The Axis of Being, part II—Emotions

Rocamadour, France

Photograph by the author

When I think of our emotions, I think of Bosch’s Temptation of St. Anthony, which lays out a visual map of an inner emotional landscape. Temptation, after all, is always an emotional experience; the word is derived from the Latin temptare, meaning to be tested. 

What is tested is our desire; what we wish for. 

So much of our life revolves around this particular part; it’s the axis of Being. The question is whether that axis is located outside of us, in external things; or inside of us. It can sometimes be hard to distinguish the difference, because when we’re identified with the external it appears to be the internal. Hence the importance of learning to discriminate quite carefully between inner and outer events and qualities. 

Given that fundamental question about the locus of our desire, we see that it already begins with confusion. This becomes even more difficult to sort out when we’re confronted with the many different inner and outer currents and eddies of desire, which are so succinctly laid out in Bosch’s Temptation. They exist both inside and outside of us; and the influences that bring us into contact with them are both higher and lower. 

This is why Jeanne de Salzmann says we live—we exist, we are—within a field of forces. Those forces are hardly just intellectual—the intellect alone doesn’t move us, it just assesses. And they are not merely physical: physical forces are just the stuff of which things are made. It’s our Being that is critical here, and that being arises in its utmost essence as an emotional or feeling-force. 

This is where the movement in life arises; it's what propels us towards or away from this or that. We’re drawn towards that which we feel is of greater value (worth more) and repelled by that which we feel is of lesser. Being forms around these motivators.

The difficulty with the human psyche, and the soul itself, is the relative complexity these confluences and influences of desire create. At any given moment we exist as a summary of lived pasts and potential futures, each one of which undergoes evaluation in a constantly changing sea of relativity whose weather is created by my attitude.   

This sea of forces requires constant navigational decisions; it’s only with clear foresight and an objective evaluation of where I am now, the conditions that surround me (both inner and outer) that I can decide whether or not to go this way or that—whether I decide this from an inner or an outer point of view.

Of course inner navigational decisions have the potential to be influenced by higher forces; but that’s a question to hold off on for a moment. Emotional center, as it stands, has a responsibility to the present moment within ordinary life that cannot be edited out, or simply upgraded to a religiously oriented, transcendental form of feeling. If that “worked,” people would be decent to one another; and we aren’t.

Emotional center as it is has a range of responsibilities it has to fulfill in order for the most ordinary functions to be executed; and pretending that we can conduct a life, any life, without that part is eventually revealed as an absurdity. Meister Eckhart comments:

“Now our good people declare that we must be so perfect that no joy can move us, we must be untouched by weal and woe. They are wrong in this. I say never was there a saint so great but he could be moved. Yet on the other hand I hold that it is possible for a saint, even in this life, to be so that nothing can move him to turn from God.”

—Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works, Maurice O’C Walshe. Sermon 9, p. 88

It reminds us as well of Marpa, who taught his pupils that everything was an illusion. When his son died, it’s said, he underwent an emotional meltdown.His students asked him why he was so upset, seeing as all of life is an illusion. Marpa’s reply was that while it was true, his son’s death was a super-illusion. That is to say, it was so great an event that no philosophy could transcend the intense emotion that accompanied it.

It’s not so simple, you see, to transcend emotion. Within the range of our three centers, it's the most powerful set of forces that acts on us; and we ignore this at our peril, whether the peril is a simple one of ordinary life, or something much more fundamental that leads us into more spiritually damaging territory. 

 I would caution the reader, then, to avoid pretending any ability to occupy a piece of territory that does not come into contact with this intimate and difficult question; even if we should by some apparently superhuman effort succeed in doing so, we are shirking our responsibilities in this life. 

Our task, instead, is to look at the question quite squarely in the face from within ourselves and see how our life and our Being turns around this access.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.