Junk Emotions
by Venerable Yifa
Our junk relationships, of course, are often
governed by what I might call junk emotions, such as anxiety, jealousy, anger,
obsession, short-temperedness, greed, hatred, and so on. These emotions are
neither good for us nor are they good for other people with whom we come into
contact.
These emotions need to be inventoried just like the material goods we
have in our closet. It's much harder, of course, to throw these emotions out
with the trash, because we've inherited them or indeed have cultivated them
over our lifetimes. That's why we need to run an inventory of these emotions as
often as we can; to make sure we're in control of them and don't allow them to
hold sway over our behavior.
This entails washing the
mind. When we come home after a long day, we wash our bodies in the shower. But
why don't we wash the mind -- clean it of the impurities and dirt that have clung
to it throughout the day, much as we do the body? Washing the mind entails
releasing the junk of the emotions, repenting of the misdeeds that we've
committed, and cultivating the virtues of compassion and non-attachment.
Healthiness in all things, as well as the removal of junk in our lives, doesn't
just happen accidentally. It needs to be worked at and cultivated, much as one
nurtures a seed in the ground.
Junk emotions are not
simply "strong" expressions such as anger or greed. They can be "softer"
statements of not caring, such as idleness or procrastination or an attitude of
indifference or boredom. These can, in the long run, be no less pernicious or
addictive. If we're lazy or bored by things, what does that tell us about how
we view our life and the lives of others? If we can't be bothered to help
ourselves, let alone other people, how can we possibly hope to make any inroads
into releasing ourselves from boredom and idleness? Is it really preferable to
avoid risking committing ourselves to something and making the occasional
mistake and be fearful of change or worried about appearing foolish or overly
earnest?
I don't know of anyone who's satisfied by doing nothing or is
fulfilled by being bored. Boredom and idleness and procrastination are, in my
opinion, indulgences that feed upon themselves until we no longer feel any
motivation to change. Buddhism, by contrast, teaches mindfulness and action: it
encourages diligence so that, clearly diagnosing the cause of ennui, we
can put effort into action and live a more meaningful life.
Buddhism demands that we're awake all the
time to the junk emotions that come about because we don't want to face
something. It knows that not confronting the inevitable or dealing with pain
doesn't make that pain go away or the day of reckoning not arrive. If, however,
we cultivate awareness, if we deal head on with that which is causing us suffering
or don't put off what is inevitably going to happen sometime, then we can more
easily face our lives with equanimity. This is why we need to develop
mindfulness and why our emotions are so essential. If we place our thoughts and
emotions in right relation to our actions then we'll more easily fall into
healthy and productive habits and become wise users of technology and material
goods, rather than be their victims.
We need
to examine our emotions and assess how many minutes in a day we feel angry,
depressed, anxious, unsatisfied, obsessed, or any other unhealthy feelings.
Aren't the minutes where we're consumed by these feelings not junk minutes? For
who does anger benefit and who does it hurt? It hurts us. How does feeling
unsatisfied help us? It doesn't. When we're obsessed with something or someone,
does the object of our obsession care or think about us in the same way?
Probably not. As you can see, these feelings are wasted; more than that, they
take up the space and time that could be spent feeling more productive and
pleasant thoughts such as love, joy, pleasure, satisfaction, and generosity. Or
these periods can be spent in meditation and reflection, deepening the skills
and honing the mental discipline that makes it easier to control the junk
emotions when they're stimulated in our mind.
Unhealthy
or junk emotions are the junk food of the mind. We love them because they allow
us to wallow in victimhood. We taste the fat of the fear that we are
disrespected and gulp down the soda of self-satisfaction. We pour on the sugar
of self-abnegation and feeling sorry for ourselves. However, unlike junk food,
junk emotions are not as easy to give up and their effects are longer lasting
and even more corrosive. Junk food can affect only your own body. But when your
body is awash with junk emotions -- when we're always angry or dispirited, when
we're constantly anxious or perpetually unsatisfied -- that can affect everyone
around us.
