On Jan 17, 2007, at 7:17 AM, TurquoiseB wrote:
As for sparaig's notion that one cannot experience strong, even "overwhelming" emotion in enlightenment, I'd suggest that's Just Another Idea *About* Enlight- enment, formed from the point of view of non-enlight- enment. I suspect one can experience *any* emotion, strong or otherwise, in enlightenment, because the emotion *is* enlightenment, as is everything else the enlightened being experiences. The Self need not be "overwhelmed" to experience any part of what is, essentially, itSelf. The histories of supposedly-enlightened saints in almost all spiritual traditions (including Hinduism) are *full* of stories of them displaying strong emotions -- of bhakti or compassion or whatever. Emotions come and go. That is their nature, and the nature of having a body. Sparaig obviously expects that nature to *change* once one realizes one's enlightenment; I don't. Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water, and occasionally experience strong emotions. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water, and occasionally experience strong emotions. Sparaig's view seems to me a belief that someone who is not comfortable with strong emotions and who finds them "overwhelming" might develop. So many of the ideas that people have *about* enlightenment seem to me to be based on their own fears and aversions, and the hope that the things that inspire those fears and aversions will no longer appear in one's life after one realizes enlightenment. But they will. And we'll still have to deal with them, just as we did before realization. In this case, the issue is not the emotions but who experiences them.
A quote I posted last night says it nicely: 51. All-consuming Openness All and everything reverted to openness, its nature is beyond denial or assertion; just as all worlds and life-forms open into space, so emotion and evaluating thought melt into hyperspaciousness. Now here, now gone in a flash—thoughts leave no trace, and opened up wide to seamless gnosis hopes and fears are no longer credible, the stake that tethers the mind in its field is extracted, and Samsara, the city of delusion, is evacuated. Like clouds emerging in the sky and then dissolving therein, all events originate in spaciousness and are finally released into the same space. Upon such intuition, assertion and denial and all emotion, all mental states and functions, return to the empty holistic seed, original hyperspaciousness, and thus the entire mentality of samsaric delusion dissolves into timeless purity. This secret transmission implies living in the undivided openness of intrinsic emptiness.
