Chapter 6: Dismantling Reactive Emotions

Wake Up to Your Life - Kickoff Essay
by Mark Michael Lewis (asexymind -at- funjoyment.com)

Chapter 6: Dismantling Reactive Emotions

Chapter six is actually quite compact. With a short introduction, it goes immediately into the 3 meditations that make up most of the chapter. However, each meditation is built directly on ideas described in detail in Chapter 5, which happens to be the longest chapter in the book. Since there is no review of chapter 5 on this mudita forum, the compact nature of this chapter is somewhat illusory. Hence, where necessary, I include brief (!) summaries of the key ideas from chapter 5.

I include only those aspects of the meditations that give their flavor and provide sufficient context to clarify their purpose. They are lengthy and complex, and are best understood by reading the book.

SUMMARY

First, I would like to examine the title of the chapter. The idea that we can dismantle reactive emotions at all presupposes that such emotions are built on logical structures that can be understood and affected. This fits with Rand's assertion that all emotions are the result of thinking, and that by checking our premises, we can eradicate irrational emotions, or emotions that are sourced from erroneous premises. While there might be an infinite number of derivative conclusions and emotions, there are a small subset of fundamental premises from which they are all sourced. By understanding and correcting these fundamentals, we undermine all those erroneous conclusions and emotions.

The purpose of the meditations in this chapter is the destruction of the fundamental erroneous ideas that form the premises/foundation of reactive emotions. Although McLeod uses radically different methods than Rand suggested, and perhaps disagrees with Rand about what fundamental premises are erroneous, the intent is the same.

As we destroy all that which is false, we are left looking into the pristine face of spirit. With an almost Cartesian dedication, the idea is that if we can destroy all that which is erroneous, the only things remaining will be the incontrovertible truth. As McLeod puts it:

All spiritual work is essentially destructive in nature. The great spiritual traditions universally hold that the essence of our being in Buddhist terms, original mind is clear, empty awareness. The purpose of spiritual work is to return to original mind, to reclaim our lives from the confusion and distortions of conditioning and wake up to what we are and what this experience we call life is. P.209. And, The determination to leave behind the life of reactive patterns is called renunciation. P.210.

McLeod uses the analogy of demolishing a high rise building. If we put a small amount of explosives at the base of the key pillars of the building, we can bring down the entire structure with minimum force. Again:

The rest of this book describes where to place and how to set those charges how to demolish specific components of the conditioned patters that constitute your personality. P.209. The practices that follow & have been carefully refined through centuries of practice and experience. They are directed at specific components of habituated patterns. P 212.

In an perverted twist on Bacon, we might say the nature of the personality, in order to be destroyed, must first be obeyed. To say that we must destroy the personality might at first glance seem to be too harsh an attribution, but McLeod is clear. There is no quarter in this battle with reactive emotions and the structures that source them, including our emotional core with its attendant sense of I. Again:

In a sense, you are in combat, and the conflict is over who or what is going to live your life you or your patterns. As in combat, one or the other has to die.

An Outlook, A Practice, and A Way of Life

In order to destroy our personality and the fundamental erroneous ideas that source the reactive emotions on which it is built, McLeod asserts that we must have an outlook to show us a path out of reactive patterns, a practice to cultivate attention, and a way of life that brings attention to each moment of experience.

The 4 noble truths and the introduction to this chapter summary summarize the outlook of McLeod's Buddhism.

A practice consists of 3 parts:

1) A method to cultivate attention 2) A method to generate higher levels of energy for attention, and 3) A method to bring our heightened attention to habituated reactive patterns.

The meditations in this chapter, as well as those from previous and future chapters provide half of just such a practice. They cultivate, generate higher levels of, and focus our attention on our patterns. The other half is create a way of life that integrates our meditative attention and insights into our daily lives.

One significant danger in creating a powerful practice in our lives involves our blind spots. As we develop a consistent practice, we will generate greater levels of attention. However, if we fail to notice and dismantle any particular patterns in our personality, that heightened attention will almost certainly become high-jacked by those patterns. When this happens, the pattern is strengthened and the reactive emotions it sources begin to unconsciously dominate our lives. We have knocked down some pillars, but now rely more heavily on the remaining ones to keep the structure standing.

In order to avoid this danger of our patterns high-jacking our heightened energy of awareness, McLeod insists that it is virtually impossible to do this work without a daily practice and a teacher to spot the operation of patterns that you don't pick up. 211

With these considerations in mind, McLeod introduces the 3 meditations of this chapter.

