Once we define the purpose of spiritual life as living on the level of Ruach, and since we now understand that level as consisting of elevated emotions, the question becomes: "How does one sustain a focus on elevated emotions?" After all, feelings come and go and most humans can no more control their feelings than control their thoughts.
The answer to this question is "training". What I mean is that, while it may be difficult to suppress or reject a feeling, any individual can learn to call up and evoke feelings. It is also then possible to transform them. With sufficient training, over many years, one can learn how to experience the emotions of the level of Ruach for much of one's conscious time and ultimately even when not so conscious.
The elements of such training are: awareness, riding the commonplace, substitution and reframing, Kabbalistic superimposition, visualization and set times. Each of these elements deserves a chapter in a long book. What I will do now is provide a concise definition of each term, which, please God, we can expand on them in the future.
1.Awareness - without knowing what you are feeling and why, there is no hope of moving forward. Mussar training comes in handy for this task, for it teaches how to be truthful with yourself, how not to rationalize and deny, and how to look at one's state and being in an objective fashion. Once one has learned how to recognize what goes on below his surface, he or she is ready for the next step.
2.Substitution -this entails substituting emotions of Nefesh with emotions of Ruach. When one feels angry, frustrated , envious, or distressed, is the time to consciously replace these feelings with the ones from the level of Ruach. To do so, one must learn how to separate the power that fuels a feeling from the experience of the feeling itself, something for another time.
3.To master an emotion, one must become its friend, to get to know it and become familiar with it. This is difficult to do when one is enthralled (meaning enslaved) by the tide of feeling and in the moment that it washes over the mind. Meditation helps one learn how to not be"in the moment". Another technique that allows unhurried and leisurely examination of one's emotions is visualization. This consists of imagining a situation, happy or tragic, that usually provokes a particular feeling, so that one can dwell on it, taste and savor it, and get to understand its components, its power, its transience. A number of such visualizations are presented in this chassidic book.
4,. Reframing is taking an otherwise unpleasant situation - like waiting in a long line or being forced to deal with a person you would give anything to avoid, and then redirecting that negative feeling into a positive attitude.
5.Riding the commonplace. This refers to using every opportunity to call up a feeling that you either once experienced in a similar situation ( i.e. a sunset over Manhattan to remind you of when you saw a sunset over the Grand Canyon) or a feeling that you can broaden to include Hashem. This is what Yakov did when he saw his long lost son Yosef. Chazal point out that Yosef kissed Yakov but Yakov did not kiss Yosef. They comment that this was because Yakov was reading the Shema. Why did he choose to read the Shema at that particular moment? Because he experienced a profound love for his son when he saw him after many years of separation. Yakov utilized that emotion to direct it toward Love of God (Kotsker Rebbe).
Another example: the Yerushalmi in Brochos 3:1 explains the practice of mourners to overturn the bed as being, "overturn your Evil Impulse", a reason not given in Bavli Moed Katan 27. This can also be understood as utilizing the unfortunate situation of being in mourning to direct the emotion of anger/ frustration that a mourner feels toward the internal evil impulse.
6.Kabbalistic superimposition. This is the technique of bringing to mind a concept with which the experienced object is associated in Kabbalah. For example, HOUSE, POOL, EARTH is associated with Malchus, HEAVEN with Tiferes, INSIGHT with Bina. Similarly, an emotion of experiencing beauty is associated with tiferes, or cause and effect with Chochma and Bina etc. Much of Shaarei Orah by R. Yosef Gikattila is devoted to explaining these examples. Another example: Glory is associated with bright light. When one walks on a street and clouds part so that for a moment the walker is bathed in light and warmth, bring to mind Divine Glory and how it fills the earth (this example is from TAMING THE RAGING MIND) . Waking hours are filled with experiences and if one learns to utilize them to evoke related but elevated sensations and emotions, he can live most of his time in intimate contact with higher realities. It is not that one auto suggests himself into a feeling what is not there. It is, instead that he reveals the deeper realities behind everyday objects and experiences. This is not my personal teaching - it comes from Arye Kaplan's commentray to Sefer Yetsirah, Ch. 1.
7. Set times. There are times everyday ay that are already a part of your life for spiritual training. They are called PRAYER. Rather than being a bothersome waste of time, make it your laboratory for emotional growth. With the application of awareness and focus, one can turn these daily occasions into a laboratory for experiencing sublimely elevated emotions that kaleidoscope, flow and transform one into another along with the words of the set prayer which carry them. It can become a time for great delight, a time that one waits and pines for throughout the day, a time for spiritual charging and motivational push.
These are chapter headings. Obviously there is much more to say about all this... but the limitations of the blog medium, available time, and my limited knowledge demand that we suffice with this, for now.
...of course, i agree and practice (in qabalah meditation and prayer) told me than i can have, after emotional and personal passions, many intellectual fixations, and not also.
I could suppose than many levels of emotion and intellect (works together) like the animal soul in the neshamah....theory suppose almost 9 levels i belive (3 x 3) knowables of the existing 25....
But the path is very infinite.....for just one life! Anyway mitzvot are line-guide to observe the status of our meditation, and a line-guard too....
please, let you visit my blog: http://lavocenellabarbadelpadre.blogspot.com
(Qabalah and Hebrew Misticism)
traduction: the (a) voice in the beard of the Father
shalom
'shir ben david
Posted by: ashir | March 19, 2008 at 04:53 PM
I agree that intellect needs careful tending as well. A lot of the time, however, it is the emotions that covertly subvert how you think, so it is very important to work concurrently on emotions and intellect. Another component is the assumptions and biases that guide the feelings, as I discussed previously in this series. Tanya calls it CHABD of the middos, which I understand as the assumptions behind the emotions. The example I listed before is the sense of hurt and entitlement that provokes anger. So all these three factors interact. One must work on emotions themselves, the assumptions behind the emotions and the capacity to see through rationalizations, self-interest and denial that subvert clear self-perception of emotion.
Posted by: avakesh | March 20, 2008 at 09:16 AM