Buddhism and Science Symposium : Emotional Awareness: Cultivating Mental Balance and Leading a Good Life.

First, a word of apology for the rough state of this post. I had initially though that the post would be a short piece of work. However, it turned out to be more involved. The post need to be edited for more organisation, to highlight and flesh out the individual ideas. For the benefit of readers, however, I will publish the post first, in the hope that some readers will find the, albeit rough, post useful. And in more opportunate in futures, I will come back to revise this post.

Date: Thursday, 15 July 2010


Time: 7.00 pm to 10.00 pm


Topic: "Emotional Awareness: Cultivating Mental Balance and Leading a Good Life."

The Symposium is opened by Minister of Foreign Affair George Yeo, who despite himself being a Catholic, has been supportive of Buddhism activities.

The speakers at the talk are Dr. B. Alan Wallace, Dr. Paul Ekman, and Venerable (Dr.) Jing Yin.

At the talk itself, however, the audience is informed that, due to health reason, Dr. Paul Ekman is unable to make it for the talk, but he have prepared a video recording for the talk.

Venerable (Dr.) Jing Yin

The theme of the symposium being emotion, as opposed to popular beliefs about emotions, he said that emotions should not be totally condemn. This is because emotions can be channelled into constructive activities as well.

He believes that desire by itself is neither good nor bad. But it generally leads to the problem that he succinctly put as, "What we have, we don't want. What we want, we don't have.". As it is, most people are living in the realm of desire, thus this leads to a lot of emotional baggages.

He believes that emotions changes come from 3 main sources.

• External Wants


• Internal Wants


• Contemplation

As you can see 2 of the 3 sources are internal. Yet, most people derives their emotions mostly from their External Wants. This is the reason why most people are emotionally vulnerable.

Also, most people focus too much on actions instead of the origin / the meaning behind the action. The origin should be the more important is it not? This can be seen in some understanding in the concept of Karma where people beliefs in Karma leads to their action or behavior. This is against the natural flow of Karma, where the origin is the actions and behaviour, that leads to the Karma.

To quote his illustration, if Karma is the result of an written test, people are often too focus on their desired result of the test to see that to get that, they have to first take the test, to start writing well. If they do well, now, then the result will come.

The key difference is in the location of the focus. Is one focusing on the origin or on the action? i.e. Is one living in the Present or living in their Expectations?

People tend to put too much focus on subjective experiences (Expectations) which leads to excessive desires and hence emotions. This is not an innate behaviour but is a learnt response that is reinforced through our cultural, and social habits.

From a bigger perspective, the root cause of our negative emotions is the I. Expectation resides within the I. This is why progress can only come from self realisation. To put in another way, is it "condition over mind" or is it "mind over conditions" It is something like Anthony's Robbin's The Inner Power kind of thinking.

He believes that enlightenment is a state of mind - a state of total understanding and a state where the mind is not affected by the environment. Take Buddha's enlightenment as an example, it doesn't mean that after enlightenment, Buddha gets to live in another world, realm. He is still living within the same world as the rest of us. But he is no longer as affected by the events that transpires in the world. Though, from another perspective, you can say that he does have "another world" that is, his inner world. The world where he have absolute control.

To sum it up, what we are to get from this is to accept the environment and work with it rather than seeking solutions in our expectation of the environment.

Dr. B. Alan Wallace

Dr Alan started off the discourse by quoting the following from Dr. Paul.

Who we are is the sum of all that have come to pass. Not just through our own experience, but by the millions of lives who had come to pass and have directly or indirectly affected our lives. From the hunter gatherers of the pre-historic times to your immediate circles of family and friends. This perspective is a good starting point for one to be appreciative about life.

However, as human kind progress through our technologies, our standard of living, our strategies for the mental, emotional realm did not. We are lagging behind in our pursuit of happiness. Many are living by the hunter gatherer approach to survival which would not work in the modern society as there is not enough resource to be hunted / gathered - the basis of society have changed.

People looking for what kind of live, of what kind of houses, of friends etc. The "looking for what kind" approach IS the hunter gatherer approach.

Dr Wallace believes that there are 2 sources of happiness, as explained below.

The first is happiness that comes through good fortune, from environmental simulants. i.e. meaningful acts that one


experiences. These are external sources of happiness. And so he pose the question - what happens when we take them away?


Do we lose the happiness?

The second source is what we are able to give to the world. It is not what you get from the "looking for what kind" approach. It can be as simple as living life by the simple maxims - Not to do to other what you will not like done to you, or did my best not to harm. These maxims are about what you can give, as oppose to what you will receive. And this is the genuine happiness.