5 dakinis: Transform our Reactive Emotions

The first meditation of the chapter is one that uses the 5 dakinis to Transform our Reactive Emotions. Each dakini is an embodiment of the power and dynamism of one the 5 aspects of pristine awareness, corresponding to the 5 elements of earth, water, air, fire, and void. As described in chapter 5, each of these elements sources a different (emotional) reaction chain that clouds the aspect of pristine awareness associated with the element. Page 227 contains a detailed table that summarizes the reaction chains associated with each element, including its location in the body, the experiential component of the reaction, the fear associated with the relation, and several other components.

To summarize drastically, the element of Earth represents sameness pristine awareness or the ability to know without judgment and is symbolized by a yellow jewel; the element of Water represents mirrorlike pristine awareness or the ability to know clearly and is symbolized by a mirror; the element of Fire represents distinguishing pristine awareness or the ability to know the particulars and is symbolized by a red lotus or rose; the element of Air represents effective pristine awareness or the ability to know what to do and is symbolized by a sword; and the element of Void represents totality pristine awareness or the ability to know the totality and is symbolized by a circle of light.

Steps of the 5 dakinis: Transform our Reactive Emotions meditation

In this meditation, we work with each of the 5 dakinis in turn, starting with the Earth dakini and ending with the Void dakini. The meat of this meditation consists of imagining the dakini appearing in front of you in the form of a woman, and allowing her to pour the elixir of her particular aspect of pristine awareness in through top of your head, allowing it to settle into its appropriate body center. This elixir then fills and breaks our entire body being apart until elixir is all there is and all you are, forming its particular symbol at the appropriate body center. Then, you notice hundreds of thousands of dakinis all around you and allow them all to pour their elixir into you, attaining ever higher levels of the appropriate pristine awareness. After the Earth dakini is complete, the next dakini appears and pours its elixir through the top of our head and we repeat the process. After all 5 dakinis have filled us with their pristine awareness, we notice the 5 centers of pristine awareness in our body are aligned and connected. At this point, light blazes from all 5 centers and everything we experience, including our body and sense of I dissolves into light. Rest in the light.

McLeod instructs us to focus most of our time and attention on one dakini for a week or two, then go to next one until all 5 dakinis have been focused on. He then offers suggestions for how to observe the manifestation of the elemental reaction chains in our daily life, both symbolically and in our emotional reactions.

The purpose of this meditation is to destroy the reaction chains that each element sources. The idea is that our body holds our habituated patterns. When the dakini elixir dissolves our body, it dissolves the structures in which patterns consist.

5 dakinis Form and Emptiness

The second meditation of the chapter is the 5 dakinis form and emptiness meditation In essence, this meditation has you imagine the challenges and fears associated with each element in turn. With each element, you imagine some aspect of the element falling apart and presenting you with a life threatening occurrence. In the face of this threat, you first imagine that you find some way to escape, second imagine being killed by the threat, and third experience the entire scene dissolve into light. As you complete the third visualization for each element, the symbol for that element forms at the appropriate center in our body.

After practicing and becoming familiar with each element in turn, move on to the second stage of the meditation. In this stage, take situations from your own life and repeat the process. For Earth, the fear is instability and the threat is grasping; for Water, the fear is engulfment and the threat is being frozen; for Air, the fear is falling and the threat is activity, for Fire, the fear is isolation and the threat is an inferno; for Void, the fear is becoming nothing and the threat is fragmentation. At the end, rest in the light. Spend about one week with each element.

The purpose of this meditation is to address the formation and dissolution of the elemental reaction chains. Each reaction chain consists of 6 steps.

1) the initial emotional reaction 2) a second feeling that lies underneath the first 3) a deep seated fear 4) an experience of open space associate with the fear 5) a reaction to the experience of open space 6) the fully formed reaction.

As we imagine trying to escape the threat, we learn to bypass the emotional reaction chain associated with each element and find creative solutions to challenges instead of letting the reaction chain dominate our lives. As we imagine dying by the threat, we learn recognize how the reaction chain functions blindly and how our resistance to it keeps it in place. As we imagine everything in the situation becoming light, we undermine our tendency to mistake our fear of the situation for reality. Rather, we get to the essence of what is in the situation and open the mystery of the arising and subsiding of experience.

