that is, by the name of God. That is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependence; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error.

 

[Jung uses the term ’Eros’ in a much broader sense than its usual erotic connotation, as should be obvious from the above quotation. For him it’s the feminine (yin) quality whose essence is psychic relatedness. It’s the great binder and loosener. Its counterpart in Jung’s psychology is Logos, the masculine (yang) quality of objective discrimination.]

 

 

Edited September 26, 2020 by Yueya

[old3bob]

gather emotions into pointed devotion and wahla - locomotion

 

I didn't exactly mean the locomotion below but it's not excluded...

 

 

Edited September 27, 2020 by old3bob

[manitou]

On 9/26/2020 at 4:34 PM, Yueya said:

Yes, that's where emotional work should lead us. I realised a few days ago after writing my long post on the previous page that the OP title is another way of saying love is the path. However the word ‘love’ is such an abused cliché it’s become almost meaningless. It no longer has emotional power. The love I’m referring to is not the tame, domesticated, sentimental opiate that passes for love in contemporary society.

 

Now I can read the following passage of Jung’s about love and deeply feel it. It resonates with my own hard-won inner experience after decades of alchemical transformation of my own chaotic emotions. Whereas when I first read it about 30 years ago it scarcely registered with me:

 

 

 

Love is also a decision.  To wear love as a daily garment is a challenge, but well worth the effort.  It's difficult sometimes to see how to react in a loving fashion (without being an enabler, etc)  and is sometimes demonstrated in the midst of chaos.  It's like all the papers and objects are swirling around you, but you are the steady rock that things will settle into.  So often the immediate answer is 'do nothing', the action we can take to stop the dynamic in its tracks.   Any  further response will involve an action.  It must be a loving one, whatever 'love' looks like in any situation.  Love might be telling someone something they need to hear, and no one else has the guts to say it.  But we say it kindly and with compassion, regardless of what it is.  Love is always truthful and does not cut corners.  It truly takes a certain type of daily courage to live honestly and without guile.

 

I took the Castaneda path, originally.  He speaks much of impeccability of character - the sort of impeccability which observes itself all day.  The kind of impeccability that will pick up someone else's kleenex in the street even if it's not yours.  Or someone else's dog poop.  These acts, although unobserved by others, are an excellent way to increase impeccability in the soul.  It's also a bit humbling to do things like that (while in Ohio, I would pick up road kill and place it off to the side of the road).  You know that the folks in the stopped cars are probably experiencing a gag reflex - but there is also benefit to doing things like that, knowing that others think you very strange.  Humbling is a good thing and diminishes ego.

 

But that too is love.  To recognize life as One, even if we're talking about a dead skunk on the road.  Castaneda's nagual promoted 'stalking yourself', the ability to see yourself from outside yourself...to see yourself as you actually are, not the fiction in your head.  To question your own motives.  Transcending ego, essentially.  Ultimately.

[Apech]

@manitou absolutely loving your replies by the way.

 

Love - yes.  Is it an emotion tho'?  Not saying it's not.  Just asking.  Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds ... and all that.  An ever fixed mark. etc. etc.

 

Someone much cleverer than me pointed out - reverse the letters E-V-O-L (ve)  ... is it something like wanting to be better and make those around you better as well.  God's law written in our hearts.  Or to be a bit Don Juan - the predilection of power - ??????

 

 

[Nungali]

43 minutes ago, Apech said:

@manitou absolutely loving your replies by the way.

 

Love - yes.  Is it an emotion tho'?  Not saying it's not.  Just asking.  Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds ... and all that.  An ever fixed mark. etc. etc.

 

Someone much cleverer than me pointed out - reverse the letters E-V-O-L (ve)  ... is it something like wanting to be better and make those around you better as well.  God's law written in our hearts.  Or to be a bit Don Juan - the predilection of power - ??????

 

 

 

I would not describe love as an emotion - in  itself .  I think love is a universal force  (meaning it is a force that operates in many things  aside from people, including physics ) that when it effects people it triggers their emotions ... into a whole range of other stuff that they often mistake as love  ( eg, jealousy, possession, etc .)

 

 

[Bindi]

9 hours ago, Apech said:

@manitou absolutely loving your replies by the way.

 

Love - yes.  Is it an emotion tho'?  Not saying it's not.  Just asking.  Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds ... and all that.  An ever fixed mark. etc. etc.

 

Someone much cleverer than me pointed out - reverse the letters E-V-O-L (ve)  ... is it something like wanting to be better and make those around you better as well.  God's law written in our hearts.  Or to be a bit Don Juan - the predilection of power - ??????