Junk
emotions not only belong to individuals. They can be a part of the community or
even an entire nation. When a nation holds a negative emotion, such as hatred,
toward another country, that emotion can develop into active violence and wars
can begin. In some cases it may be hard to determine whether it's the country
or the leader who harbors the junk emotions: some leaders in history have acted
from their own anxieties and insecurities rather than genuine fears of being
threatened to launch their countries into disastrous conflicts. This is why
it's so important that leaders and politicians are able to deal with their
afflictive emotions in a way that is moderate and mindful. That way, countless
lives could be saved and much human misery avoided.
These days, there's a lot
of discussion about the war on terror. Some people believe that the West and
the Islamic world are involved in a clash of civilizations and that there's a
global religious conflict taking place. I don't believe that. In my opinion,
the conflict is a war of desire, hatred, and delusion. It's one caused by the junk
in our minds: the emotions of anger and craving and need. What's needed to stop
the war is also in our minds: clarity of thinking, judgment, self-awareness,
compassion for sentient beings, and a deep consciousness that ascertains the
fears of the combatants and seeks to neutralize them. We cannot fight terror
with more terror, or fear with more fear, for this only increases the amount of
fear and terror.
This is, of course, very
hard. The hardest and most difficult thing we'll ever do is to react appropriately
to tragedy. And there are many things in this world that should make us
feel angry: injustice that allows the innocent to be punished and the guilty to
go free, and violence meted out on the vulnerable are shameful things and we
wouldn't be human if we didn't feel fury and want retribution. I'm also aware
that there is evil in the world and that it needs to be opposed. However, we
need to make completely sure that our anger is righteous and not self-pitying
or full of our own ego, and that in the actions we undertake we're not simply
adding to the violence and cruelty that's so abhorrent to all of us.
Let us examine these junk emotions in more
detail. Junk emotions come from embedded presuppositions in ourselves that we
project onto the outside world and others. For instance, we may hate someone,
not because they're objectively unpleasant as individuals or to us but because
they don't fit our preconceived notions of how we want them to look or behave.
Our ideas of looks and behavior might be completely irrational and based only
on prejudice and ignorance. Yet we take it out on the other person and accuse
them of all sorts of things, as a cover for our own unexamined feelings.
One
way a junk emotion like anger manifests itself is by making itself so painful
that the only way we feel we can get rid of the pain is by expressing our
anger. In this way, junk emotions become addictive. The only way we can deal
with the anger is to "get it off our chest" by being angry all the time with
everybody. Being angry becomes like a "high" -- it provides us with the brief
satisfaction that a drug does, as everyone recoils from our anger and we find
ourselves paid attention to and our anger appeased. But then, sure enough, we
"crash," and the anger goes inside again, eating away at us. When we express
that anger again, the people around us who felt our anger the first time aren't
be quite as eager to experience it again, and our friends and family distance
themselves from us. In the end, just like a drug, the junk emotion will leave
us feeling isolated and alone.
An
emotion like anger corrodes in other ways as well. When we're angry we may use
foul language. As the phrase suggests, "foul language" pollutes the air and
mind of the person who employs the words as well as the person who hears it. It
upsets the equilibrium of people and only communicates anger and distaste. Not
only is such foul language junk because it pollutes, but it's also junk because
it only communicates negative emotion. As such it adds nothing except unpleasantness
to the world. As was suggested earlier, if we've nothing to say that is
positive, then we should say nothing.
Some
emotions can be healthy, but when taken to their extreme they become negative.
For instance, love. Love is a positive emotion when it's based on respect and
care and genuine concern for another's wellbeing. However, love can also turn
into attachment, where we're overly dependent on the person whom we're in love
with or they on us. Then the relationship becomes unbalanced by power, and that
can mean that one partner begins to exploit the vulnerability and neediness of
the other.
Dedication is also a good emotion: it allows us to stand by someone
or pursue an idea or a cause and not be discouraged when things don't work out
as we would wish. But dedication can lead to obsession, where we neglect others
and ourselves because we're so single-minded, and when we pursue something or
someone, losing all perspective on reality.
When
love turns into attachment, and dedication into obsession, the individual can
become a stalker, a person who won't accept that the object of their affection
no longer wants to be with them or convinces themselves that the object of
their obsession cares for them or would become their lover. This is all fantasy:
sometimes the victim has no idea that the stalker exists until they make
themselves a nuisance. Tragically, that emotion of dependence sometimes leads
to death, when the person feels that, if they cannot have that person in their
life, then no one can.
