Positive Emotions Are Compatible with the Innate Essential Nature of Mental Activity
We saw that it’s possible to attain a true stopping of our unawareness of how everything exists, because there’s a state of mind, correct understanding, that is the exact opposite and mutually exclusive with it. If our engagement with that correct understanding is with a tremendous amount of force from all these other factors that we were describing, then it’s possible to overcome and get rid of the inertia that just keeps that unawareness recurring.
Then the question is: What about the disturbing emotions like anger, hatred, greed, attachment, jealousy, arrogance, etc., etc.? They don’t occur all the time, they occur only sometimes, but they also have no beginning. Again, there are states of mind that are mutually exclusive with them. For instance, with anger: wishing harm to someone, there’s love: wishing for the other person to be happy. So, which is stronger: love or hatred? Is the wish for somebody to be happy or the wish for them to be unhappy stronger? How do you analyze? How do you decide? Anybody?
They’re equally strong.
If they are equally strong, then someone could also try to work to get rid of love and just develop hatred. Which would win – love or hatred?
Love is stronger.
Why? What supports the disturbing emotions? The disturbing emotions all arise because of our ignorance, our unawareness. We think that we exist in some solid, impossible way, but because we are insecure about that, we feel that we have to protect and defend our solid existence. We get angry and push things away that we don’t like; and we have greed to get whatever it is we want more of so that we’ll feel more secure.
But, although love will temporarily replace hatred – just as hatred can temporarily replace love – love will not get rid of hatred forever. But, because we can get rid of unawareness forever, the disturbing emotions like anger and hatred will never be able to arise again because we’ve gotten rid of what they depend on.
Love can be accompanied by unawareness, and then it becomes attachment. But, when we get rid of that underlying unawareness, love is still there. But when we get rid of the unawareness underlying hatred, the hatred disappears as well. Unlike hatred, love doesn’t depend on unawareness to arise. Love can accompany correct understanding, for instance the correct understanding that we are all interconnected and, just as we want to be happy and not to suffer, so does everyone else.
Analyzing like that, we can start to understand that these positive, constructive emotions, like love, patience and compassion, are compatible with the innate essential nature of mental activity. In other words, there isn’t something that can get rid of love and compassion forever. We can get rid of the disturbing emotions, like hatred forever, but we can’t get rid of love forever, despite the fact that it can be blocked temporarily when we have hatred. Because of that, love and compassion – these positive emotions – not only have no beginning, they also will have no end. We can develop them to the fullest extent as a Buddha by not mixing that love and compassion with unawareness.
So, it’s not that as a Buddha we have infinite hatred. As a Buddha we have infinite love! “Equal hatred for everybody!” – that’s not what we want to achieve as a Buddha. I mean, it sounds funny, but we have to analyze: if everybody is equal, and everybody has been nasty to us, then we can develop equal hatred for everybody. Why is that a fault and the opposite not a fault? These are the things we need to analyze, we need to try to figure out. Why is infinite love possible and is okay as part of mental activity, but infinite hatred is something we can get rid of forever?