After Awakening
Are the emotions and desires still there?
Tesla gave me the answer
If you really wake up
Is there no more emotions and six desires?
Does it become a cold wooden man?
Lover walks by you
You have no waves in your heart
Parents get old and sick
You can't even cry
Eat your favorite dish
You just smiled
It's like chewing on a piece of tasteless paper.
This is a question I was asked recently by a viewer backstage.
She said she was curious about spiritual practice
But when I think about the awakening, I don't even have any joy, anger and sadness
She was too scared to go any further
She says
This awakening
I don't want it.
Hello
Hello.
I am Wang Lijie
And I really want to answer that question seriously today.
Because it wasn't just her.
It could be 99 percent of the people who are curious about the practice.
The greatest threshold in my heart
Even I can say that
This misunderstanding
Directly blocking the vast majority of people from true awakening
They think awakening is a pair of scissors
Cut out all the living things in people's hearts
They thought the Enlightened One was a stone statue
Wind and rain
Just sitting there empty
I want to tell you today
That's not true at all.
And I'm going to use something you probably see every day
Give you an extremely accurate answer
This thing
Tesla's Fully Autonomous Driving
So let me start with a conclusion.
awareness
Doesn't mean no emotion
seven emotions and six desires
Not one less
joys and sorrows
Greed and doubt
Everything is still there.
The awakened person is not missing something.
It's one more thing.
More of that stuff
It's called awareness itself.
You can imagine
Tesla's latest fully autonomous driving mode
You're in the driver's seat.
The car makes its own direction, changes its own lane
You overtake. You avoid pedestrians.
In this mode
You can actually do three things.
first
You can sleep through it.
Eyes closed
Leave it all to the car
Drive the car however you want
Encounter small pits and valleys
It handles it itself
Slow down when you hit the brakes.
It judges for itself
You are not involved at all
second
You can watch
Eyes wide open
Every lane change, every acceleration, every brake
You see it all
You see it.
But you didn't put your hands back on the steering wheel
You're just a sober passenger
third
You can take over
When the car is about to run into a situation that you judge to be very dangerous
Your hand grabs the steering wheel
Override autonomous driving
Complete the action you want
After the danger has passed
You put the car back in automatic mode.
Keep watching
Ordinary people's lives
That's the first one.
fall asleep
Your emotions run automatically at the bottom
When anger comes, you become angry
When greed comes, you pounce on it
When jealousy comes, you get sour
You have no idea who's driving the car.
You are the car itself
Or more accurately
You think you are the car itself
Awakened Man
It is a mixed state of the second plus the third.
The car is still running
The mood is still up
It's just that there's an extra awake person in the driver's seat
He's looking at what happens, how it inflates.
How do you attempt to hijack an entire car?
Most of the time he just watches
No shot - because the shot itself is another kind of entanglement
Only when the emotion is about to crash the car into a cliff
He will take over
Before saying something that shouldn't be said
Stop for half a second
Before slamming the door
Take a breath
And then...
He returned it to the autonomous system.
Keep watching
Can you see it?
Awareness is not scissors
Awareness is the sleeping passenger in the back seat who should have been awake
Finally opened my eyes
This metaphor is not poetic
It has a very hard counterpart in neuroscience.
You have two systems in your brain.
One is the limbic system.
The core is the amygdala.
Responsible for the automatic generation of emotions
How fast is the amygdala?
From a stimulus into your eyes
Until it commands your body to secrete adrenaline
It only takes about a hundred milliseconds
That is to say
Before you realize you're angry
Your body is already angry
That anger is not your decision
It's a hardware response that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years.
You can't turn it off
You don't need to close
It's one of the reasons your ancestors survived.
Another system is prefrontal cortex.
Especially the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex
It's responsible for metacognition.
It's the ability to observe what you're perceiving.
It responds much more slowly
It may take three to five hundred milliseconds to intervene
But it does have something that the limbic system doesn't.
It can see what the limbic system is doing.
Then decide whether to take over or not
The relationship between these two systems
Identical to Tesla.
The limbic system is that self-driving artificial intelligence
Specialize in handling each specific road condition
Prefrontal cortex is the person who's sitting in the driver's seat.
He is not responsible for driving
He is responsible for knowing how the car is driving
Brain scans of long-term meditators tell us one thing
An amazing thing.
Their amygdala's not gone.
It's even shrunk a little bit.
But
Their prefrontal lobe's downward control connection to the amygdala
Significantly enhanced
Translated into human language is
Their emotions are still there
The automatic response is still there
But the seeing eye above the emotion
Become very awake and very powerful
They're not people without anger.
