THE DIVINE ABIDINGS
One concept in Buddhism that I have repeatedly practiced and at the same time questioned are the Divine Abidings. The abidings are four well-known meditation subjects called loving-kindness, compassion, gladness, and equanimity. Practicing these four subjects is meant to irradicate emotional defilements and actualize potential for the meditative path.
While the first, loving-kindness has the purpose of warding off ill will, the others are meant to save us from cruelty, aversion, and greed or resentment.
Because of the way they are practiced they are sometimes also called the illimitables, because they gradually generate a boundless condition. Loving-kindness practice, for example, assumes that hate has to be abandoned and patience attained. First it should be developed only towards oneself, doing it repeatedly thus: “May I be happy and free from suffering” or “May I keep myself free from enmity, affliction and anxiety and live happily.” Then the practice is extended to others such as neutral, loved, and antipathetic others as in the phrase “May you be happy and free from suffering.”
Limitations
However, these standardized emotions can easily become a bypass to appreciate and harness the full spectrum of human sensing. They can become a veil that blinds us for what is actually present in us and as Gabor Mate points out in When the Body Says No, especially the repression of aversive emotions can lead to a variety of illnesses. He recommends having the courage to allow negative thoughts and emotions to inform our understanding, without simply allowing them to dominate our future.
Dealing with human reality in a dynamic way asks us to experience, cherish, and harness a wide range of basic emotions, that Jaak Panksepp and Luci Biven point out in The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion. Upon these primary processes, Panksepp points out, we can build more complex social emotions and mental states such as the imperative to practice loving-kindness.
The Transcendental Spectrum of Emotions
In this sense a contemporary path of enlightenment must consider a more complex approach to human emotions. Generating bliss of insight as the means to live an excellent future life, as the Divine Abidings intent, does not start with the judgment and repression of certain emotions but their acknowledgement.
When you look at the map of the stages on the path to enlightenment you notice the emotional dynamics that each state has its own emotional dynamic based on polar pairs distilled from my meditative practice and aligned with Panksepp‘s work and that of developmental psychologists such as Margaret Mahler and Daniel N. Stern who specifically looked at the sequence in which certain emotions show up during infancy.