How then, do we move from the hunter gatherer mode to a cultivation mode? The first step is to see youself, be aware of


oneself. To know the truth.

It has been said before that the truth shall set you free. And indeed, it is the truth about oneself that is the most important towards emotional balance. Know Thyself! If getting into better emotional state is the destination, and someone gave you a map, that is still not enough. You need to figure out your current location on the map first. Your location is precisely your current emotional state.

As part of this journey, we need to develop our conscious attention. To move from what makes me happy, to the truth. To move from lamenting a regrettable act after the deed, to being able to stop ourself from commiting the regrettable act in the first place. To Shifting / cultivate our conscious attention to what we could give, and contribute, rather than what do we expect.

Constructive Emotions vs Destructive Emotions

in achieving emotional balance, it is helpful to distinguish between constructive and destructive emotions. Constructive emotions are emotion which are supportive of ourselves and others. And they gives us genuine happiness.

Conversely, destructive emotions are non supportive emotions about ourselves or others, and which doesn't give genuine happiness.

For finding the meaning of life, Dr. Wallace proposed a reductionist solution - try to strip the non-essential from your life, so that at the end of the process, What is left will be the things that are truly important to you.

Meditation

What is meditation? (from v.JY)

Is meditation about keeping a Blank Mind? If so, one can take a brick to the head. or lie down there and sleep.

Meditation is the route to Nirvana. which can be seens as cultivating a way of benevolence. It is about awaress, education, understanding, seeing the wole, acceptance, living consciously. Living consciously is to be conscious of what is happening.

A good life is about what the individual can give to the world.

Awareness is the key to controlling our emotions.

Emotions evolve from our hunter gatherer heritage, is a survival mechanism to allow us to make decisions quickly. For example, in a car accident, our heighten emotion of fear enables us to make split seconds decision. In this kind of no-time-to-think situations, if we have to think we would have died. This is how emotions such as fear can save one's life.

However, in non critical situation, Emotions can get us into troubles as it is simply not appropriate.

There are 7 kinds of basic /primary emotions, with hundreds if not thousands of nuances and variations. They are as follows:

Angers


Fear


Regrets


Sadness


Surprise


Enjoyment


Contempt (Superiority)


As mentioned, each of the above represent a family of experiences.

The way emotions work is that each emotion have generic triggers. For example. The trigger for Anger is when a pursuit of a goal is blocked. This being said, different experience may install different triggers across different individuals. Tramatic childhood experiences may install distorted triggers.

We will need to use conscious attention to cure / remove the destructive triggers. That is, we will need to start with awareness of the triggers, then condition ourself to deactivate the triggers.

Every emotions can be constructive or destructive. We can measure this by looking at the subsequent interactions that the emotions bring forth. i.e. feelings, reactions, to similar triggers.

Impulse arrives to set off a series of actions. The gap between the impulse and action is like the spark before the flame. We need to be aware of both our impulse and the gap, that is one of the criteria towards enlightenment.

The speed of our emotions is equal to the gap between the impulse and the action. Some people's are fast in this aspect and we call them temperamental. Others are slow in this aspect, and we call them cool ice.

One way to raise our awareness of this is to practise way mindful meditation.

Another way is to keep a diary of regrettable emotional episode. Noting down details such as what is the trigger, what is the behaviour, and the ways in which this behaviour is harmful. And following up by reviewing the diary, to reviews the trigger. Be familiar with them, because familiarity with them can help one to recognize it.

The aim is to become aware that one is emotional when one is emotional. When we find it hard to be aware of our emotional states, we can start by trying to become more aware of the sensations that we have. We can support this process by doing memory exercises and physical exercises, that help us to become more aware of our physical body and our biased memory process during emotional episodes.

In the grip of emotions, the mind is not fully used. In the journey towards emotional awareness, we must start with the awareness of our body, then of our feelings, only then can we be awareness our emotions.

We should not be rejecting even the negatives emotions, because they are there to serve a purpose. Instead, we should strive to be more aware of them, to grow the fullness of the experience. However, we do not let them control us, our actions, our mind.

Reaching out to people is never a one way traffic, it is about interaction. One need to respond to their response to maximise the effect.

I have to appologize for not crediting the individual speaker where it is due. In the midst of my hectic note taking, I had neglected to note down who said what. And the post as it is now, is very rough, I will come back again to revise it in hopefully within the next 2 months. I hope this blog is useful to some readers as it is now though.

Last Edited: 2010.08.01.1749hrs(Sun);