The most important lesson I ever learned was back in Thailand in 1997: that the biggest contributor to my unhappiness wasn’t external problems like being single or unemployed, but my own mental states like craving. Fixing those mental states was a surer path to happiness and reducing suffering.
But the question that has played an ever-increasing role in the three ensuing decades has been: okay, but how? It is one thing to recognize that your craving and anger – or fear or self-pity or shame or other negative emotions – are the main thing keeping you down. It is quite another to do something about them. Our animal natures make those states quite recalcitrant.
Lately, I’ve been noticing one solution that has slowly been working better for me. That solution is a key element in modern mindfulness meditation: to recognize the bodily nature of one’s emotions, and treat them as such. This is a significant teaching in Goenka vipassanā and in the Headspace app. But where I think the point comes out most explicitly is in a wonderful short meditation recording by Bodhipaksa, entitled Four Steps to Self-Compassion.The first of the steps in question are to call to mind an emotionally fraught situation, drop any stories one might be telling about the situation, and observe the physical feelings that have arisen in one’s body at the thought – examining the feelings’ shape, their intensity, their location in the body.
What I have come to notice is how this kind of bodily practice is able to enact, in a more particular, embodied and effective way, the basic Buddhist and Stoic insight that one should focus on one’s own reactive emotions more than on external conditions. When we are afraid or angry, our natural instinct is to turn our attention to their object, to the thing we are afraid of or angry about – which is itself usually external to our minds, an external bad.
And I have noticed in many cases how deceptive that focus on the external object can be. We often have a preexisting fear and anger that looks for external objects. This is particularly noticeable for anxiety sufferers: anxiety sometimes looks like just plain fear, a fear where you don’t even know what the object is, enough that maybe it doesn’t actually have one. But I saw this pattern with anger too. My anger at George W. Bush slowly faded once he was out of the presidency – but that didn’t mean I got less angry overall, just that the anger found other targets, from the censoriousness of the Catholic League to the prevalence of car alarms.
When we focus our attention on the object of negative feelings, we make those feelings – which can be helpful on their first arising but usually aren’t helpful after that – look justified. Keeping our minds on the object of our fear or anger is a way that we indulge the fear and the anger, giving it more trust than it deserves. We keep valuing the external object (positively or negatively), and effectively – wrongly! – take the object as the source of the negative emotion.
But something very different happens when, as Bodhipaksa advises, we turn inward and look at the emotion as embodied: when we see the anxiety as a hot patch in the front of our stomach, the anger as a clenching in our chest. At that point, we might be motivated to notice: “well, I had four cups of espresso today, of course I’m feeling anxious!” (Bryce Huebner in The Moral Psychology of Anger relatedly notices how he’s more likely to get angry “at” people after he’s consumed gluten.) We move our focus from the external object to the internal feeling. We are less likely to indulge the feeling and view it as justified or righteous.
The way we conceive the external/internal distinction can matter here. According to Martha Nussbaum, the Greeks use “externality” as “a metaphorical way of referring to the fact that these elements are not securely controlled by the person’s own will”, so that bodily health counts as an “external good” even though it is in a literal sense internal to us. (Upheavals of Thought 4n2) Whether that’s an accurate representation of Stoic and other Greek thinkers I don’t know, but I do think that the idea of control by will is not the best distinction to work with here – because, as Buddhists see, often our own mind is itself not fully under our control. Rather, the important distinction is between what’s internal and external to the mind – with the mind considered in an embodied sense, where those feelings in our gut and our chest are still part of the mind. A broken toe is not internal to the mind, but a feeling of fear or anger in the gut – even if it is caused by caffeine or gluten – is. And the latter, at least as much as any external situation, is a likely source of our suffering.
Over many years of experience, I have trained myself to let go of unhelpful thoughts, ideations and experiences. This does not always, nor in all ways work. I attended, briefly, one and only one high school reunion. It was called the 25th, but, In reality, it was year 26 after our graduation…people were too busy to remember, see. My wife and I were curious. She, perhaps, more than I. We left after about half an hour. The people who were there were still the jerks they were in senior high school. Folks I wanted to see and talk with did not show up or were deceased. Oops…
Amod, I largely agree with you here, finding myself still paing you’ll, in the perspective of broad Classical idealism as comes down to us with the institution of Academia, where Plato ” does not place Soul in body, but body in Soul,” – thus the Enneads III.2.2. Two large problems follow, however: firstly the contrast between the Western Soul and the mind of your concerns, and our now secularized academic discourse; and secondly the odd case of Enneads III.2, headed Detached Considerations, or Various Questions.
Firstly, it seems to me, in all sympathy, that in your theological commitment, you are at least prompted to shoulder a moral burden appropriate to the moralism of Soul, where the mind as Sanskrit Manas (at least in yoga, where I’m coming from here) has a far more modest role and importance, comparable to the autonomic nervous system of physiology.
Take for example our troubles with adrenalin, the hormone that feeds violent action: it’s also used medically in emergency rooms, and it seems to me that spur of agro in anxiety states is acting similarly, for hidden wounds in chronic ailments, choked with inflammation and contusion. It would follow that such impulses are morally forgivable*as directed inwards, and if they also show up in flaming rhetoric, that should be understood as such, and not taken as judgement of any other or external situation.
Hence the huge current problem with finding a place for flaming rhetoric within the ambit if free expression or freedom of speech; in historic tension now with the Far Eatern concern to always maintain Good Form. South Korea lies now in the eye if the storm, with a rash of celebrity suicides, against a backdrop of cybebullying, where China exploit their psychopaths, in a pathetic ruse to cover their huge lack of social services. Such are the philosophical challenges of our risky times, here echoing Protagoras in Plato, worried by soldiers who flared their bravery to the point of madness.
Now secondly, we have the rext of the Enneads seeming to beak up just where the semantic stress lands, at the pagan #13 in Porphyry’s sequence, given in his preface or Life if Plotinus. There is actually a whole fringke of very short chapters, especially early in the sequence, in which I find Plotinus giving Short Answers of just two or later three sections, to some questioner, who cannot be Porphyry, for he joined the Conference half way.
The Preface does quietly announce his Commentaries, which can be readily found in the chapters of exceptional length, marked by breaks where Plotinus forcefully concludes, in his abrupt manner. That leaves Amelius Gentilianus, the lifetime companion of Plotinus, defending him against Roman charges of plagiarizing Numenius the latter-day Pythagorean. And working from the Detached Questions, I find a distinctive voice of Old Roman contemplative mysticism, albeit less prominent than the Commentaries. So I found myself in the business of Folder Philology, unstitching the Classics to lay bare the currents of layered commentary.
Here it is helpful to note hat thru Aristotle’s Metaphysics folder, which I break into original monographs named by Diogenes in his Catalog, one can pick up the theme of spitual knots which runs strongly back through the Moksha-dharma to the Upanishads. As knots of the heart, hridya- granthi, they speak directly to contused circulation around inflamed, hidden wounds, and here close the circle of discovery in figures of our wounded endurance and thus burdened spiritual aspirations.
Orwin, I’m a little confused as to why you think my theological commitment requires me to shoulder a moral burden appropriate to the moralism of Soul. I’m a Buddhist – my theological commitment tells me there is no Soul.
I understand that, Amod, and did contrast soul and Manas. What matters here is simply the scope of responsibility: the sense that one is responsible for all ones aches, pains and mental weaknesses, and should have the spiritual strength to get free of them. I don’t see how that is consistent with dependent co-arising. Western spiritualisms have similarly encompassing views, and burdens.