Emptying the Six Realms

The last meditation of this chapter involves what McLeod calls the Six Realms.

Remember that the three reactions to experience that cloud our awareness and distract us from the radical emptiness of our Self are attraction, aversion, and indifference. When we judge our experience as either attractive, aversive, or indifferent, we add an extra level of interpretation and evaluation on top of our fundamental experience. We then no longer relate to and experience reality itself, but our interpretations and evaluations of reality. We are living in a realm of illusion; a world of our own creation; a world built out of our fears. When we can dismantle the reaction chains that source and maintain these realms, we can become fully present to the simple truth we are what we experience, nothing more, nothing less.

The Six Realms describe the 6 major types of fears and the realms of illusion they create. This meditation on Emptying the Six Realms is designed to dismantle the worlds projected by reactive emotions. When we can be present with the fear of each realm and its attendant reactive emotions in ourselves and others, we become free of it, have access to our full awareness and creative genius, and experience compassion for those still caught in it. Again, in quick summary:

1) Anger is associated with The Hell Realm. Violence and Pain surround us and we tend to react in kind. To empty the Hell realm you have to die to opposing. 2) Greed is associated with The Hungry Ghost Realm. Grasping and Fear surround us and we tend to react in kind. To die to the Hungry Ghost realm you have to stay present in the experience of neediness 3) Instinct is associated with The Animal Realm. People's and animals' Instinctual reactions and Survival behaviors trigger our own instinctual survival behaviors. To empty the Animal realm you have no longer reactively try to control pain. 4) Desire is associated with The Human Realm. People are consumed by Wanting and Desire and we tend to react in kind by seeking our own piece of the pie. To empty the Human realm when you no longer strive to fulfill desire (pleasure, enjoyment). 5) Jealously is associated with The Titan Realm. Paranoia and Competition rule here and we tend to react in kind. To empty the Titan realm you have to die to achieving, to the effort to do more and more to justify your existence. 6) Pride is associated with The God Realm. Superiority and Denial of the transitory nature of life and wealth surround us and we tend to react in kind. To empty the god realm you have to die to striving to prolong pleasure. Instead your stay present with whatever experience arises.

Steps of the Emptying the Six Realms Meditation

Enter into and open yourself to the experience of The Hell Realm. Observe how the realm triggers a reactive pattern in you. Bring attention to the reaction and let it go. Open again to the experience of the realm. Dissolve the realm into light. Move on to each of the Six Realms sequentially and repeat these steps. Then, rest in the light.

The purpose of this meditation is to disengage us from these six reactive emotions and the characteristic strivings of each realm as described above.

COMMENTS

I wonder what Rand would have thought of these meditations had she come across them. Would she still understand mystics to be thoughtless social metaphysicians after power over mindless followers?

The source of my own fascination with Buddhism and meditation is well represented in this chapter. In these meditations, I find the same ruthless desire for truth and transcendence of irrationality that I find in Objectivism. They also fill what I experience as a void in Objectivism a practice to cultivate awareness of our subconscious emotional process. IMO, while Objectivism is extraordinary at examining the logic and consistency of abstract principles relative to experience and axioms, it is lacking any systematic means to explore the emotional EXPERIENCE of human life. Experiential meditations such as those suggested in this chapter compliment the philosophical acumen of Rand.

The meditations in this chapter direct our attention to the multifarious ways that our emotions obscure and distort our experience of life. They do not offer conclusions but methods, not answers but experiences. They do not ask us to accept the pronouncements of authorities on faith, but provide us with experiential experiments and ask us to come to our own conclusions based on our experience. In this sense, they are fully compatible with Objectivism.

Most importantly, these meditations assist us in recognizing our actual motivations for our behaviors in life. They do not address only our explicit goals and life choices, but our moment by moments decisions about whether or not to answer an email now or later, or what voice tone to use in a conversation. My own experience is that while my philosophical commitments influence my major life decisions and overall stance on integrity and politics, they have only indirect impact on choices I make in any typical moment. The momentary choices I make depend far more on my emotional mood, my self-esteem needs in that momentary context, the social demands and opportunities that are present, and the fears and desires that are running below my conscious awareness. Yet, it is these moment by moment decisions that create and constitute our lives. As Jason Alexander has said, most of us know in our hearts that what makes Sammy run is more complex than purity of premise, non-contradictorily applied.

