Beoman,
I appreciate your spirit in this discussion. I'm going to respond to your last post with a certain degree of firmness, and I hope this won't be received as an attack. I get the sense from your writing that you are a deeply considerate and compassionate person, and I truly wish you the best.
I echo Bill's point, which I hinted at when I suggested that the experience of PCE may be dissociative. What I mean by that is that it's possible that in PCE, none of the emotions, soul, self, etc. are actually gone they are simply out of view. I've had similar experiences in vipassana and Jhana practices lots of times, where I suddenly thought that some core structure of my normal experience was lost, but with enough time and perspective this always turned out to be either a temporary state caused by selective focus (samadhi) or a temporary dissolution caused by the dark night stages of the insight cycle. Once the cycle for any given object reaches fruition or the samadhi fades, these core structures always reappear (sometimes in a new light). That said, with samadhi you can really get "good" at self-deception by constantly maintaining an unconscious selective bias about what you attend to. If you adopt a belief system that says it's possible and good to eliminate emotions, you're likely to start selectively attending to other aspects of experience such as the qualities of bare awareness. If your samadhi is strong enough this could be a very convincing illusion.
Bill, I'd like to see Daniel's essay about the re-canters. Can you post the link?
I agree with the benefits or intimacy and understanding, however, and I strive for those qualities with all of 'my' sides as well. But I do this not via love, but rather via contemplation that is enabled by felicity. No longer blaming myself for 'my' bad sides, I am free to look at them freely.
This seems to be getting into semantic differences. In my lexicon, intimacy, understanding, and non-blame (i.e., acceptance) are all deeply related to love. I am not sure what you mean by "felicity", but this sounds suspiciously like a slippery term used to name something that actually depends on emotions, soul, or spirit.
However, you don't ever get to the root cause, because that would end up eliminating true love as well, and true love neither wants to nor can eliminate itself. The root cause is, as I mentioned above, our animal heritage. Even without any slights ever having occurred to a human, that human will be malicious or sorrowful at times.
When I spoke of root cause, I meant the root cause of hatred, malice, jealousy, etc, not the root cause of emotions per se. I think that extreme forms of emotion, the kind that are dangerous and can cause harm, need to be healed, but not the more moderate forms that constitute the healthy manifestation of the very same emotional energies. So for example, rage can be very dangerous, but there is nothing wrong with healthy anger at wrong done to oneself or to others. Jealousy isn't very helpful, but the underlying yearning to achieve and be successful is very useful. Also, I think that even the harm caused by extreme emotions is overstated. Very few instances of malice, rage, jealousy, etc, lead to actual harm to others, and they only harm ourselves to the extent that we don't take the steps necessary to take care of them properly. I actually think that a lack of human emotions has much more potential for harm, but more on this below.
Avi Craimer:
I can't argue there. No question we've got a lot of work still to do to realize our full potential. If you were to have fully eliminated your ego, soul, and all human emotions, would you still care about ending human violence? If so, on what basis? If not, then wouldn't it be better to keep being human so that you could work to skilfully reduce violence within humanity?
Yes, of course. I know from myself that being hurt sucks. Hurting others also sucks, actually, but that's a bit harder to see. In any case, I don't want other people to keep on hurting themselves. Just because I stop hurting myself and others doesn't mean others will also stop hurting themselves and others.
I don't buy this answer. When you say that being hurt "sucks" you are expressing some kind of emotional attitude toward being hurt. Even the concept of harm goes beyond merely having a painful sensation, it requires some sort of negative impact on a person. Now, if in the PCE state one truly perceives all of actuality as meaningful, wonderful, etc., then getting tortured on the rack would be just as interesting, wonderful, meaningful, etc., as sitting in a sunlit field full of flowers. Of course, one situation involves painful sensations while the other doesn't, but painful sensations aren't inherently harmful. There are lots of cases where people derive satisfaction from painful sensations, and I presume that in a perpetual PCE state, this would be the case. As for your attitudes toward other people who still have souls to be hurt, again, how would you be able to judge that it was "bad" or that it "sucks" for another to be hurt. You would see another person being violently hurt and experience it as being just as wondrous and meaningful as anything else. You would feel no emotion that would tell you "this is wrong." You might have a purely intellectual idea that it's wrong, but if that idea is unmoored from any emotional underpinning then it would be easy to abandon this idea as "unnecessary". You might on a whim decide that you'd like to dedicate your life to savouring the inherent meaning and wondrousness of all the different kinds of human suffering. There would be no emotion to tell you that this was a bad idea.
