--- In [email protected], "Bill!" <BillSmart@...> wrote:
>
> In my practice I certainly feel happiness, sadness, anger, love,
etc...
Humans experience feelings that humans have evolved to experience,
regardless of whether they have done Zen practice or not.
> The point of departure with zen is that there is no evaluting of these
emotions.
Without choice or judgment, some feelings do feel better than others due
to differing opiate, serotonin, oxytocin and/or epinephrine releases.
> In other words being happy is not 'good' while being sad is 'bad'.
Some feelings do feel more pleasurable than others, even though we
contrain ourselves from saying so, as that would be so un-Zen-like.
> Being happy is just happy, and sad is just sad.
Yes, but only after one has eradicated the automatic, natural and normal
human proclivity toward wanting to feel good. This erasure is a tall
task, as humans have been developing this addiction to feeling good for
millennia upon millennia, through the Darwinian evolutionary process.
> When I'm happy I'm totally happy, in fact the whole world is happy.
When I'm sad I'm totally sad.
Being a statement about your experience of your feelings, this statement
is incontrovertible.
> Neither is better or worse than the other.
Is this an intellectual judgment, a statement of Zen dogma, or your
personal experience of life after decades of Zen practice?
> They just are.
> ...Bill!
They are not 'just' existent to the vast majority of humans. But so
what if they are, or what if they are not?
--ED
