I won’t correct everything I find wrong, but I felt that the “Understanding Suffering” section was completely off. I will just mention one of the major points:
Remember, enlightenment means that you no longer experience emotional pain as aversive. In other words, you continue to have “negative” emotions like fear, anger, jealousy, and so on—you just don’t mind having them.
This is utterly wrong. Enlightenment in Buddhism means emotional pain cannot arise, period. In Buddhism, there are five “hindrances” or negative mental states: desire, aversion, compulsion/agitation, slothfulness and remorse. This list is said to encapsulate all possible negative feelings. In an enlightened person, these hindrances cannot arise. The “fetter”, the bond which causes a person to experience these is uprooted.
Secondly, in Buddhism, it’s believed that negative mental states are always a bad and painful experience so it’s impossible to not mind having them. If you think about it, you can’t be sad and not mind it. You can’t be angry but not mind it. There are a few Buddhist circles which believe you can be detached from anger or desire, but this doesn’t make sense because in Buddhist theory, such mental states arise from attachment in the first place.
Yeah, some Buddhist traditions do make those claims. The teachers and practitioners who I’m the most familiar with and trust the most tend to reject those models, sometimes quite strongly (e.g. Daniel Ingram here). Also near the end of his life, Culadasa came to think that even though it might at one point have seemed like he had predominantly positive emotions in the way that some schools suggested, in reality he had just been repressing them with harmful consequences.
Culadasa: As a result of my practice, I had reached a point where emotions would arise but they really had no power over me, but I could choose to allow those emotions to express themselves if they served a purpose. Well, it’s sort of a downweighting of emotions – negative emotions were strongly downweighted, and positive emotions were not downweighted at all. So this was the place I was coming from as a meditation teacher. I just never really experienced anger; when something would cause some anger to arise, I’d notice it and let go of it, and, you know, it wasn’t there. Negative emotions in general were just not part of my life anymore. So it was a process of getting in touch with a lot of these emotions that, you know, I hadn’t been making space for because I saw them as unhealthy, unhelpful, so on and so forth.
Michael: So, in essence, you had bypassed them.
Culadasa: Yes, it’s a bypassing. I think it’s a very common bypassing, too, when somebody reaches this particular stage on the path. I mean, this is a big of a digression, but I think it maybe helps to put the whole thing into perspective, the rest of our conversation into perspective…
Michael: Please digress.
Culadasa: Okay. So this is a stage at which the sense of being a separate self completely disappears. I mean, prior to that, at stream entry, you know, there’s no more attachment to the ego, the ego becomes transparent, but you still have this feeling that I’m a separate self; it still produces craving; you have to work through that in the next path, and so on and so forth. But this is a stage where that very primitive, that very primal sense of being a separate self falls away. Now, what I know about this from a neuroscience point of view is that there’s a part of the brainstem which was the earliest concentration of neurons that was brain-like in the evolution of brains, and there are nuclei there that were responsible for maintaining homeostasis of the body, and they still do that today. One of their major purposes is to regulate homeostasis in the body, blood pressure, heart rate, oxygenation of the blood, you name it, just every aspect of internal bodily maintenance. With the subsequent development of the emotional brain, the structures that are referred to as the limbic system, evolution provided a way to guide animals’ behaviors on the basis of emotions and so these same nuclei then created ascending fibers into this limbic system, from the brainstem into these new neural structures that constituted the emotional brain.
Michael: So this very old structure that regulated the body linked up with the new emotional structures.
Culadasa: Right. It linked up with it, and the result was a sense of self. Okay? You can see the enormous value of this to an animal, to an organism. A sense of self. My goodness. So now these emotions can operate in a way that serves to improve the survival, reproduction, everything else of this self, right? Great evolutionary advance. So now we have organisms with a sense of self. Then the further evolution of cerebral cortex, all of these other higher structures, then that same sense of self became integrated into that as well. So there we have the typical human being with this very strong, very primal sense that “I am me. I am a separate self.” We can create all kinds of mental constructs around this, but even cats and dogs and deer and mice and lizards and things like that have this sense of self. We elaborate an ego on top of it. So there’s these two aspects to self in a human being. One is the ego self, the mental construct that’s been built around this more primal sense of self. So this is a stage at which that primal sense of self disappears and what usually seems to happen is, at the same time, there is a temporary disappearance of all emotions. I think that we’ll probably eventually find out that the neural mechanism by which we bring about this shift, that these two things are linked, because the sense of self is – its passageway to the higher brain centers, which constitute the field of conscious awareness that we live in and all of the unconscious drives that we’re responding to, the limbic system, the emotional brain, is the link.