In short, you'd be operating very much like a psychopath. The most terrifying psychopaths are those that actually don't seem to have regular human emotions. They don't commit crimes based on malice or aggression toward their victims. They do it simply for the pleasure of it. Now of course, you could argue that there's some messed up emotional stuff underlying the pleasure they take in hurting others, and you'd be right, but the totally unemotional person would be capable of all kinds of atrocity if some seemingly rational thought told him it was a good idea. I say "seemingly" rational, because I don't think that practical rationality is even possible without emotions (and most philosophers agree on this point). Emotions function as our pragmatic guidance system. They don't work perfectly, but without them we'd be like those perennial sci-fi robots who end up destroying humanity because they are following an un-emotional "rational" algorithm.
To that I say, just as you can help another without loving them, you can also physically hurt another without hating them. There would be no reason to do so unprovoked, but if provoked, you can non-maliciously disable them. It only makes sense to do so. This would be the use of force, of course, but aimed not at hurting the other for the sake of hurting the other, or out of revenge or anger at having hurt yourself, but as a way of preventing yourself and others from getting hurt. There's nothing loving about this, which is sort of the point. Then again the Dalai Llama said (I'm
paraphrasing), when asked what he would do if a thief came into his house and tried to kill him, is that he'd shoot him in the legs, call the cops and the ambulance, and then stay with him and comfort him until they came.
The Dalai Llama has compassion, which is what underlies his proposed action. Without compassion, one might just kill the thief because he happened to be inconvenient, or for that matter, one might just let the thief kill oneself because the experience of being killed was just as inherently wondrous and meaningful as any other experience.
If you think about it a bit the endless quest thing rings a bit hollow doesn't it? Your'e saying you need constant entertainment and novelty or... what, you'll get bored with life? That doesn't seem like freedom at all.
Actually, I've always felt the concept of "total liberation" rings a bit hollow. What am I liberated to do/be? If I'm liberated from everything that I am, from everything that's important to me, then I'm not actually getting to live the life I want, rather I'm losing everything that matters to me, and instead I'm living some totally different form of existence that in my current form I can't see the value of. It was for the same reason that for a long time I resisted the Arhat ideal in Buddhism. Based on the way that many authors and traditional sources describe Arhatship, I felt that it sounded more like a living death than a state of realization. However, after assimilating Daniel's perspective and working through some important hang ups in my meditation practice recently, I've embraced the Arhat ideal in Daniel's sense of it. However, the reason for this is that nothing that is actually important about one's life on the level of content is lost or problematically changed by achieving arhatship. The arhat still thinks, still strives, still has emotions, still has a soul. All that changes is that the arhat's sensory field is perfectly integrated, thereby eliminating various perceptual distortions that cause most of us a great deal of extra stress that has nothing to do with the meaning of our lives. I think of eliminating clinging and learning to see emptiness as clearing out the static in our sensory systems so that we can get on with the business of living
human life to the fullest. As Daniel says, after arhatship, the arhat simply "does what there is to be done," i.e., he goes back to living his life, but now with a lot less meaningless stress.
As for the unending quest being about constant novelty, there is a difference between kinds of novelty. I'm interested in new orders of emergent complexity that yield synthesis of previous layers. That's a very special kind of novelty, one which I value highly for reasons I'll not get into here. It's not a matter of endlessly retelling the same story with different characters, or playing the newest pop song hit. It's more like baroque counterpoint as it layers each new theme into the tapestry of notes. If you've ever read Hesse's
Glass Bead Game, you'll have an idea of what I'm talking about.
The thing with freedom is that it seems like it would either be boring, or vapid, or that there would be nothing to do with it. But quite the contrary - it's that you would be unable to choose to be dissatisfied with life any longer. From that point of relentless fulfilment, you would then be able to do whatever it is on earth that you would want to do, without being driven by the need for it.
Your point illustrates the fact that there is no coherent concept of total freedom. In your favoured state, you would be un-free to be dissatisfied, while in my favoured state I am un-free to be satisfied with anything other than fulfilling my soul's purpose. Either way, freedom and constraint go together like subject and object. However, in my case, being un-free in this way also makes me free to live a life in pursuit of my soul's purpose, which is a life that I value, in fact, it's the only life I value. In your case, I'm not so sure that you'd be free to do much of anything other than enjoy the flowers (or the rack). I challenge you to think about your idea that after being totally satisfied with life in every moment as it is, one would still be able to do "whatever it is on earth that you would want to do." What is the basis of wanting when one has no emotions and no dissatisfaction? I submit that the in that state wanting to do anything at all would be incoherent. Any actions would flow from unmotivated whims or intellectual programming. That doesn't sound like freedom to me.
With great respect,
Avi