Day #1

Today’s favourite poses: Warrior I, II, III, Twisted Pigeon, Angel pose

Minutes with a relatively quiet mind: 15

Today’s interesting/thought provoking reading: (Taken from A Simple Path by the Dalai Lama)

Applying our Understanding of Emptiness – The reason it is so important to understand this subtle point is because of its implications for interpreting our own personal experience of life. When strong emotions arise in you, say attachment or anger, if you examine the experience of that emotion you will see that underlying it is an assumption that there is something objective and real out there which you are holding on to, and on to which you project desirable or undesirable qualities. According to the kind of qualities you project on to a thing or event, you feel either attracted to it or repulsed by it. So strong emotional responses in fact assume the existence of some form of objective reality.

However, if you realize that there is no intrinsic reality to things and events then, of course, this will automatically help you to understand that no matter how real and strong emotions may seem, they have no valid basis. Once you know that they are actually based on a fundamental misconception of reality, then the emotions themselves become untenable. On the other hand, if your understanding of emptiness is not thorough, in the sense that you have not succeeded in negating the notion of intrinsicality completely, then of course your attitude towards emotion will be somewhat ambivalent, and you may just feel that there is some sense in which it is valid or justified.

When you have developed a certain understanding of emptiness, albeit and intellectual one, you will have a new outlook on things and events which you can compare to our usual responses. You will notice how much we tend to project qualities on to the world. More especially, you will realize that most of our strong emotions arise from assuming the reality of something that is unreal. In this way you may be able to gain an experiential sense of the disparity between the way you perceive things and the way things really are. The moral that we can draw from all of this is that he strong emotions which afflict our mind arise from a fundamental stare of confusion, which leads us to apprehend things as real and existing independently. In conclusion, we know that afflictive emotions and thoughts have no valid basis, neither in our experience, nor in reality, nor in reason.

By contrast, your insight into the emptiness of things is not only grounded in reason, but also in experience: it has valid support. In addition, your understanding of emptiness and your grasping at things as real are directly opposed to one another, so one cancel the other out. Since they are opposing forces, and not that one has valid grounding whereas the other does not, the final conclusion we can draw is that the more we deepen our understanding of emptiness, and the greater the power of our insight becomes, the more we see through the deception of emotions, and consequently the weaker those emotions become. Indeed, we come to realize that strong afflictive emotions and thoughts, and their basis which is ignorance, can be weakened, while insight into emptiness can be enhanced.