The Arcade Revelation
I was having a stimulating conversation with some friends last night on one of my favorite topics… life and its meaning. Unfortunately, given the loud nature of the setting and the sensitivity of the subject I left feeling that my message was not accurately conveyed. As I sat in meditation later, my mind started organizing the thoughts that would enforce the point I was trying to make. So here I am, about to write a mini dissertation on the breakdown of the fundamentals of human nature. Enjoy.
It should comes as a surprise to no one that humans are dominated by emotion. This is a well known fact, one which to some degree, we experience on a daily basis. If we bothered to try, in fact, we could probably break down every decision we’ve made, consciously or otherwise, to the emotion it stemmed from. This, as we are told, is just human nature. From the time we are little children we quickly learn that “such and such” contact or experience makes me feel sad or bad, and “such and such” other contact or experience makes me feel happy or good. At this point it doesn’t take much conscious effort to draw the conclusion: “I should make my life about avoiding the bad, and getting more of the good”. This is of course a simplification, but if we are totally honest with ourselves we can easily see how much of our life is preoccupied with this practice. One of the problems, existentially speaking, with this is that because it comes as a natural impulse to avoid bad emotions and seek good, we take this balance for granted and assume that it is a vital function to our nature. I will attempt to prove that this is not so.
So, if we have the courage to admit to ourselves that yes, in fact, our lives on almost all fronts have been dominated by our emotions, then we can start to analyze and understand the next big part…why? But it’s not as easy as all that. If there’s one thing the human consciousness, or “ego”, hates, it’s being simplified. I have had innumerable conversations, where despite the philosophical evidence I was presenting, the other person will adamantly refuse the information because it’s demeaning to their ego and the “specialness” of the human existence. What I mean by this is that people fundamentally feel that they are a unique and a separate entity from the rest of the world and to entertain an idea that would require that view to be disassembled is simply asking too much of the listener. So bear with me as we move forward and try to suffocate that feeling that arises that makes you want to toss this information out, as early French scientists did meteors, because in conflicted with their understanding that the only thing that’s above us is heaven.
So why do we let emotion rule us? Why is it so important to us? Most people think that emotions are only felt by humans, but more and more studies are suggesting that many types of life forms feel emotions, especially other animals. But other animals are not dictated by their emotions, rather instincts. There’s a good reason that we like to think that we are the only beings that feel emotion and why the idea is so popular, that reason being because we use emotion to define ourselves from our surroundings. Think about it… “I got picked on today, and that made me feel bad, because it hurt my feelings”. The experience of this emotion defined you, the victim, from your attackers through the emotions it made you feel. To one degree or another, however small, this is true of all emotions.
Let’s think of emotions like little blocks. We keep taking these blocks and stacking them, one on top the other. And what we are doing is starting to build a wall, a little fort, around ourselves made of emotion. We build and build and build, painstakingly trying to define ourselves from the rest of the world. We instinctively feel a need for this because after the idea takes hold of us that we are a separate ego, there consequently comes questions that can’t be answered. “Why am I separate”, “Why am I special”? Because there is this massive torrent of information and activity all around us, known as life, we seek some stable ground or vantage point to reflect from and it becomes necessary to us to first find that defining line between where “I” end, and “everything else” begins. This all sounds relatively complex but it actually comes to you as a natural part of your development. It has less to do with the way we are built though and is more so a product of consciousness. It is also a false view.
And so we go on and on building our little fort of emotions. And some people will tell you that this is where it ends. That this is the point of it all, to just try and make those experiences and emotions be good ones and weed out the bad ones, or at least not let them get to you. But there’s a bigger problem that stems from our supposed nature to trust emotions… eventually (whether or not you experience it early in life or, as most do, later) you find yourself all alone in this fort you built and you feel trapped, too isolated. This constant reliance on emotion has become our support system and when we don’t have emotion, good or bad, we crave it. In this way we have become trapped by our emotions, a slave to them, even the positive ones. This is one reason why the elderly seem so distant to us, so unlike ourselves. Because their lives aren’t filled with such constant back and forth motion between polarities, it’s slowed down a bit. And, sadly, for most of us we are left reminiscing and longing for the days when we were young and filled with strong, vivid emotions like hope, love, lust, or even anger and greed. Even sadder still are the ones who’ve isolated themselves so much with their separate emotions that they feel threatened by and begin to hate those who are different, whose ideas may chip away at their fort.
Logic should then dictate that in order to avoid winding up trapped in our illusionary world we created for ourselves from emotion, we should eliminate the want or need for those feelings. And this is where even more people stop and refuse to follow this path further. Why? Because now it sounds bleak, hopeless. A world where I shouldn’t pursue feelings like love, passion, pride, and happiness? No thank you, I’ve heard enough. But this is not where it ends. The point here is not to just understand that emotions are a trap and therefore never feel emotions, which is actually impossible. The point is rather that it should be your aim to turn the blocks of your emotional fort into translucent ones. To see through them to the rest of life around you which you, despite your best efforts to think otherwise, are very much a part of. If you can manage to see that these emotions are hollow, void of anything of lasting use to you, then you will find they can still exist but will be like links of a chain which, upon realizing that they are not really there, cannot bind you. It is in this way that you can come to a balance where you still get the emotions but they don’t wind up being the deciding factor on whether your life experience is a happy one, or a sad one.
This all may sound confusing to you, and understandably so, I had to unlearn most everything I learned through being raised as a human being to start applying it. Or perhaps it’s not confusing. Perhaps you intellectually understand the concepts I’ve presented. But understanding is not enough. Understanding alone will not fix the false views. You have to cultivate a mind that can accept these ideas and put them into practice, a fertile ground for these seeds to take root, otherwise it is sand passing through your closed fist.