Michael: Yes.
Culadasa: So something happens that interrupts that link. The emotions come back online, but they come back online in a different way from that point. So instead of being overcome by fear, anger, lust, joy, whatever, these things arise and they’re something that you can either let go of or not. [laughs] That’s the place where I was.
Michael: They seem very ephemeral…
Culadasa: Yes, right. They’re very ephemeral, and very easy to deal with, and there is a tendency for other people to see you as less emotional and truly you are because you’ve downregulated a lot of more negative emotions. But you’re by no means nonemotional; you’re still human, you still have the full gamut of human emotions available to you. But you do get out of the habit of giving much leeway to certain kinds of emotions. And the work that I was doing with Doug pushed me in the direction of, “Let’s go ahead and let’s experience some of those emotions. Let’s see what it feels like to experience the dukkha of wanting things to be different than the way they are.” So that’s what we did. And I started getting in touch with these emotions and their relationship to my current life situation where I wasn’t fulfilling my greatest aspirations because I was doing a lot of things that – stuff that had to be done, but that I had no interest in, but I had to do it and that’s what occupied my time.
I’m guessing that something similar is what’s actually happening for a lot of the schools claiming complete elimination of all negative feelings. Insight practices can be used in ways that end up bypassing or suppressing a lot of one’s emotions, but actually negative feelings are still having effects in the person, they just go unnoticed.
If you think about it, you can’t be sad and not mind it. You can’t be angry but not mind it.
This disagrees with my experience, and with the experience of several other people I know.
Based on the link, it seems you follow the Theravada tradition. The ideas you give go against the Theravada ideas. You need to go study the Pali Canon. This information is all wrong I’m afraid. I won’t talk more on the matter.
I won’t correct everything I find wrong, but I felt that the “Understanding Suffering” section was completely off. I will just mention one of the major points:
This is utterly wrong. Enlightenment in Buddhism means emotional pain cannot arise, period. In Buddhism, there are five “hindrances” or negative mental states: desire, aversion, compulsion/agitation, slothfulness and remorse. This list is said to encapsulate all possible negative feelings. In an enlightened person, these hindrances cannot arise. The “fetter”, the bond which causes a person to experience these is uprooted.
Secondly, in Buddhism, it’s believed that negative mental states are always a bad and painful experience so it’s impossible to not mind having them. If you think about it, you can’t be sad and not mind it. You can’t be angry but not mind it. There are a few Buddhist circles which believe you can be detached from anger or desire, but this doesn’t make sense because in Buddhist theory, such mental states arise from attachment in the first place.
Yeah, some Buddhist traditions do make those claims. The teachers and practitioners who I’m the most familiar with and trust the most tend to reject those models, sometimes quite strongly (e.g. Daniel Ingram here). Also near the end of his life, Culadasa came to think that even though it might at one point have seemed like he had predominantly positive emotions in the way that some schools suggested, in reality he had just been repressing them with harmful consequences.
I’m guessing that something similar is what’s actually happening for a lot of the schools claiming complete elimination of all negative feelings. Insight practices can be used in ways that end up bypassing or suppressing a lot of one’s emotions, but actually negative feelings are still having effects in the person, they just go unnoticed.
This disagrees with my experience, and with the experience of several other people I know.
Based on the link, it seems you follow the Theravada tradition. The ideas you give go against the Theravada ideas. You need to go study the Pali Canon. This information is all wrong I’m afraid. I won’t talk more on the matter.
For what it’s worth, I don’t really follow any one tradition, though Culadasa does indeed have a Theravada background.