In this passage from Then and Now, Ken jokes that if we tried to eliminate emotions entirely we might become like “zombies.” His quip also brings to mind the Vulcans from Star Trek, who are often portrayed as having a high degree of control over their emotions.
But Ken’s point goes in a very different direction. Practice is not about eliminating or controlling emotion. The question is whether emotions like attraction, aversion, pride, and jealousy organise around a solid sense of self, or whether they can be experienced openly as movements in mind.
When our capacity of attention is weak, emotions swallow us. Anger becomes my anger. Pride becomes my pride. We are carried away before we even know what has happened. But as attention develops, the same emotions can arise without taking over the whole field of experience. They are still felt, but are experienced as movement or energy rather than identity.
Ken’s image of emotions as waves in the ocean points to something simple yet profound. Waves are the nature of the ocean. Like emotions they arise naturally. The question is how we experience their movement. The aim of practice is not to be emotionless like a zombie, nor to control our emotions like a Vulcan. It is to develop the capacity to experience them completely. When that capacity of attention is present, emotions no longer swallow us. They arise, move, and pass, and we are no longer confused by them — mistaking them for who we are or what the world is.
From Then and Now 7
Kyle: I can understand the benefit of experiencing the emptiness and the emotion at the same time, but is the ultimate goal of the practice to ultimately go without the emotion? Because it seems that if the emotion doesn't really exist, and things like anger and other emotions like that can cause so many problems. Wouldn't it just be easier just to—
Ken: Get rid of them?
Kyle: Yeah.
Ken: Oh yeah, easier said than done, isn’t it?
Kyle: Yeah. Well, obviously you'd have to approach it in a very careful way. Would there be a way of doing that without ultimately—maybe I don't want to use the word suppress, but—
Ken: Well, we might become a nation of zombies. They don't have any emotions. That's not the point. We live. We breathe. We have thoughts, we have emotions. Very broadly speaking there are two kinds of emotions: there are reactive emotions and emotions which are responses. The reactive emotions are organized around a sense of self. They are things like attraction, aversion, preference, indifference, pride, jealousy, greed and things like that.
They arise and when they arise, because we don’t have the sufficient capacity of attention, they swallow us, so we get angry or we get proud, or what have you. But as you practice and you develop a greater capacity in attention then you are able to experience the arising of the emotions without being distracted, without being swallowed by them and then they just become an experience and that’s where what I was talking about comes in—one experiences them as just being no thing, just a movement. And it's very, very different because you’re not confused by it.
So saying, "Okay, let’s get rid of the emotion," it's a little bit like saying, "Well, you know, it would be nice if the ocean was always calm without any waves on it." Because one way of looking at the emotions is that they are simply mind waves. But it’s the nature of the ocean to have waves. It’s the nature for mind to move, to have waves.
The question is, is that all organized down to the sense of self, with all the destructiveness of that, or can it be experienced openly and freely so it doesn’t cause the locking or the reactivity that is the basis of suffering?
So what we’re doing in Buddhism is actually not trying to get rid of emotions but trying to develop the ability to experience them completely, so we’re never confused by them.