 

 

Reversing letters isn’t a secret code though  

 

I was thinking today that if love is a choice, it hasn’t achieved the state of ‘wuwei’. 

[old3bob]

14 hours ago, Nungali said:

 

I would not describe love as an emotion - in  itself .  I think love is a universal force  (meaning it is a force that operates in many things  aside from people, including physics ) that when it effects people it triggers their emotions ... into a whole range of other stuff that they often mistake as love  ( eg, jealousy, possession, etc .)

 

 

 

 "love" between people with variable  condition's or complexities to whatever degree is part of our human experience,

an unconditional  love is also of the human experience but without variable conditions or complexities, it simply is part of our True Nature (or The True Nature) ever ready and empowered to work instant and also lasting miracles of compassion, wisdom, support and acceptance beyond any calculation for Itself or limits of reasoning although It is not unreasonable...

Spirit unto Spirit, Love unto Love !   

[Apech]

7 hours ago, Bindi said:

Reversing letters isn’t a secret code though  

 

I was thinking today that if love is a choice, it hasn’t achieved the state of ‘wuwei’. 

 

Is love a choice with you?  

 

 

[ilumairen]

17 hours ago, Apech said:

@manitou absolutely loving your replies by the way.

 

Love - yes.  Is it an emotion tho'?  Not saying it's not.  Just asking.  Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds ... and all that.  An ever fixed mark. etc. etc.

 

Someone much cleverer than me pointed out - reverse the letters E-V-O-L (ve)  ... is it something like wanting to be better and make those around you better as well.  God's law written in our hearts.  Or to be a bit Don Juan - the predilection of power - ??????

 

 

Your post brought to mind a song.

 

“Love lift us up where we belong
Where the eagles cry
On a mountain high
Love lift us up where we belong
Far from the world below
Up where the clear winds blow”

 

Would love’s power to “lift” be akin to it as catalyst to evolve?

[Apech]

32 minutes ago, ilumairen said:

Your post brought to mind a song.

 

“Love lift us up where we belong
Where the eagles cry
On a mountain high
Love lift us up where we belong
Far from the world below
Up where the clear winds blow”

 

Would love’s power to “lift” be akin to it as catalyst to evolve?

 

Being better:

 

 

[manitou]

Really, I see love as a mindset.  To always at least try to do the most 'loving' thing in any circumstance.  And while in that mindset, while maintained, is an enlightened state of mind, because you know at that moment that you are aligned with the highest ideals, from the inside to the outside..  I do see it as a choice, but a daily choice that must be renewed as the day wears on.

 

The feeling of love is another thing altogether, IMO.  That is certainly icing on the cake - but I know from my many years of doing the two-step with others, that the squishy love feeling comes and goes, and cannot be relied upon.  The kind of love I ultimately experienced with my husband started out as a squishy thing alternating as a drunken thing - but after adjusting to each other over a 35 year period, the most golden, quiet love evolved.  And we did make each other better people.

[Nungali]

1 hour ago, manitou said:

Really, I see love as a mindset.  To always at least try to do the most 'loving' thing in any circumstance.  And while in that mindset, while maintained, is an enlightened state of mind, because you know at that moment that you are aligned with the highest ideals, from the inside to the outside..  I do see it as a choice, but a daily choice that must be renewed as the day wears on.

 

The feeling of love is another thing altogether, IMO.  That is certainly icing on the cake - but I know from my many years of doing the two-step with others, that the squishy love feeling comes and goes, and cannot be relied upon.  The kind of love I ultimately experienced with my husband started out as a squishy thing alternating as a drunken thing - but after adjusting to each other over a 35 year period, the most golden, quiet love evolved.  And we did make each other better people.

 

 

[Bindi]

14 hours ago, Apech said:

 

Is love a choice with you?  

 

 

I think ‘love’ and decisions to love are neither here nor there for me, they’re certainly not my end goal.  From my perspective - which aligns with the neidan point of view - the end goal is producing the elixir, a goal beyond emotions, even the nice ones. 

[Bindi]

Beyond the mental channel and the emotional channel there is the central channel. If energy is flowing through this central channel it’s not going to be doubling up on the production or transport of emotions including love, as that’s already covered by the emotional channel. The central channel must serve another purpose neither mental nor emotional, beyond mental and emotional consciousnesses. 
 

 

 

Edited September 30, 2020 by Bindi

[Nungali]

On 27/09/2020 at 9:34 AM, Yueya said:

 

Yes, that's where emotional work should lead us. I realised a few days ago after writing my long post on the previous page that the OP title is another way of saying love is the path. However the word ‘love’ is such an abused cliché it’s become almost meaningless. It no longer has emotional power. The love I’m referring to is not the tame, domesticated, sentimental opiate that passes for love in contemporary society.

