Emotiional Awareness, Ekman, Dalai Lama

I finished the book I just wrote about, Emotional Awareness, and learned very little for a lot of slow reading and struggle. I very much admire the Dalai Lama for his willingness to engage in dialogues such as the nearly 40 hours, over 3 or 4 years of visits. He is trying to understand Western thinking and quite a few Westerners are trying to learn from him. But finally I have a feeling that Kipling had it right: East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. I don't want to believe that. But this book does not disprove it.

Many Westerners now call themselves Buddhists and practice various sorts of Buddhism. This is a very new phenomenon. In the late 1930s when Theos Bernard [about whom I've done much research] lectured across the country about his visit to Tibet and what he had learned of their religion it was an exotic performance [in his silk robes he had had made for himself] and seems to have been forgotten very rapidly when the country was plunged soon thereafter into WWII. But then we became so prosperous and complacent the hippies rebelled and the more serious among them began looking for not only alternative hair and clothes but religions. If one reads the publications, Tricycle, Shambala Sun, etc. they reflect many takes on Buddhism. Also there are many Buddhisms, the Dalai Lama's being only one of several ... which historically in Tibet was also true but those variations were Tibetan and different, of course, in background and language and concept from American.

I began trying to understand the concepts to get a feel for what Theos Bernard had brought back; but that is beyond me, especially since I cannot read the Tibetan texts he chose to study. So I'm very much a dilletante on the subject and look at it as an outsider with my own Western background -- I wind up confused. I finished the book and am still confused; I don't think they resolved anything although Ekman seems to think they did.

In the final chapter Ekman writes of the effect his meetings with the D.L. had on him personally, very profound effects on his emotional life. It is easy to say, "ah, yes. The scientist has been affected by meeting holiness." That seems to be true statement but I really don't know what it means. It is finally the only solid information I take away from the whole difficult book. Is the Dalai Lama holy? It seems he would not say so. But he was trained in holiness from childhood and he is a very intelligent man who learned profound lessons from brilliant tutors and within the Tibetan debating/questioning formula of study and has practiced intense meditations for years. Others too have been trained in this way, and perhaps they too are holy. Unfortunately once again I'm confronted by a word whose meaning I actually do not understand.

These are things I ponder; I feel a need to ponder even though I have little hope of finding answers. Who is quoted, "What is the answer? What is the question?"

Reading heavy stuff

I have been reading heavy stuff; mainly, Emotional Awareness, a discussion between the Dalai Lama ans Paul Ekman who has written extensively on emotions, especially how they are revealed on the face, sometimes very fleetingly, yet nearly always recognized if only subconsciously by others. Again and again as I read I feel they are not talking about the same thing. Often they discuss the Tibetan words compared to English, sometimes one or the other lanauage lacks the concept and, as Ekman remarks, if you don't have a word for it you can't talk about it. They wonder if it can be felt if there is no word. The books raises such questions over and over and often doesn't answer or even try to answer them.

Meanwhile I've been reading a lot of old New Yorker magazines. Since the issues through the summer and fall were full of political articles, most of which are outdated and uninteresting at this point, I've mainly read articles on medical studies -- these have mostly been brain studies. I know that science has fads and fashions like every other field and that presently brain structure and chemistry is a hot topic because. for the first time ever, MRIs and other methods can actually show the brain reacting in very fine detail. Although much has been written lately about studies of Tibetan monk meditators with MRI, that work doesn't get to anything like the fine points of the articles I've been reading about psychopathic disorder, or the work with restructuring brain reactions to phantom limb sensations.

On the one hand I am reading two thoughtful and very intelligent men trying to talk about emotions but they are not taking into consideration any of the newer understanding. For instance, in Tibetan philosophy a common comment is that compassion comes from thinking of each sensate being having possibly once been one's mother. But apparently motherhood in the period when these ideas was formed was a simpler and more loving thing than it is in today's world or has been in many civilizations. So the whole idea goes out the window -- sociological differences are not addressed, let alone what happens in the brain of a severely neglected or abused child -- what pathways simply are not formed, that "mother" is barely a concept or an extremelty negative one. And that compassion may be a physical impossibility. The Dalai Lama has said that if it is discovered that modern science disproved some Buddhist concept then the concept just be discounted, it is wrong. The openness to reinterpretation, to rational and scientific thought is unique to Buddhism and makes it vastly more appealing than other religions [to me and, I think, to many other people].

I'm in a morass of questions and have absolutely nowhere to turn for discussion of these matters. I don't know a soul who reads the literature I read or cares about these subjects. So I display my confusion here simply because these thoughts gnaw at my understanding. I've been accustomed to "thinking in the dark" like this most of my life so I'm not feeling sorry for myself. Just feeling a familiar kind of frustration.