February 2020 Issue

MANAGING NEGATIVE EMOTION
ZEN PHILOSOPHY WITH BILL WALZ
“No self, no suffering.” - Buddha
Buddha is said to have stated, “I teach suffering,
its origin, cessation and the path to its transcendence.
That’s all I teach,” but what this is also saying
is that The Buddha taught entering into a deep
examination into negative, problematic human
emotions - what causes them, and the means to
effectively managing them. This is so important
because no matter how “smart” we may be, there
seems very little correlation between the kind
of intelligence that makes a person an expert in
some field of study, in the academic or professional
worlds, and emotional stability. There may
even be, in many cases, an inverse relationship
where with higher and more complex intelligence,
there is little practical wisdom and little of what is
sometimes called “emotional IQ.”
The Buddha taught that in all of Nature, humans,
because of their evolved brains, are unique
in their ability to create a virtual reality called
culture and to develop techniques and tools for
living in a complex and exploitive relationship with
Nature. This is a good thing from the standpoint
of greatly freeing humans from the dangers and
limitations of Nature while releasing us to be
creative, making ever-more complex culture and
tools. But Buddha also realized there is a very big
problem connected to this evolutionary human
trait of complex brain function. To borrow from a
modern paradigm drawn from the very complex
tool of cybernetics, humans live in very much
what are virtual realities constructed of information
manipulated by these complex brains, and
this virtual reality generates a sense of a virtual-reality-sense-of-self
that psychology calls ego that
is quite disconnected from our true nature and
from Nature itself with serious consequences for
both us humans and for Nature.
Buddhism teaches a model of mind that considers
thoughts and emotions to be mind-objects
or forms that exist within the formless energy
of mind-consciousness that individuates into
awareness, the faculty for directing consciousness
energy with its inherent intelligence into
the examination of experience. In recognizing
this multidimensional model of mind, Buddhism
then gives us a methodology from which we can
train in building skill at managing the contents of
the mind by directing awareness into this examination.
The Buddha further taught that having
realized this dimension of awareness that can
examine the contents and activity of mind, the
insight becomes natural that we then must not
be the contents, the thoughts and emotions, as
most people assume and our culture reinforces.
Rather, if awareness can examine the contents
and activity of the mind, then who we fundamentally
must be IS this awareness and not the
contents and activity. We are not egos that have
awareness; rather, we are awareness that has
an ego structure so as to engage the world. This
shifts our experience of mental activity from one
that seems helpless in its management to one
that is interactive and opens the way for skillful
management.
While Western education focuses intensely on
feeding the mind full of information and ideas
along with methods of logic for putting these
ideas together effectively for utilitarian application,
it teaches nothing about managing these
contents in a manner so as to maximize mental
stability, serenity and wisdom. The Buddhist
model, on the other hand, emphasizes that we
can manage mind through meditative techniques
where mind examines mind, shining the light of
awareness on the content of mind giving us perspective
and insight, while developing awareness
of awareness, allowing us to explore its potential
for intuitive insight into the nature of existence.
We discover that as awareness, we are free of the
contradictions and imbalance of the egoic mind,
and we can deepen the exploration of life lived as
awareness, the dimension that is the true source
of intelligence, creativity, wisdom and insight.
To continue borrowing metaphor from the
cybernetic world, as the saying goes: “Garbage
in, garbage out” and any crazy thing can be
programmed into these computer-brains of ours,
much of it being completely contradictory and at
odds with actual reality. Most importantly, these
reality-virtualizing brains generating a virtual-self
experiences itself as unique and separate from
all else in the world, and this virtual-self is acutely
aware of its vulnerability and its mortality; living in
a story of itself in time, the past defining us and
the future challenging us. This sense of limitation,
vulnerability and dependency on the external
world for stability and validation, and the too-often
failure of the external world to provide consistency
and validation, causes the contents of mind
to be all too often marked by anxiety, frustration
and unhappiness.
At the core of most negative emotional experience
- of depression, anxiety, anger and loneliness
- is an exaggerated sense of this virtual-self
in personal isolation along with a time-focus in
the past or future. Most of the time, our focus of
attention is on our “self” in our story-line in time
that is too often distressing. Even anger, which
in a given moment seems to be present-moment
activated, has a strong component of residual
past distress and disappointment brought into
the present situation and is often carried quite
inappropriately into the future, the ego chewing
on its grievance over and over. The world, with
the exception of whatever or whoever may be
the focus of stimulating the emotion, has receded
far into the background of our attention. Even
the stimulating event or person is being experienced
principally in its distressing connection to
self, not in its larger context which would give
the experience more sense and proportion, and
thus greater acceptability. The world has to some
inappropriate degree collapsed into the situation,
thoughts and emotions orbiting our focus on our
self.
Buddhism recognizes this and teaches us to
realize the antidote to such a perception is to
‘Walz’ continued on page 23
VOL. 23, NO. 6 — FEBRUARY 2020 | RAPIDRIVERMAGAZINE.COM | RAPID RIVER’S ARTS & CULTURE | 21