TANAGATSANABATS

View + Meditation = Transformation

An undue stress on the ‘feeling’-aspect of reality marks the so-called emotional natures. By them, the pleasurable or unpleasant features of an experience are repeatedly and passionately dwelt upon, and thereby magnified. This will often lead to an exaggerated view of the situation and an extreme reaction to it, be it one of elation or dejection, overrating or deprecating, etc. But apart from markedly emotional types, even when feeling is just as uncontrolled as is the case with the average man, it will also tend to produce habitual overstatements, with all the dissatisfaction and disappointment they entail. Often one may hear people exclaim: ‘This or that is my only happiness!’ or ‘This or that would be the death of me!’ But the still voice of Mindfulness speaks: ‘It is a pleasant feeling, like many others too—and nothing else!’ or ‘It is an unpleasant feeling, like many others too—and nothing else!’ Such an attitude will contribute much to an inner balance and contentedness, which are needed so greatly among the vicissitudes of life. Another innate weakness of the world of feeling as far as it is uncontrolled by reason and wisdom, is its extreme and uncritical subjectivity. Uncontrolled feeling does not in the least question the values that it attaches so lavishly to persons and things; it does not admit that other evaluations of the same object are possible at all; it easily disregards or hurts the feelings—i.e. the emotional values—of others, all this owing to its being so naively self centered.

Nyanaponika Thera. The Heart of Buddhist Meditation: The Buddha's Way of Mindfulness (pp. 66-67)

A bit of oft-repeated wisdom from my former employer is the phrase TANAGATSANABATS, which is an acronym for “Things are not as good as they seem, and not as bad as they seem.” I was reminded of this when I read this passage from Nyanaponika Thera’s influential commentary on the Satipatthana Sutta (mindfulness sutra), which, when published in 1962, was one of the first serious meditation manuals to be published in the West. There are many many ways of working with difficult emotions of course — from tantric approaches that emphasize dwelling in their non-conceptual energetic quality to Western cognitive reappraisal approaches like CBT. What Thera is talking about here is a mix of both — we don’t choose what we feel, and so simply telling ourselves that the intensity of response is non-normative is often insufficient. Bringing contemplative attention to bear by carefully observing direct experience is also required. Remembering the fact that in the past our emotional reactions were always overblown is a more developed cognitive move, and can be helpful. But even more powerful can be a form of what Thera calls “questioning the values” that feeling attaches to things. We can question the solidity of the things themselves — i.e. try to see the targets of our feelings themselves as being insubstantial. That is what it means to see things as empty - it’s a deconstructive move. For all of these types of mental moves, repeated application and practice is essential until a way of seeing coalesces and becomes alive in experience¹. Finally, it’s worth noting that Thera’s advice is to apply these antidotes not just to extreme negative emotions, but to positive ones as well. Cultivating equanimity across the full range of emotional experiences can be much more effective than focusing only on the negative.

1. In Thera’s text there is a notion of “Bare Attention” — the idea that there is some kind of pure or non-conceptual mode of observation that we can apply to the contents of experience. In contrast, the Vajrayana perspective is that there is no such perspective-less view. Moreover, we can take advantage of the fact that Views are always present by applying different Views and allowing them to transform our experience. When we question the veracity or substantiveness of our feelings, we can do so in concert with meditation in order to give these Views more power than simply asserting these ideas conceptually.