That sounds like alchemy. I actually have read warnings about similar techniques that mix emotional energies to "balance" them. This particular warning said:Originally Posted by watrinh
(from "The Great Stillness" by Bruce Frantzis)Originally Posted by Bruce Frantzis
I reference this because of what it reminded me of. When he says "Taoist esoteric schools" it reminded me of the teachings of Mantak Chia. In fact, Chia has a technique very similar to yours - as part of his "Fusion of the Five Elements" technique. The "Five Elements" here pertain to the different emotional energies inherent to the organs of your body - like the liver (which is "responsible" for anger in Daoist medicine).
Chia's technique would now try to balance the elemental energies by doing what you did - mixing and matching different emotional qualities to "neutralise" them. Energies would be moved and combined, and supposedly result in a balanced being. This already reminded me a lot of what was warned about in the book mentioned above. And for me at least everything that author has written so far checked out.
This is pretty much the same as your technique to - take emotional quality A, take supposedly opposite emotional quality, mix and attain some kind of balance. I think the same risk as mentioned above is inherent to this, for several reasons:
First of all, I believe that every sadness, every frustration, every bout of anger, every negative feeling do have an underlying cause. A reason. I believe that these reasons must be dealt with, root causes found to be really neutralised properly. I believe that negative qualities persist due to the absence of awareness. Only exposing them to awareness can help releasing them, IMO.
In my personal practice I found some confirmation for another belief - the positive qualities are not the opposites of the negative qualities, they are their absence. You are happy, joyful, content, grounded in yourself when you are not overwrought with sadness, anger, fear or hate. So, by facing the root causes of some of these states of mind I was able to experience these purer qualities - like love and compassion - more and more frequently. Again I applied awareness to these negative qualities to arrive at something positive. I did not mix them or match them. I just neutralised them directly and purified myself of them whenever I could.
And finally - since I believe the positive qualities are the absence of the negative, there is also no sense for me in trying to balance the negative with the positive. You can feel love all the time without it doing you harm. Love, for example, is IMO a balanced state you arrive at when you remove all the negative qualities that keep you out of this balance.
Maybe that is part of your problems that have occurred during your practice.
Oliver
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