I have found that while Objectivism creates a rational context and big picture in which to live our lives, until and unless we address our emotional process and motivations, it will most often serve as 1) a powerful source of rationalization for our subconscious choices, or 2) a means of judging our Self and others negatively and reducing our self-esteem for the irrational subconscious choices we make all day long. Further, since it is uncomfortable to our self-esteem to recognize our own irrationalities, the rigor of Objectivism leads its practitioners to focus on the irrationalities of others. This includes both the projection of our own irrationality onto others, and the desire to find others consciously and subconsciously irrational so we can declare ourselves superior in our conscious rationality while ignoring our subconscious irrationality.

The Limits of Objectivism

That being said, I am reminded of a conversation I had with a friend who was suggesting that although Objectivism was good, its conclusions did not apply to every aspect of life. After considering, I said that I had to agree. In meditation, when I have learned to recognize my mind's tendency to judge the elements of my experience as attractive, aversive, or indifferent, I have moments when I relax these judgments and experience my Self as BOTH an infinite emptiness in which all of experience/existence floats, AND simultaneously not other than each element of that floating experience/existence. In those moments of transcendence, I have experiences that go beyond language and the subject/object dualism - experiences in which the categories and axioms of Objectivism are simply not meaningful. They don't apply to the experience any more than the principles of economics apply to the experience of tasting of a Thai green chicken curry or listening to Dream Theater's Scenes From a Memory.

However, as soon as the subject/object dualism obtains, the principles of Objectivism are the best available guides to experience and life. In other words, for non-enlightened beings (which studies suggest at 99.9999% of the population), Objectivism is the philosophy of choice. Now, for some Objectivists, this is conceding too much. For me, I am more than happy to limit the application of Objectivism to those experiences that involve the subject/object dualism, which, as Rand points out, applies to everything stated in language.

Last, to be clear, I think that the essential commitment to truth which is the fundamental movement that drives all of that which is good in Objectivism is still operative in the non-dual, enlightened realm. I simply think that the concept that the common understanding that the axiom of consciousness constitutes a self is inadequate contain/describe the experience.

Nihilism and the Fullness of Emptiness

Last, I want to speak to the destructive nature of McLeod's methods. On the one hand, the methods are all destructive in nature. They are designed to destroy our reactive emotions: the reactive chains that create them, the Six Realms they create, and the personality we create to navigate these realms. If we focus on the destructive element of the Buddhist practice, we can experience a deep nihilism. This nihilism affects both our understanding of 1) the nature of life and 2) our effectiveness in it.

The Nature of Life - Benevolent and Malevolent Senses of Life

First, this nihilism might lead us to conceive of the nirvana of no mind (the end/goal towards which Buddhist outlook looks out ) as the cessation of everything valuable. In this sense, there is no reason to pursue such a path. There is no value or goodness in it. Who wants to destroy all pleasure, all values, all joy? Is the Buddha such a pessimist that he would rather have ZERO pleasure than ANY pain? If so, he is the pre-eminent malevolent universer.

However, those who have traveled the path of Buddhism and looked out on the view that the outlook promises describe the experience as transcendent, unspeakable, incomparable bliss. In true mystical double-speak, the realization of our Self as radical emptiness is completely full of Being and that Being is Bliss. My personal, momentary immersions in this experience of it are indescribably and inconceivably beautiful. In the Hindu mystical tradition, they speak of the three aspects and fruits of enlightenment: Sat, Chit, and Ananda. Sat is the truth and reality of BEING. It is not abstract knowledge of being, but participation in the actuality of it, without attraction, aversion, or indifference. Chit is consciousness itself. It is not an subject differentiated from the object, but the awareness that arises when subject and object are one. Ananda is often translated as bliss or the happiness that transcends all happiness. Ananda is the natural experience of Sat and Chit. It is the experience of life itself, that pulsating, ever evolving, creative force that sources and develops our universe. It is not the sensual pleasure of a need being satisfied or sexual release, nor the mental satisfaction of accomplishing a worthy goal or creating a beautiful work of art, but the simple experience of BEING.

In the phrase that sums up my own integration of Objectivism and Buddhism, Existence Exists Gloriously! The fundamentally full nature of Being that permeates the radical emptiness has a nature. Its nature is Sat, Chit, Ananda. Existence is fundamentally and incomparably good - without opposite. It is not good in opposition to something else. Rather, just as Existence does not exist in contrast to non-existence, but simply exists, Existence is not good in contrast to bad/evil, but is simply good.

