NEGATIVE

  
All of us experience troublesome or unpleasant mental states. Anger, sadness, and fear are the most primal negative feelings with numerous combinations and shadings. They may range from vague feelings of discomfort or unease to obsessive, consuming, and even violent expressions. I call these states “negative” because the conscious, subjective experience is predominantly painful or uncomfortable. But, if we are brutally honest with ourselves, we will discover that there is a certain pleasure in the pain. It is the pleasure aspect that induces us to indulge these mental states when they arise. This is why self-righteous anger, self-pitying sadness, and heart-pounding fear can feel so good at some level and be so hard to shake off. These feelings provide intensity and drama in a life that may otherwise fall into drab, boring blandness, and even negative feelings are preferable to no feelings at all. They remind us that we are alive, and in this respect they put us in touch with the Divine, the Source of all Life and all Bliss, albeit unconsciously.

The problem with these unconsciously experienced intense feelings from a spiritual perspective is that they usually create mental chaos, and a scattered, over-stimulated mind typically fails to perceive the Divine substratum. This is why most spiritual traditions prescribe practices that calm the mind. The exception to this are devotional systems that intentionally evoke intense feelings through music, dance, or rousing oratory, but even here the focus of the feeling is the Divine, and so the desired result is a dynamic focusing of attention analogous to meditation.

The tantric method for dealing with an unpleasant mental state proceeds through several stages. The first stage is recognizing the feeling as a mental state. For instance, I may feel sad because my boyfriend has to work unexpectedly. If I merely identify with the sadness, that is “I become sad,” it is not possible to spiritualize the state. To spiritualize the feeling I first have to recognize the sadness as a condition of mind that is to some degree objective, that is, separate from me. I may use a phrase like, “There is sadness in the mind,” as opposed to “I’m sad,” to emphasize the objective nature of the feeling.

Having recognized and objectified the feeling, I “freeze the frame,” so to speak. That is I decline the invitation the feeling provides to indulge in a chain of related thoughts like creating a movie from a single image. We all do this. We make up stories about our feelings, bringing up past incidents that may relate to the current one, and creating fantasy scenarios about the future ramifications of what has happened. I may remember other times my boyfriend’s job interfered with our being together and imagine how this could become a greater problem in the future. Even though this kind of mental film making often magnifies our pain, we addictively indulge in it because of the subliminal pleasure the drama provides. Even when the pain truly outweighs any masochistic pleasure, we cannot stop the movie because it has gained its own momentum. The best way to avoid having to play out the whole, painful saga is to freeze the frame as soon as one becomes aware of the painful feeling.

Having captured the image of our feeling in a frozen frame, the next step is to offer the feeling to the Divine. Think of the feeling image as a flower and offer that flower to God. As many times as the feeling arises, freeze the image and offer it to God. To offer something to God means to recognize the Divine Source within that thing. The feeling can only arise in the mind because of the presence of consciousness. The content of the feeling is not important here but merely the fact of it. Without consciousness we could feel nothing. It is God in the form of consciousness that reveals the feeling in the mind. Offering the feeling to God means acknowledging the Divine Presence as consciousness as the Source of the feeling.

The final stage is to place the flower of our feeling in its proper context. Shift your perspective to that part of your being that sees this feeling as just one flower in an infinite meadow of variegated flowers; regard this objectified feeling in relation to all the feelings of all sentient beings everywhere. All feelings are in essence nothing but consciousness and thus Divine. And the same consciousness as the unmoved and unmoving Witness, the substratum of all experience, underlies and encompasses the entire infinite meadow of feelings plus the infinite sky above and everything else besides. Shift your identity to the unmoving Witness Consciousness.

I have found it effective to concentrate on one type of feeling at a time when practicing this technique. For instance, I started with angry feelings that would arise while driving. My goal has been to make each occurrence of anger an opportunity for mindfulness of the Divine. The moment I feel anger arising when a thoughtless or careless driver cuts me off, I use the anger as a jumping board to remember God. Instead of cursing the errant driver, I end up blessing him for helping me remember God. This technique requires patient, persistent practice, but I believe anyone will get tangible results fairly quickly with a little of such practice. Failures are unimportant except as markers for when to renew the practice.

-- William Schindler, Gay Tantra