As a physician, Deepak’s job is to try to alleviate suffering, so emotional turbulence, which he mainly attributes to past trauma, is his main concern. He says that ‘depression is the number one pandemic of our time’.
Rupert says that in this chapter, and in the book as a whole, he gives two approaches to dealing with painful feelings: the Vedantic and the Tantric. The Vedantic approach is to turn away from the content of experience – i.e., the painful feelings themselves – and towards that which is aware of them. Awareness itself. This is the neti neti approach, ‘not this, not that’. The via negativa, or way of negation.
The Tantric approach is the opposite: turning towards the content of experience and positively embracing it. In this case, bringing your emotions so close that they merge into you.
This process is illustrated in the Grimm fairy tale ‘The Frog Prince’. The princess has to embrace the ugly frog that she and everyone would normally reject. When she eventually does, he instantly transforms into the very thing she longs for, the handsome prince of her dreams. Our instinct is to push away unbearable emotions, says Rupert, but when we discover that it’s not the emotions themselves that are unbearably painful but our resistance to them, then that distance is collapsed, and the painful sense of separation dissolves.
Deepak cites Rumi, who wrote that the only way to get out of the fire is to go through the fire. And, he continues, when you enquire further into the nature of emotions, you realise that none of them actually belong to you. Even if you try to ‘own’ your anger, or fear, you can’t, because you can’t grasp the ephemeral.
Rupert says, ‘All that is present is the raw energy of experience’. Intense, maybe, but there is no separate self to claim the emotion or deem it either pleasant or unpleasant. To which Deepak adds, ‘Yoga . . . means union with the source’. When Jesus said ‘my yoke is easy, my burden is light’, he could do so because he’d found the source of all existence’. He says that Rupert is pulling together a practical, modern version of what is said in yoga, Tantra, Vedanta and Kashmir Shaivism.
Rupert responds that Kashmir Shaivism presents the concept of ‘devouring the emotions’. Emotions are just like currents within the ocean. If we are the ocean, the currents are part of us and cannot harm us. He goes on to quote William Blake, ‘. . . for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses’, by which Blake means that what we call ‘matter’, physicality, is made of mind, refracted through our sense perceptions.
The body, says Deepak, is therefore an activity, a verb, rather than a noun.
And the world, as Rupert describes, referencing a beautiful quote from Wordsworth, is what we half create and half perceive. Everything appears to us as it does precisely because of our sense faculties, which are the refracting lens through which we perceive reality.
Deepak finishes by saying that he would like to start some master classes on the subjects Rupert writes about and invites him to collaborate on them.
Listen to the podcast below.
