[MD] Emotions?

[MarshaV]

Greetings Jan,

Well, my point was that which seems totally self-evident may not be. Maybe
it was a reminder to myself that some of these patterns, active patterns
within me, can be insidious.   

Your three aspects of quality sounds interesting so I hope you will have
more to say.  


Marsha



-----Original Message-----
From: moq_discuss-bounces at lists.moqtalk.org
[mailto:moq_discuss-bounces at lists.moqtalk.org] On Behalf Of Jan-Anders
Sent: Sunday, August 23, 2009 2:30 PM
To: moq_discuss at lists.moqtalk.org
Subject: Re: [MD] Emotions?

Dear Marsha and all


I don't know much about Buddhist emotions, but I do think Dalai Lama 
will scream if he sits on a hot stove too long.

As usual there are three aspects on the quality of emotions. Intensity 
(Quantity), character (Pattern) and feeling (Value).

Think about the emotions corresponding to these situations of different 
quality:

Experiencing a situation of unjustice is usually very intensive. 
Everyone has his own key to our office but you.

Experiencing a malfunctioning system is usually easy to detect. The lock 
doesn't work anyway.

Experiencing a solution of a problem is very positive.  There is an open 
door at the back of the house.

This shows that the quality of the signal from your emotional system is 
useful to know.
Is the major signal a feeling of quantity, pattern or value? Is it a mix 
of two or all three of them? Which is the dominating?


Just can't wait until monday.

Jan-Anders



>
> This is from 'The Dalai Lama at MIT'  by Anne Harrington and Arthur
Zajonc.
>
>  
>
> Speaking is Georges Dreyfus:
>
>  
>
>     "So what are some of the Buddhist ideas of emotions?  Let me start
with
> a shocker;  there are no Buddhist conceptions of emotions in the proper
> sense of the term.  By this statement I do not mean to deny that Buddhism
> has a lot to say about the affective life, but I do mean to say that the
> concept of emotion as we know it plays practically no role in the
> tradidtional Indian and Tibetan Buddhist discussions of the mind.  There
is
> no term in the traditional Buddhist vocabulary that resemebles our notion
of
> emotion, and our concept of emotion is not recognized indirectly either.
> This may surprise, since the notion of emotion seems so self-evident and
so
> basic to our modern ways of understanding ourselves.  We may imagine
people
> who do not have exactly the same emotional vocabulary as we do, but it
seems
> hard to conceive of people who do not understand a concept as fundamental
as
> that of emotion.  And yet this seems to be the case for Buddhists, for in
> traditional Indian and Tibetan Buddhist texts there does not seem to be
any
> word that even comes close to our concept of emotion.
>
>     This surprising and even shocking absence is certainly intriguing.  It
> shows that the idea of emotion, which seems self-evident, is not."  
>
>  
>
>  
>
>  
>
>   
>   
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