They are when anger arises
The awareness that sees anger rise
Someone who will follow within a second
This second
It's that one second in Tesla's metaphor.
The difference between awakening and not awakening
Just this second
Buddhism has actually made this clear for a long time
It's just that a lot of people read it in the wrong direction.
You may have heard the phrase
It's called annihilation.
This was the ultimate state pursued by some early practitioners
Let go of all feelings and thoughts
But later Mahayana Buddhism
Especially Zen
Just overturned the road
zen theory
Trouble is Bodhi
What do you mean?
Worry is not the enemy
Worry is the fuel of awareness
No emotion.
What do you practice with?
Stones are emotionless.
Stones never wake up
The Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng once said a particularly famous saying - hate love and don't care
Lie on extended feet
If you take this sentence literally
You would think he meant to erase love and hate
But you carefully taste
He said he didn't care.
Not without
Love is still there
Hate still exists
The desire to like something is still there
I still have that aversion to hating someone.
only
He doesn't care about them anymore.
No longer being dragged by them
Stop identifying yourself with them
This is the Buddhist path
One side is depressing
Press down the emotion
The result is internal injury
And on the other side is identity.
Totally carried away by emotions
The result is trauma
What is the Middle Way?
The middle way is when you're sitting in the driver's seat.
Keep your eyes open.
Look at
You neither smashed the car
Don't strap yourself to the steering wheel
You let it go?
You watch it open
There is a story in the Zen koan that illustrates this in particular
There is an old Zen master meditating on the mountain
Once I suddenly heard a mother crying in the village at the foot of the mountain
Her baby died.
The old Zen master listens and listens
I cried myself
His disciples later asked him
Master, you have been cultivating for decades
Why are you still crying?
The old Zen master said something - don't cry
It's vegetation.
You taste this sentence
Don't cry
It's vegetation.
True Enlightened One
Instead of turning into stones and plants
True Enlightened One
It's a heart that has everything
But no longer held by anyone
Now here's one thing that's counterintuitive and that's going to surprise a lot of people.
Awakened Man
Emotions not only did not disappear
On the contrary, it has become richer, more vivid and more delicate than ordinary people
That sounds crazy.
But it has its reasons
Ordinary people's emotions are actually a mess
When you are angry
Anger mixed with fear, mixed with self-esteem hurt
Mixed with resentment about something in the past
Mixed with anxiety about the future
And there's a shame in your subconscious that you don't want to admit.
This big lump of stuff sticks together
You can't tell which is which
You can only use one crude word to describe it - I'm bored today
But a conscious person
When emotions arise
He is like an experienced wine taster
You can layer by layer.
He knows.
The top floor
It was the other party's words that touched a certain point of his self-esteem
One floor down.
He was hurt by a similar situation ten years ago
Today, this situation flipped the switch on that seed.
One floor down.
And he discovered that it was 80 percent fear.
Only 20% is true anger
You can feel the difference.
A mush of emotion
And the emotions of transparent dew droplets one by one
It's a completely different life experience
Ordinary people live in a gray emotional haze
The Enlightened One lives under a clear emotional starry sky
You said he felt less
He feels a thousand times more finely than you
It's just that he doesn't put any dew anymore
Take it as your own
This is why truly advanced practitioners
They were often extraordinarily gentle, extraordinarily humorous, extraordinarily empathetic.
Because he knows what's underneath your anger
He knows what lies beneath your pride
He also knew what lay beneath his own anger and pride
A person who can see himself clearly
Only then can we truly see others clearly
So back to the audience question.
She actually has a more specific extension - the awakened person
What is it like in a relationship?
Won't he be torn, won't quarrel, won't be sad, won't be angry?
Is he like a robot?
Mechanically polite
Leave nothing in your heart
I'd like to make this more specific.
In any relationship
When that emotional moment occurs
A person with awareness
It goes through layers.
first floor
He will see
What do you see?
See your emotions rise
Seeing what kind of hook the other party's words hooked him like
Which seed?
This seeing itself
It has made him no longer fully equivalent to that emotion
second floor
He will exercise some restraint
Attention please.
So restraint is not repression.
It's not about gritting your teeth and enduring it.
After he saw it
He has a choice
He has a split second to choose from.
Do I want to follow this emotion?
How far to go
He won't be trampled to the bottom by an automatic program
Third floor
He will find a way
Let the other party see it too
Only one person is awake in a relationship
The structure of this relationship remains unstable
So the Awareness One does not take Awareness for Himself.