I’d like to close with these quotes from the Buddha…
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”
“However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act upon them?”
It should comes as a surprise to no one that humans are dominated by emotion. This is a well known fact, one which to some degree, we experience on a daily basis. If we bothered to try, in fact, we could probably break down every decision we’ve made, consciously or otherwise, to the emotion it stemmed from. This, as we are told, is just human nature. From the time we are little children we quickly learn that “such and such” contact or experience makes me feel sad or bad, and “such and such” other contact or experience makes me feel happy or good. At this point it doesn’t take much conscious effort to draw the conclusion: “I should make my life about avoiding the bad, and getting more of the good”. This is of course a simplification, but if we are totally honest with ourselves we can easily see how much of our life is preoccupied with this practice. One of the problems, existentially speaking, with this is that because it comes as a natural impulse to avoid bad emotions and seek good, we take this balance for granted and assume that it is a vital function to our nature. I will attempt to prove that this is not so.
So, if we have the courage to admit to ourselves that yes, in fact, our lives on almost all fronts have been dominated by our emotions, then we can start to analyze and understand the next big part…why? But it’s not as easy as all that. If there’s one thing the human consciousness, or “ego”, hates, it’s being simplified. I have had innumerable conversations, where despite the philosophical evidence I was presenting, the other person will adamantly refuse the information because it’s demeaning to their ego and the “specialness” of the human existence. What I mean by this is that people fundamentally feel that they are a unique and a separate entity from the rest of the world and to entertain an idea that would require that view to be disassembled is simply asking too much of the listener. So bear with me as we move forward and try to suffocate that feeling that arises that makes you want to toss this information out, as early French scientists did meteors, because in conflicted with their understanding that the only thing that’s above us is heaven.
So why do we let emotion rule us? Why is it so important to us? Most people think that emotions are only felt by humans, but more and more studies are suggesting that many types of life forms feel emotions, especially other animals. But other animals are not dictated by their emotions, rather instincts. There’s a good reason that we like to think that we are the only beings that feel emotion and why the idea is so popular, that reason being because we use emotion to define ourselves from our surroundings. Think about it… “I got picked on today, and that made me feel bad, because it hurt my feelings”. The experience of this emotion defined you, the victim, from your attackers through the emotions it made you feel. To one degree or another, however small, this is true of all emotions.
Let’s think of emotions like little blocks. We keep taking these blocks and stacking them, one on top the other. And what we are doing is starting to build a wall, a little fort, around ourselves made of emotion. We build and build and build, painstakingly trying to define ourselves from the rest of the world. We instinctively feel a need for this because after the idea takes hold of us that we are a separate ego, there consequently comes questions that can’t be answered. “Why am I separate”, “Why am I special”? Because there is this massive torrent of information and activity all around us, known as life, we seek some stable ground or vantage point to reflect from and it becomes necessary to us to first find that defining line between where “I” end, and “everything else” begins. This all sounds relatively complex but it actually comes to you as a natural part of your development. It has less to do with the way we are built though and is more so a product of consciousness. It is also a false view.
And so we go on and on building our little fort of emotions. And some people will tell you that this is where it ends. That this is the point of it all, to just try and make those experiences and emotions be good ones and weed out the bad ones, or at least not let them get to you. But there’s a bigger problem that stems from our supposed nature to trust emotions… eventually (whether or not you experience it early in life or, as most do, later) you find yourself all alone in this fort you built and you feel trapped, too isolated. This constant reliance on emotion has become our support system and when we don’t have emotion, good or bad, we crave it. In this way we have become trapped by our emotions, a slave to them, even the positive ones. This is one reason why the elderly seem so distant to us, so unlike ourselves. Because their lives aren’t filled with such constant back and forth motion between polarities, it’s slowed down a bit. And, sadly, for most of us we are left reminiscing and longing for the days when we were young and filled with strong, vivid emotions like hope, love, lust, or even anger and greed. Even sadder still are the ones who’ve isolated themselves so much with their separate emotions that they feel threatened by and begin to hate those who are different, whose ideas may chip away at their fort.
Logic should then dictate that in order to avoid winding up trapped in our illusionary world we created for ourselves from emotion, we should eliminate the want or need for those feelings. And this is where even more people stop and refuse to follow this path further. Why? Because now it sounds bleak, hopeless. A world where I shouldn’t pursue feelings like love, passion, pride, and happiness? No thank you, I’ve heard enough. But this is not where it ends. The point here is not to just understand that emotions are a trap and therefore never feel emotions, which is actually impossible. The point is rather that it should be your aim to turn the blocks of your emotional fort into translucent ones. To see through them to the rest of life around you which you, despite your best efforts to think otherwise, are very much a part of. If you can manage to see that these emotions are hollow, void of anything of lasting use to you, then you will find they can still exist but will be like links of a chain which, upon realizing that they are not really there, cannot bind you. It is in this way that you can come to a balance where you still get the emotions but they don’t wind up being the deciding factor on whether your life experience is a happy one, or a sad one.
This all may sound confusing to you, and understandably so, I had to unlearn most everything I learned through being raised as a human being to start applying it. Or perhaps it’s not confusing. Perhaps you intellectually understand the concepts I’ve presented. But understanding is not enough. Understanding alone will not fix the false views. You have to cultivate a mind that can accept these ideas and put them into practice, a fertile ground for these seeds to take root, otherwise it is sand passing through your closed fist.
I’d like to close with these quotes from the Buddha…
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”
“However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act upon them?”
Labels: emotions, philosophy, understanding
posted by Quinn Allan at
10:19 PM
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