On Oct 5, 2009, at 3:58 AM, TurquoiseB wrote:
But that has been perverted by the revenge fantasists on FFL to me "supporting and enabling a child rapist." Go figure. The amount of time Polanski serves is now a moot point. By the time his extradition is settled, he will have spend more time behind bars than he was originally sentenced to, and that will be *before* he is returned to the US, if he is. The larger issue in my opinion is that people in the media and on this forum HAVE LOST THEIR FUCKING MINDS with regard to Roman Polanski. They don't seem to be able to remember even simple facts about the legal system they claim to be upholding.
There has been a lot written and there are numerous on-going investigations into what the Buddhist taxonomy of consciousness would call afflictive emotions. The first major work was by Daniel Goleman, Ph.D. and entitled Destructive Emotions. Goleman was group leader in the Mind & Life conference, where HH the 14th Dalai Lama meets with leading scientists. The meeting Goleman was at was actually the 3rd Mind & Life conference held in 1990. Since that time researchers have continued to look into this topic. I am actually just reading a more recent work on the topic of emotional awareness, a conversation between the Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman, Ph.D. entitled Emotional Awareness: Overcoming the Obstacles to Psychological Balance and Compassion.
Of course there are afflictive and non-afflictive emotions. If one truly expands consciousness one should expand consciousness to include automatic mechanisms--"knee-jerk reactions"--which can include the afflictive emotions. As awareness expands, unconscious afflictive emotions are diminished. Some meditation forms may not work at this level and so destructive emotions continue to flourish, which means such people can afflict others with their afflictive emotions.
But someone who is free from afflictive emotion and able to discriminate instinctively, can also use afflictive emotions constructively.
It's usually pretty easy to tell "who is who" in person, if one spends enough time around them. Similarly, although with less precision, you can also get a good idea by reading someone's writing across time.
One primary characteristic of afflictive emotions is that they are out of tune with reality. There is a distorted perception of reality. It is as if the perception of reality is poisoned or negatively colored by an instinctual negative reaction. Whether one can turn that afflictive emotion into something constructive depends on the skill of the individual.
Certain meditative training can help one develop that skillfulness. In general meditative forms that use a form of top-down control of attention tend to favor a more egocentric neural functioning, and thus aren't as good at transforming instinctual negativity. Bottom- up, more "open presence" style of meditative practice, either alone or in conjunction with egocentric attentional forms, seem to favor a more allocentric, "other", "out there" awareness and are better at integrating and transforming negativity. "Transcend and include" rather than "transcend into".
All healthy humans have various instinctual reactions or reflexes that originate from the very old, reptilian part of the brain. For example, in all humans, if they are startled by a loud sound, there is a reflexive and measurable response that always occurs at exactly 250 milliseconds after the stimulus and always lasts for exactly 250 milliseconds, always ending 500 milliseconds after the stimulus. Never longer, never shorter, in the entire species. However in advanced meditators we now know they can "transcend and include" to the point where that reptilian startle is no longer measurable or just barely detectable. It's this level of meditation practice and proficiency that allows a person to conquer--and master--even the most instinctual negative emotions.
This "non-startle" presence is very obvious once one has recognized it, around certain meditative adepts. It has a kind of ripple effect through the various levels of the person. And like the afflictive emotions of a person who can spread this "affliction" to others (and cause them to produce negative emotions), people with the non- startle, non-afflictive style are able to pass that presence on to others, but in a more positive manner.