In this sense, the good news of Buddhism (and the other meditative traditions that teach us to relax our tendency to judge experience as attractive, aversive, or indifferent) is that the reality of experience itself - before our judgments - is indescribably beautiful. In fact, it is more beautiful, satisfying, and enlivening than any sensual or mental pleasure that comes from achieving our desires, avoiding our disgusts, and ignoring that which is indifferent. Buddhism is a truly benevolent sense of life.

Effectiveness, Planning and Genius

Second, just as Buddhism maintains that existence is both full and good once we destroy all the reactive emotions and the attraction, aversion, and indifference that cause/maintain them, it also maintains that our natural capacity to solve problems is fully competent to address the challenges we face in every moment. In fact, just as the bliss of nirvana is more fulfilling than sensual or mental pleasure, the genius of our natural awareness is understood to be far more effective at solving problems than the defense mechanisms, strivings, and reactive emotions that our personality uses to solve problems.

To put it another way, Buddhism puts more faith in the natural genius of human being than in the reactive emotional patterns built on attraction, aversion, and indifference including formal rationality. Hence, whenever we can destroy or dismantle a reactive emotional pattern, we free more of our natural creative genius. The more we of our reactive emotions we can dismantle, the more powerfully we can achieve long-term rational value in our lives.

The conclusion and foundation of this approach is that if we were to dismantle ALL emotional reactive patterns, and face our experience without any desires, fears, or agenda, we would be maximally empowered to achieve our highest values we would naturally and effortlessly choose those actions that best suited our ultimate happiness.

This perspective is challenging to me as an Objectivist, even as I see its value and truth. As an Objectivist, I use my best rational thought to build principles by which to make decisions. The idea is that the more rigorous my rationality, the more effective my decisions will be in achieving my highest values.

The Buddhist perspective, on the other hand, suggests that I am fooling myself. Instead, it says that if I were to let go of my rational morality and rules for behavior that I make for myself, and rather trust my own creative genius, I would make more effective (better than rational planning) decisions to achieve my highest values. The more of my awareness that is present to the situation, the more brilliant the choices I will make.

Since I am sometimes known as Mark both/and Lewis, I will take a both/and rather than an either/or approach here and say that both perspectives are accurate here.

First, if I am in the grip of my reactive emotions and they are dominating my awareness, using the rational guidelines I worked out in advance will often save me from allowing my emotions to make decisions I later regret. As Rand suggests, emotions are NOT tools of cognition. As I like to say, make commitments in times of clarity so you don't have to make decisions in times of confusion.

Second, in contrast, when I have dismantled a reactive emotion chain and am fully present in any situation, I will typically notice details and patterns in the situation that would normally have escaped my reactive awareness. My greater focus and attention will allow me create new solutions in the moment that are more effective and valuable than my best rational plans and guidelines would suggest. This is why computers and robots cannot compete with human beings in arenas that require integration of multiple domains of information. The creative capacity of human beings to comprehend the totality of a particular situation allows them to create new solutions that are adapted to that situation. The time it takes to logically consider all the information and rationally plan out a course of action is typically prohibitive in our daily interactions. As we say in NLP, if you have to think about it, you are too late. Our intuition is often far more useful and powerful than our rational capacity, which is why we use it and privilege it over rational decision making millions of times each day. We don't consider the pros and cons of letting a glass strike the tile floor as it falls off the table. We simply see it falling, and reach out to catch it, without thinking.

Further, the less our reactive emotions are dominating our experience, the more powerfully our rational faculty can gather and integrate information into higher and more coherent levels of abstraction.

Of course, my personal understanding, which I think Ken McLeod would agree with, is that the more we have dismantled our reactive emotions, the more our spontaneous genius and intuition will match or parallel the rational choices we would make had we sufficient time and conscious information. I imagine that the choices of truly enlightened beings would parallel exactly the choices of the best informed and most rational among us. When I see the enlightened masters speak, this certainly seems to be the case.

DISCUSSION

Do you think that through dismantling our reactive emotions we can tap into our personal genius and achieve more happiness than through rational planning and thought?

Does Objectivism give you insight into the Six Realms and where you enter them in your life? How do you use Objectivism to assist you in navigating them?

What are your fundamental emotional premises? Which of the Six Realms shows up the most in your life?

Have you noticed Objectivists (and not only objectivists) using a superficial rationality to make themselves feel better than other people? Which of the Six Realms does this remind you of?