I'm going back to reading through MCTB2 since extricating myself from the influence of some of the thai forest teachers. It has been a multi-year process where I've oscillated back and forth between Shinzen style training and a few of the Thai forest teachers. So many of the pitfalls that Daniel talks about are just being repeated out in the open but I found them hard to identify without experiencing it myself first. I tried to push back against it a little bit but ended up just getting a strange spiritual passive aggressive response, so weird, so disillusioning.  Does anyone have some resources or thoughts about these limited emotion models that some of the teachers in that tradition keep spamming? Has anyone written more extensive works or studies about these limited emotion models that are worth reading. I'm just not sure what terms to search to look into this kind of thing, "spiritual bypassing" is kind of close to the idea but not exactly what I'm thinking. The phemomenon of that spiritual passive aggressiveness is kind of fascinating and has surely been studied or needs to be. Cheers, and watch out for these spiritual fiefdoms, what a doozy lol.

Could you please elaborate a bit on the spiritual passive aggression you encountered? 

What kind of limited emotional models have you seen being spammed?

​​​​​​​Welcome to the DhO, Chloe.

Can you please give some examples of the kinds fo things you're describing in this quote? It's had to comment not knowing your experiences in more detail.

Yes, in this case i noticed that the head monk seems to get frustrated a lot and goes on rants against vipassana practice, it's pretty subtle but i think i made a legitimate observation. I said something in a q and a like, "it  seems like he gets frustrated but tries to steer that into a useful dhamma talk, does that mean the hindrances never fully go away?"  In that tradition, they seem to think that the goal is only to have positive emotions, that the fetters are completely gone after a certain stage. The moderater said that they wouldn't answer that question because i was projecting what i thought they were feeling onto the teacher. They topped that response with a nice little anjali  emoji. I was checking for humility expecting something like " yes occasionally i get carried away with certain topics and I'm working on it" or something. I think it probably destroys the whole point of their organization if the head guy admits that he actually isn't doing the full mythologized enlightenment thing, or they have to hold up appearances or many other reasons why my question was dangerous to answer

Thanks for sharing.

I think teachers generally try to talk about the subject at hand and dont necessarily want to talk about themselves.

Maybe that's what happened. Or maybe it was passive aggression. You know better because you were there.

The enlightenment of an arahant does mean that the fetters are completely gone though. Which in turn means that the first person subjective experience of emotions is remarkably different.

In any case ranting against vipassana practice seems very very very odd!

What is the teacher's objection to vipassana? If you dont mind, please do share.

Your own judgment may be all that is needed here. If you see it that way, it seems likely that these teachers will not be the most useful to you at the moment. I don't think that, in all of recorded history, there has even been an example of a lay follower getting the head monk to change his mind in a public discussion :-) It could be more fruitful to continue your practice without resolving this. 

I'm guessing you know the parable of the raft. I'm thinking of the one where a person sees that the land that they are on is about to be swept away in a flood, so they gather some sticks and grass and leaves and heap them up together and use that makeshift raft to get to safety. The raft sucks. It's basically a pile of garbage. And it's going to be thrown away once the person gets to safety. The teachings are the raft. And this is the Buddha talking about his own teachings. The idea is not to fuss too much about the teachings. My take on this is that our practice is what is really important. Our practice is what we do once the raft is on the water. Maybe kicking with our legs, or paddling with our hands, or punting with a stick. We are making an effort to get to the other shore, even though the raft is slowly coming apart beneath us. 

In that same talk, he talks about snakes. He says that, if you need a snake "for some reason" (I love how it's left to the imagination. I guess in those days people could think of plenty of reasons for needing a snake) you have to pick it up the right way. If you grab a snake in the right place, you'll be fine, but if you pick it up in the middle, it will bite you. The teachings are also the snake. They can help us or hurt us depending, not only on the snake but how we grasp it. My take on this is that, in some cases, if we can't see a way to get a useful grip on some teachings, it's better to leave them alone and look for a more suitable snake. 

Or not. I'm just a guy on the internet typing while he drinks his morning tea. This doesn't even rise to the level of a pile of sticks or a poisonous snake :-)

So I'm trying to elaborate without just calling out the group specifically which is why I was being a little vague. For a little more context, I have been studying and practicing some form of Buddhism for almost the last 20 years, and with this group specifically for the last 5 or 6 years. So this last minor thing with the q&a was more like the tip of the iceberg/ last straw kind of thing for me.

I default to using Shinzen style techniques and if I ever get into a new Buddhist system, I tend to translate how they teach it into a set of unified mindfulness style techniques. I think taking that approach helps to avoid a lot of the problems that can come up with practice because it allows you to take what you find useful from a tradition without getting caught up in other parts of the tradition that might be unhelpful or harmful.

One of the examples I can think of this teacher using a limited emotional model is: He explicitly tries to get people to completely abandon any sort of negative emotions, and  says that the goal of practice is to only hang out in the positive states to the point where it's impossible for negative states to come up anymore. More specifically the feelings of grief we might feel if somebody died or fear or sadness or any of these other kind of natural emotions that come up, if you have not eliminated those, then you are not awakened and you need to ask for more of your practice. That's kind of the way he talks about it.

I understand that someone who has a lot of meditation practice is going to experience those emotions very differently to the point where they might not even seem like what we mean when we say fear or grief but that's not what this tradition is about. I was trying to see if there was any nuance about emotions that the teacher might be able to talk about because it seemed so ironic that they would talk about how we're not supposed to have negative states while clearly looking agitated about it.

edited for formatting issues

Thank you, Chloe. My personal take is that someone, a lay person, a teacher, anyone, who tells you that naturally occurring human emotion (aka grief, as in your comment) is preventing you from becoming awakened, is a person to avoid. The purpose of practice, IMHO, is to understand and accommodate, not eliminate or eradicate, what we are.

His argument is interesting but probably a strawman of mindfulness practice. He is basing his argument off of early suttas. He says that just noting your experience as it is happening is not "right effort" and doesn't really do anything or that it gives you bad results. Under his conception of right effort, there is a duty to prevent and remove negative states while maintaining and growing positive states so that you can get into jhana/samadhi. He says that vipassanna is not a technique, but a result of the application of right effort. I know in saying this he is dismissing a whole branch of later buddhist practice. I don't think he is necessarily wrong about dropping the hindrances during preparation for jhana practice but he just talks about getting things together enough to make the jhanas happen and that will be the sole thing that wears down the fetters. He talks about samadhi alone being enough to take you into the insight. Anyways it's a little complicated and not all wrong, that's why it's a bit difficult to parse.

I think i tend to agree with something like what you're saying but I certainly wasn't getting that message from this teacher and that more orthodox reading of early buddhism. I think that's why I would not consider myself a buddhist because you've got to do a lot to read that and not think that the goal of practice is the annihiliation of your personality. Also yes I've heard the raft and the snake similes before but I had never heard them combined like that lol. I think I may have been dealing with a snake that had teeth everywhere so best not to pick it up to begin with.

​​​​​​​Thanks for the replies.





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My original question was about resources or examples for understanding how the limited emotion models play out in spiritual communities. Going back and reading through Chapter 37 of MCTB2, I'm finding it hits the nail on the head. The notion of spiritual advertising without the nuance and vagueness about the deep end of practice especially in the thai forest tradition definitely tracked with my experience. I have to admit, when I first read this book many years ago, it just seemed like a lot of disconnected incoherent rants. Now I'm starting to see that the descriptions are coming from close contact and interaction with these spiritual commmunities. Anyway, just writing this here just in case others become disillusioned with that kind of community and can use some catharsis.