 

Now I can read the following passage of Jung’s about love and deeply feel it. It resonates with my own hard-won inner experience after decades of alchemical transformation of my own chaotic emotions. Whereas when I first read it about 30 years ago it scarcely registered with me:

 

At this point the fact forces itself on my attention that beside the field of reflection there is another equally broad if not broader area in which rational understanding and rational modes of representation find scarcely anything they are able to grasp. This is the realm of Eros. In classical times, when such things were properly understood, Eros was considered a god whose divinity  transcended our human limits, and who therefore could neither be comprehended nor represented in anyway. I might, as many before me have attempted to do, venture an approach to this daimon, whose range of activity extends from the endless spaces of the heavens to the dark abysses of hell; but I falter before the task of finding the language which might adequately express the incalculable paradoxes of love, Eros is a kosmogonos, a creator and father-mother of all higher consciousness. I sometimes feel that Paul's words 'Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love" might well be the first condition of all cognition and the quintessence of divinity itself. Whatever the learned interpretation may be of the sentence "God is love," the words affirm the complexio oppositorum of the Godhead. In my medical experience as well as in my own life I have again and again been faced with the mystery of love, and have never been able to explain what it is. Like Job, I had to 'lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer" (Job 40:4 f .)

 

Here is the greatest and smallest, the remotest and nearest, the highest and lowest, and we cannot discuss one side of it without also discussing the other. No language is adequate to this paradox. Whatever one can say, no words express the whole. To speak of partial aspects is always too much or too little, for only the whole is meaningful Love "bears all things" and "endures all things" (i Cor. 13:7). These words say all there is to be said; nothing can be added to them. For we are in the deepest sense the victims and the instruments of cosmogonic ‘love.’ I put the word in quotation marks to indicate that I do not use it in its connotations of desiring, preferring, favoring, wishing, and similar feelings, but as something superior to the individual, a unified and undivided whole. Being a part, man cannot grasp the whole. He is at its mercy. He may assent to it, or rebel against it; but he is always caught up by it and enclosed within it. He is dependent upon it and is sustained by it. Love is his light and his darkness, whose end he cannot see. "Love ceases not" whether he speaks with the "tongues of angels," or with scientific exactitude traces the life of the cell down to its uttermost source. Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names at his command, and still he will involve himself in endless self-deceptions. If he possesses a grain of wisdom, he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown, ignotum per ignotius that is, by the name of God. That is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependence; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error.

 

[Jung uses the term ’Eros’ in a much broader sense than its usual erotic connotation, as should be obvious from the above quotation. For him it’s the feminine (yin) quality whose essence is psychic relatedness. It’s the great binder and loosener. Its counterpart in Jung’s psychology is Logos, the masculine (yang) quality of objective discrimination.]

 

 

 

 

What says Jung  of 'agape'   then  ?

 

[ Traditionally  Eros was  sexual attraction and desire , but not just that . Eros also had a much wider range , as Jung suggests,  depending on which tradition (some have even posited the existence of at least two different Eroses)  ;

 

Eros as a Primordial Cosmic Force

The first of these is Hesiod’s Eros, a primordial being, “the most beautiful of the immortal gods,” one of the very first few deities that sprung into existence. In this story, Eros was the son of Chaos, and the brother of Gaea, Tartarus, Erebus, and Nyx. A universal cosmic force, he became Aphrodite’s companion soon after her birth, which he had previously overseen.

Eros as One of the Erotes, Children of Aphrodite and Ares

However, possibly due to the fact that Eros was constantly accompanying the goddess of love, later authors reimagined him as one of the many children of Aphrodite and Ares. In this case, there are at least three more winged love gods such as him, all of them his brothers: Anteros, Pothos, and Himeros. Together, they are often referred to as the Erotes.

 

-  https://www.greekmythology.com/Other_Gods/Eros/eros.html

 

 

Other named Erotes are Anteros ("Love Returned"),^[1]Himeros ("Impetuous Love" or "Pressing Desire"), Hedylogos ("Sweet-talk"), Hymenaios ("Bridal-Hymn"), Hermaphroditus ("Hermaphrodite" or "Effeminate"), and Pothos ("Desire, Longing," especially for one who is absent)

 

  - Wiki .

Them here is Eros husband of Psykhe (Psyche) .  Now that story and Eros'  role in it is a real eye opener and  and insight into the dynamics of 'soul',  self and ego .