[Q]: “Where does emotion fit in spiritual growth or spiritual values? It seems that every time it’s spoken of, they’re not serving the spiritual life well.”
We see on the Scale of Consciousness that the emotion depends on the level of integrity and that emotion itself is not necessarily detrimental. We were talking about negative emotions which calibrate below 200: hatred, anger, self-pity, guilt, remorse. But as you get over 200, now emotion becomes a positive asset. The commitment to integrity is a certain emotionality. It’s not emotionality the way most people think of it, but it’s a certain space of commitment. You can do it when you clean up the kitchen in the morning. You can commit to “getting this place absolutely clean the way I want it.” Eventually you see as the emotion goes up, it calibrates higher and higher. Probably the most important emotion…in spiritual work is that of love, but beyond that, devotion.
What makes any spiritual understanding comprehensible, and work, is one’s devotion to the truth. So, the pathway of heart and pathway of mind are one and the same. They end up one and the same. Because the pathway of Advaita, let’s say, Advaita, pathway of No-mind, the pathway of Zen, is really based on a profound and intense dedication. One-pointedness of mind is the expression of an intense dedication, a love that is not in the world of ordinary emotionality.
The love, the devotion to achieve one-pointedness of mind, is extreme and intense. To leave everything in the world, fixate only on that which is straight ahead of you, with no deviance, takes an intense dedication, and that is devotion.
New! Beyond Illusion: Exploring Perception, Ego, and Meditation on the Path to Truth, pg. 130-131
This book contains the transcriptions from the May and June 2002 lectures.