Hi Kim,
Kim O'Hara wrote:
You have made it hard for me to comment on your responses to my post by picking it into chunks that are often too small to be meaningful, so I'll start half way through.
Sorry.
Kim wrote:
May I remind you ...
Three Hindrances aka Three Obstacles:
Aversion aka Anger aka Hatred
Attachment aka Greed aka Desire
Ignorance
Sure, but here neither anger, nor hatred nor greed refers to an emotion. These terms, or rather the original term that was translated into anger, refers to a reaction to the feeling (vedana) translated as "pleasant". I think this sutta explains it nicely:
Pleasant feelings (vedana) arise due to contact with the senses. Mind (citta) is such a sense just as the body senses. The emotion anger is that what is contacted, the object, not the "dosa" that leads to clinging. Think of physical pain, does all physical pain lead to hate or anger in the emotional sense? I don't think so. Actually, I think the emotion fear is more common reaction to physical pain ("what is wrong? Will it heal? What if not?). Dosa is more properly translated as "aversion" as this describes better what happens. When a painful feeling arises we try to avoid it, we don't accept it, we want it to go away and pleasant feelings to return. This wanting for pleasant feelings is called "greed" but it is not a greed for money or wealth or fame or anything like that but simply the wanting of pleasant feeling, whatever it is for oneself.
You are expanding the word 'instinct' far beyond its real meaning.
I objected - mildly - to calling anger and other emotions 'instincts' before, but calling ideology an instinct makes nonsense of your argument.
Here's the Wikipedia definition:
Instinct is the inherent disposition of a living organism toward a particular behavior. The fixed action patterns are unlearned and inherited. The stimuli can be variable due to imprinting in a sensitive period or also genetically fixed. Examples of instinctual fixed action patterns can be observed in the behavior of animals, which perform various activities (sometimes complex) that are not based upon prior experience, such as reproduction, and feeding among insects. Sea turtles, hatched on a beach, automatically move toward the ocean, and honeybees communicate by dance the direction of a food source, all without formal instruction. Other examples include animal fighting, animal courtship behavior, internal escape functions, and building of nests. Another term for the same concept is innate behavior.
Instinctual actions - in contrast to actions based on learning which are served by memory and which provide individually stored successful reactions built upon experience - have no learning curve, they are hard-wired and ready to use without learning. Some instinctual behaviors depend on maturational processes to appear.
Biological predispositions are innate biologically vectored behaviors that can be easily learned. For example in one hour a baby colt can learn to stand, walk, glide, skip, hop and run. Learning is required to fine tune the neurological wiring reflex like behavior. True reflexes can be distinguished from instincts by their seat in the nervous system; reflexes are controlled by spinal or other peripheral ganglia, but instincts are the province of the brain.
In these terms, hunger and pain are simply sensations, emotions are perhaps 'biological predispositions', the suckling reflex is an instinct, and ideology is clearly learned behaviour.
I don't think so. While the explicit ideology depends on experience and memory and is influence by others the ability to think and act according to an ideology, to believe and accept it's values, is a genetic disposition. Like language. The ability to learn a language is genetic encoded, but the explicit language one learns (such as English or Thai) depends on the environment. There are other - purely mental - instincts in our human gene code, f.e. one is called "formal thinking". When this instinct is opened one can learn mathematics and other formal systems much better than before (also is more fun). It is the same with ideology, this instinct is opened at a certain state of mental development (makes no sense to teach it a three month old), but then the explicit ideology one learns differ. But once this instinct has opened the person will feel a need to have an ideology, a set pattern of values, of what is good and what is bad, something he or she can base the thinking, planing, and acting on. This need is just as instinctive as the need of the sea turtles, hatched on a beach, that automatically move toward the ocean. A person in whom this instincts opens will automatically search for a fitting ideology.
I agree that it's interesting to observe all of these kinds of things going on within ourselves, but I think we need to discriminate more carefully between them.
I always like that
There is a separate problem with trying to deal with 'instinct' in a Buddhist context: it is a concept which does not appear at all (AFAIK) in the suttas. I actually did a search for the term (only in the suttas) on Access to Insight and came with no results - zero - in about 1100 documents.
You have to look for how the mind is when an instinct dominates. Is it scattered or not? Is it surpassable or unsurpassable? Does an emotion lead to concentration or not? This is not in the suttas as it is a matter of experience of direct insight. There are too many instincts, too many emotions, if at all they can only appear as examples not as general rules.
Freawaru wrote:
This is right, but even a Vulcan with unsurpassable logic has to admit that it only takes one fact to make statements like "in general experiencing anger is wrong" incorrect.
I'm sorry, but that is a clear error of logic - "
in general experiencing anger is wrong" can only be disproven by a majority, or at least a significant minority, of countervailing facts. (In general, crows are black, and that's true even if there are a few albino crows around.)
Yes, you are right. That is a logical wrong statement. Let me see ... I rephrase it: The general statement "all angry responses during all possible situations are bad" only requires one opposite fact to prove it wrong. Better?
I actually must have expressed myself poorly, by the way, since you ended up thinking I said 'experiencing anger is wrong.' I didn't quite say it, and I didn't quite mean it, and I'm sorry that I may have led you astray. Giving in to anger, letting it rule one's behaviour, is what is wrong.
We agree here. It is important to stay in control even when mind and body are suffused with the emotion anger.