Kindness As Constructive Imagination
Feb07

Kindness As Constructive Imagination

Posted By on Feb 7, 2024

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton   10 minute read This excerpt is from the chapter ‘The Evidence Bases in Religion, Science and Politics,’ in which I explore how kindness is developed through paying attention to what living beings truly are: a process Tse-Fu Kuan calls ‘Constructive Imagination.’     Feeling and emotion Metta—Universal Loving Kindness–is one way that we redirect our emotions along the most wholesome pathway; it is, however, very important first to be clear about the difference between feeling (vedana) and emotion–as an aspect of ‘mind’ or citta. Sangharakshita: ‘When Buddhist psychology refers to developing mindfulness of feelings, however, something rather different is meant from the “getting in touch with one’s feelings” with which psychotherapy is concerned–something less complex, perhaps more useful. Indeed, being able to identify feelings (in the sense of vedana as defined by the Buddhist tradition) is what makes it possible for us to follow the Buddhist path. The Pali term vedana refers to feeling not in the sense of the emotions, but in terms of sensation. Vedana is whatever pleasantness or unpleasantness we might experience in our contact with any physical or mental stimulus.   ‘To understand what we would call emotion, Buddhism looks at the way in which that pleasant or painful feeling is interwoven with our reactions and responses to it.’[1] Feeling as vedana, then, is just experience: specifically the experience of pleasure, pain or neither. On the other hand, the etymology[2] of the word ‘emotion’ is connected with ‘moving out,’ in the sense of ‘responding.’ Emotion, then, is that aspect of the mind or psyche (Pali: citta) which ‘moves in relation to experience.’ Citta encompasses the sum total of how the psyche moves in response to experience: it therefore includes thinking, emotion and the distribution of attention: It is useful to consider the above diagram. In the teaching of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (satipatthanas,) the Buddha says we need to bring mindfulness to four areas, if we are to bring happiness into the world, avoid suffering and ultimately attain Nirvana.[3] These foundations are body (kaya,) feeling (vedana,) mind (citta) and views (dhammas) and they all condition each other. Usually that conditioning, when taken between feeling and emotion, involves moving towards pleasurable experiences that are desired and away from painful experiences that are undesired—and maybe not responding at all to neutral experiences. Emotion then is most of the time an unconscious and reactive response to feeling; while feeling and the emotion feel to be one thing, they are actually distinct. Feeling is just what is presented to us in the moment: thus, it is something we...

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Views
Feb01

Views

Posted By on Feb 1, 2024

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book…     10 minute read This excerpt is from Chapter 8, ‘Mindfulness the Undiscovered Foundations,’ in which I explore the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (Pali: satipatthanas,) and here, ‘Mindfulness of Mental Objects (Pali: dhammas.) I am particularly concerned to clarify this key section of the Satipatthana Sutta: current interpretations of ‘mental objects’ and ‘dhammas‘ have lacked conviction amongst commentators.     Views I have arrived at ‘Views’ as my translation of dhammas, and this is how. Dhamma roughly is ‘what can be remembered’ or ‘what can be borne in mind’ (Pali: dharetabba), hence the translation of dhammas as ‘mental objects’ and sometimes as ‘phenomena.’[1] ‘Mental objects’ doesn’t tell us very much about what dhammas are, although two things we do hold in the mind are ‘concepts’ and ‘images.’ Buddhism teaches that we have not just five but six senses, with the mind being the sixth sense called manas. As humans we have evolved to make assessments about the world around us. These assessments can be at the level of thought, although prior to thought, evolution taught us the more gut-level instinctual response of fight or flight, where information resides at the visceral level on a ground of learned experience. According to Sagaramati, a view is a deeply ingrained attitude, not simply an opinion; it arises on one or all of Buddhism’s grounds for faith: reason, intuition and experience. When we come across something that meets one of these criterion as a means either for survival, to avoid pain, or to bring joy and fulfilment, we don’t need to consciously make an effort to place that ‘mental object’ in our mind, it naturally gets stored there. In this way views naturally arise based upon a mix of feelings, gut instincts, and reasons; in fact, often it is emotion that plays the bigger role, only for us to later come up with rationalizations for the views we hold. The process of bearing a mental object in mind, i.e. in the mind-sense manas[2] (Pali,) involves apperception or recognition (Sanskrit: samjna; Pali: sanna.) Through life we are taught the conventional conceptual meanings of concrete objects and abstract concepts: chair, desk, popularity. Once we know these as names, we can recognize them when we see them. But we also recognize images: a person’s face, a landscape, a painting, a visualized Buddha. ‘Although when manas is translated as ‘mind’ dhammas tends to be rendered accordingly as ‘thoughts’ or ‘ideas’, note that dhammas qua the object of manas as the sixth sense faculty refer not only to thoughts, ideas or concepts, but to mentality in its broadest denotation:...

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