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**eocavrWM** · 02-18-2011, 01:21 AM

It is, in my view, a WISH(my emphasis)-and one that entails some magical thinking- that we could change reality (and an implicit belief that we can) but, of course, we can't - we can only learn to better live within it(reality).

Did you mean your statement to imply that acknowledging and observing emotions involves changing reality? If so, here is my response.

We can't change the nature of reality. However, we can change our response to it. In the case of emotions, one approach is to see them as part of conditioned reality. For me, it has been like this:

I learned through Buddhism that one could see emotions as part of conditioned reality instead as part of self.

When negative emotions (the ones which seemed to be causing me the most suffering) would arise, I began on occasion to remember that one could see them as part of conditioned reality. When I so remembered, the emotion was immediately ameliorated to some small extent because I was, so to speak, looking at it from the outside rather than being "within" it.

As I did this more and more often, my painful response to negative emotions began to weaken. What response? Guilt, hating their presence, wanting them to go away, and a whole raft of related thoughts that led, for example, to placing the blame for that emotion on some person in my past.

The related thoughts, in particular, would lead to the arising of new negative emotions in their own right. The response to the original negative emotion was worse that the emotion itself.

02-18-2011, 01:21 AM	#6
eocavrWM Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 520 Senior Member	It is, in my view, a WISH(my emphasis)-and one that entails some magical thinking- that we could change reality (and an implicit belief that we can) but, of course, we can't - we can only learn to better live within it(reality). Did you mean your statement to imply that acknowledging and observing emotions involves changing reality? If so, here is my response. We can't change the nature of reality. However, we can change our response to it. In the case of emotions, one approach is to see them as part of conditioned reality. For me, it has been like this: I learned through Buddhism that one could see emotions as part of conditioned reality instead as part of self. When negative emotions (the ones which seemed to be causing me the most suffering) would arise, I began on occasion to remember that one could see them as part of conditioned reality. When I so remembered, the emotion was immediately ameliorated to some small extent because I was, so to speak, looking at it from the outside rather than being "within" it. As I did this more and more often, my painful response to negative emotions began to weaken. What response? Guilt, hating their presence, wanting them to go away, and a whole raft of related thoughts that led, for example, to placing the blame for that emotion on some person in my past. The related thoughts, in particular, would lead to the arising of new negative emotions in their own right. The response to the original negative emotion was worse that the emotion itself.
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