Now, these are extreme emotions, and it's not
necessarily the case that attachment will lead to obsession, and that obsession
will lead to stalking, and that stalking will lead to murder. But what is clear
is that murder is a result of a chain of junk emotions, and that is why it's
important that we break the chain as early and absolutely as we can.
As
we see, love and obsession, attachment and hatred are all contained within the
same mind and sometimes spring from the same feeling. We may feel that we're possessed
by these feelings, we may argue that someone else brings them on or draws them
out of us, but the simple truth is that all of them -- the positive as well as the
negative -- come from our mind and our mind alone. That's why Buddhism recognizes
how important it is for us to control our minds and to discipline our emotions. The point is not that we cultivate coldness or remove ourselves from feeling
anything at all; we wouldn't be human if we did that. The aim of disciplining
the mind is to recognize positive and negative emotions and act appropriately.
Anger will occur, anxiety will surface, and fear won't be put aside. However,
when these feelings inevitably arise, we should be prepared to recognize that
emotion for what it is and deal with it before it has a chance to affect us or
others. You ‘ll notice that I said that we first have to recognize the
emotion. This is important, because the mind is tricky and will cover up our
junk emotions. Anger might disguise itself as feelings of hurt; fear might
disguise itself as wanting to be taken care of or feeling abandoned. We need to
excavate those emotions and recognize what lies behind them. Invariably we find
a negative emotion that we need to acknowledge and then deal with.
What
does it mean to "deal with" a junk emotion? We've already talked about
meditation as a tool for dealing with emotions. Yogacara says that we create
our own world from our own mind. In other words, the moment that we feel happy
or content, we literally create a world of contentment; the same is true of
unhappiness or discontent. The mind shapes the world and makes it a reality.
Now, of course, this doesn't mean that people who are suffering from hunger,
war, natural disasters, and other such tragedies somehow brought the problem on
themselves and that if they just smiled then all their problems would vanish.
That is absurd and insulting.
What it does mean, however, is that their
attitude to their lives may change to the extent that they might be less
weighed down by helplessness and desperation and be able to walk that much
further to get help or seek shelter. Perhaps they would encourage others to do
the same, and thus save others' lives.
These are, obviously,
extreme examples of suffering. However, it's surely obvious that we can change
the nature of our reality on an everyday basis. Since it's the mind that tells
us whether we feel happy or not, telling the mind to feel happy can make
us feel happy. Likewise, every time we tell ourselves that we feel unhappy or
discontent, we're reinforcing those conditions in our mind, and thus making it
that much harder to become content. This is why it's so important to be present
to ourselves and tell our mind positive thoughts. Because the mind is both the
activator and recipient of our thoughts, we can change how it thinks and our
attitude toward those thoughts at the same time.
Another way to deal with
junk emotions is to neutralize that junk emotion with something positive. I've
found that, in many instances, forgiveness acts as a powerful antidote to
negativity. Forgiveness immediately extends a positive emotion outward. We can
forgive ourselves for feeling angry and tell ourselves to let the anger go and
replace it by feelings of compassion -- both for us and the person or situation
that made us angry. With the anger neutralized we can then act in a way more
appropriate to the situation.
Once we remove the junk emotion, it's amazing how
not only does the context in which the anger arose change and we can see much
more clearly what the correct thing to do would be, but the action we take will
be more effective, because it will be devoid of the negative karma that would
have attached itself to the action should we have maintained our anger.
This is a very important
point to understand. Some people think that Buddhism is a quietist religion, in
which one is encouraged to do nothing at all, at the risk of generating karma,
which can hold one back from enlightenment. However, as I've suggested
throughout this book, it's the intention behind one's actions that is
important. Everything we do and think and say, as well as everything that we don't
do or think or say, generates karma, both good and bad. Our karma collects
over many lifetimes, and it's a very wise and mature soul indeed who can afford
not to generate good karma. Therefore, it's important for us to act in the
world, but to do so in a way that we generate as much good karma as we can in
ratio to the inevitable bad karma that we'll also produce. Neither good nor bad
karma is confined to one single action: both spread. This is why it's vital
that the junk emotions are controlled at source; otherwise, they can extend
wider and wider until our single act has caused a world of hurt.
