Dispatch #25: Diaphanous Daffodils
Beauty Hidden in Plain Sight
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was in a deep funk over a particularly heartbreaking break up. I was a newspaper reporter in Annapolis, MD, and became mistake romantically involved with another reporter. It was a small news room and impossible to avoid him. On this particular day, I wept for most of my 30-minute commute home; my mind and body leaden with sorrow as I drove to the large farmhouse where I lived on the outskirts of the city.
The farmhouse was on a few acres of land, and there was a long, dirt driveway that led to the back of the house. As I drove along the rutted path, I was hoping that none of my housemates were home so they wouldn’t see what an emotional mess I was. I walked through the back door and into the kitchen and was relieved that no one was around. I dropped my stuff in my room and headed back to the kitchen to eat and distract myself from the overwhelming misery that gripped me.
My relief at finding no one home was short lived as one of my housemates came bounding through the back door. She was always an annoyingly upbeat person and now she was even more cheerful because she had a bouquet of daffodils clutched in her hand. Their beauty shocked me.
“Where did you get those from?” I blurted out as I wiped the tears from my eyes, hoping she wouldn’t notice the state I was in.
She stared at me incredulously, and silently walked toward the front door. I followed her, happy to be distracted. She opened the door, and lo and behold, there were dozens and dozens of daffodils standing like sun-faced sentinels in our meadowy front yard. I had driven right past them! My mind had been so thick and shrouded with depression and lethargy that I did not see the daffodils bright and diaphanous in the slanting afternoon light.
This memory had evaporated into my mind’s ether until I began learning more about emotions from a Buddhist perspective. In the illuminating and instructive book Destructive Emotions, the Dalai Lama along with psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists (one woman and 11 men—just saying) investigate the relationship between emotions and the brain.
In the book, Matthieu Ricard, a French scientist who became a Buddhist monk, clarifies the main differences between the Western and Buddhist view of emotions: “The English word ‘emotion’ comes from the Latin root emovere—something that sets the mind in motion, whether toward harmful, neutral, or positive action.” However, in Buddhism, an emotion “conditions the mind and makes it adopt a certain perspective or vision of things.” Unlike in Western psychology, Buddhists do not refer to “emotion” only when there’s a gross expression of it; for example, an outburst of anger, immobilizing depression, or sobs of grief.1
For Buddhists, emotions are either constructive or destructive. The main distinction, as you might surmise, is that the former does not cause harm to oneself or someone else while the latter does. Destructive emotions obscure reality, preventing us from seeing things as they are, whereas constructive ones give us a “more correct appreciation of the nature of what one is perceiving.”2
Also, as Ricard points out, destructive emotions obscure our ability to perceive impermanence and to remember that no conditioned phenomena has intrinsic properties. At the center of the vortex of destructive emotions is a constricted sense of body-mind that we refer to as “I.” Destructive emotions are both the manifestation of a sense of a solid, independent “I,” and a perpetuation of this suffering-separate “I.” This ego-clinging “impairs one’s freedom by chaining thoughts in a way that compels us to think, speak, and act in a biased way.”3
Although the depression that blinded me from seeing the glorious daffodils did not harm my housemate, it hindered my ability to see and appreciate the beauty present amid suffering. This obscuration of reality perpetuated the heavy heart and the dark mood that suffused me. When heavy emotions such as depression and anxiety afflict the mind, our worldview shrinks and we shrink with it; and the suffering-self(ing) feels even more solid and separate. With our perceptual apparatus (the five sense organs and the mind as the sixth) polluted by emotion-sensation-thought, it’s difficult for the body-mind to stabilize and for any light to penetrate the dense, emotional fog.
We then find ourselves thinking, acting, and speaking from this constricted sense of self and perpetuating this harmful karma. If we do not interrupt our karmic conditioning over and over, it reifies itself (“becoming” [bhava] in the Twelvefold Chain of Causation) and we get stuck in a karmic rut! The good news is that the Buddha offered many teachings and tools to illuminate karmic conditioning and liberate us from its wily and insidious grasp.
Stay tuned for another post on May 4th, further exploring the Buddha’s teachings on working with mental afflictions, as known as the Five Hindrances.
Goleman, Daniel, and the Dalai Lama. Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them? New York, Bantam, 2004.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Perceptive creatures,
sensitive beings humans are.
Notions, emotions.