He would use various means - sometimes a single sentence
Sometimes a silence
Sometimes it's a question - to help the other person also raise a little awareness
He's not teaching each other.
He is ordering each other.
Because he knows
A couple who see each other
To really get out of the relationship quagmire together
Fourth floor
If the other party is temporarily unable to raise awareness
He will find a way to improve the relationship on his own
He doesn't sit there waiting for the other person to wake up
He will adjust his approach
Adjust the pace of communication
Adjust the distance to get along
Even adjust your expectations for the relationship
He was always an active improver
Rather than being a passive victim
Fifth floor
It is also the hardest layer
If the relationship doesn't improve - the other person doesn't want to wake up at all
All his efforts are just deepening the entanglement between the two sides
Those who are aware will choose to avoid
Not escape
Not the Cold War
It's a sober exit.
He knows.
Stay here.
It will only make the automated procedures on both sides worse together
Let the karmic seeds of both parties increase together
He would rather leave with regret
I don't want to let my own awareness
Being infected by a doomed relationship into a new seed of ignorance
You see
Inside these five floors
There's no layer. There's no emotion.
Emotions are surging on every level
Just inside each floor
There's an awake person in the driver's seat.
So much for that.
I want to ask you a question that may subvert your entire spiritual imagination
After the Buddha became enlightened
Does he still love his former wife?
Yasodhara
The standard chicken soup answer is - Buddha is beyond worldly love
His love for all beings
Replace the love for someone
This answer is too cheap
Cheap enough to paint the Buddha with cold gold paint
The real historical picture is this
The sixth year after the Buddha became enlightened
He returned to Kapilavastu for the first time.
Back to the home he left behind
His father, King Jingfan, went out of the city to greet him
His foster mother hugged him and cried
His son Rahula was seven years old.
The first time I met this father who had only heard his name
And his wife Yasodhara - she did not leave the city
She stayed in her room.
She says
If he still has me in his heart
He'll come up to me on his own
If he doesn't have me in his heart
What's the point of me going to see him?
The Buddha really went upstairs
He walked into the room he had once known
Standing in front of Yasodhara
The description in the classics is very restrained
There was no earth-shattering conversation between them
No crying
No complaint
Yasodhara knelt at his feet
Tears fell on his robe
Buddha just stood still.
Allow that emotion to happen
No depression.
No escape
I didn't pretend I didn't see it.
You tell me.
Does that count?
A few years later
Yasodhara himself became a monk
Later
Rahula also became one of his youngest disciples
A person can bring those closest to him
All follow the same path of liberation - it's not without feelings
It's taking emotion from a form of appropriation
Transformed into a deeper, larger, less attached form
He didn't turn to stone.
He becomes a boat that everyone can cross together
So
Let me come back to that viewer's question
After Awakening
Are the emotions and desires still there?
Still there.
Not a few.
Just from today.
You know you're not the car
You are the one in the driver's seat who finally opened his eyes
Anger will rise
It's just that you watch it rise
Then watch it recede like a tide
Like will happen again
It's just that you stop grasping at it like a drowning person grasping for a lifeline
Sadness will still flow
It's just that you allow the tears to flow
Without having to add another layer to the tears "Why am I so fragile"
The self-attack
You may even find that
You love more than ever
Because you finally have the ability
Don't involve the other person in your own emotional whirlpool
You see each other for the first time
Because you can see yourself for the first time
Awakening doesn't make you less
Awakening is getting to know you for the first time
The thing I've been looking at
That looking thing
Outside of your car
Outside of your emotions, outside of your physical body
The existence that has always been there
It doesn't require you to do anything to appear.
It's already here.
It's just waiting for you one day
In the midst of a quarrel, at the height of a rage
At the moment when a tear is about to fall
Suddenly turned around
See it.
That glance
The second you take over the steering wheel
After that second
You will still go on living
Continue to Love
Continue to be angry
Continue to be happy
But you know - in the driver's seat
There is a person awake
Speaking of which
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Have you ever experienced an emotional moment?
Suddenly jumped out of his body
The moment you find yourself angry or sad
How did you deal with that moment?
Did it change the outcome?
If you like
Let's chat in the comment area
I'm really curious.
And
If you want to continue to explore this topic in the next issue
Which direction do you most want to hear me open?
It's how the neural mechanisms behind emotions can be rewritten through training
Or what is suffering in Buddhism?
Or why the more aware people are, the more emotional they are. Behind this
Deeper structure
Tell me.
We'll walk in together next time.
I am Wang Lijie
See you next time.