Another very simple way we
can monitor our junk emotions is to resolve that we'll not go to bed angry or
feeling hateful. I've heard that many couples say this is the secret why their
relationships have lasted: they don't go to sleep angry at each other. This
means they find the time to talk about whatever it is that's upsetting them,
and don't allow themselves to go to sleep (or lie awake unable to sleep)
without dealing with the negative emotion. Not only does this mean that the
individuals in the relationship are likely to get more sleep and be more
rested, and thus not as likely to be in a bad mood the next day; but it means
that they can begin that day refreshed and renewed, ready to deal with that
day's emotions. Of course, what was said and done the previous day may not be
resolved and some difficult and painful decisions may need to be made. But the negative
emotion will have been removed or reduced, which will make the solution to
the problem easier to discern and easier to deal with.
Similar to junk emotions are junk thoughts,
which in Buddhism are described as defilements. In other words, they are like
garbage. We have already analyzed the junk emotions such as anger and anxiety.
Junk thoughts are to some extent the premeditated or even deliberate
expressions of those junk emotions. They consist of resentment and jealousy,
deceit and spite, flattery and arrogance, shamelessness and parsimony,
remorselessness and mistrust. Other junk thoughts are negligence and
dissipation, a lack of introspection and being distracted, or in fact any
aspect where we act in an ill-considered and thoughtless manner.
As was
indicated, the roots of these defilements come from deeper emotions, such as
greed or hatred, delusion, egocentricity, doubt, and prejudice. Like junk
emotions, junk thoughts are dealt with through cultivating mindfulness. As well
as meditation, breathing deeply can help us deal with impure thoughts and
unsettling emotions. Breath control has been shown to slow the heart rate and
calm the nerves. This in turn can stop the mind racing and the body reacting
unnaturally to a situation. It also forces us to think and not to talk, which
will give us time to deal more appropriately with someone or something that's
upset us. In meditation or while we're breathing deeply, we can even visualize
the dispensing of the negative emotion by taking it out to the garbage and
dumping it there. This visualization is a technique that actually forces the
mind to release the emotion itself.
I
conclude this chapter emotions and
thoughts with a story. There was a scholar, who was full of knowledge about
Buddhism and philosophy and who came to study with a Zen master. As was
customary, the Zen master offered the scholar a cup of tea. The scholar was
delighted and accepted. The Zen master said nothing and began to pour the tea.
However, when the tea reached the rim of the cup the Zen master did not stop
pouring. He pointed to the cup of tea in silence but continued to pour the tea
into it. "What are you doing?" said the scholar, baffled. The Zen master looked
at the scholar. "Scholar," he said. "Take up your cup of tea. How can I pour
anything more into it unless you empty it?"
The
scholar knew everything there was to know about his religion. In fact, he was
so full of knowledge that there was no room for anything else. The Zen master
was teaching him, in a very direct way, that he had to empty his mind of all
that knowledge in order for him to be able to get the knowledge he really
needed, which was to gain enlightenment. I told this story to a group of
twelve-year-olds. I later found out when some of the children went home and
heard their father complaining about how awful his job was or expressing a junk
emotion, at least one of them said, "Father, you need to empty your cup."
What
I take from this story is not that we need to become ignorant or not continue
to learn about the world, but that we should stop filling our mind with trivia
and junk emotions that block our path to true knowledge and happiness. We all
need to empty our cups.
 This article was excerpted from:
Authenticity -- Clearing the Junk: A Buddhist Perspective
by Venerable Yifa.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Lantern Books. ©2008. www.lanternbooks.com
For More Info or to Order This Book (paperback). (or Kindle edition)
About the Author
Venerable Yifa
is a nun belonging to the religious order Fo Guang Shan, which was
founded by Venerable Master Hsing Yun in Taiwan and seeks to make
Buddhist practice relevant to contemporary life. Yifa lives at Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California. Venerable Yifa is also the author of The Tender Heart: A Buddhist Response to
Suffering.
More books by this author.
| Comments () >> |
 |
 |
