5 0 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 3 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 1 7 The other festival to which should be payed attention is the Nyepi Day of Bali. It is celebrated as the last day of the year in a 210-day year according to the sacred and complex Balinese calendar known as Isaawarsa (Indian Saka era starting 78 AD). In 2012 it occurred on 23rd March. It is a day of silence, there is no traffic on the streets. The Ngurah Rai international airport of Den Pasar, the capital, is closed for the twenty-four hours. No fires may be lit and the lights must be kept dim. There is no self-entertainment, only contemplation and silence. Most people fast for the day. The dharma-shanti, peace of dharma, rituals are performed in the form of listening to scriptures in kakawin (classical Sanskrit-related ancient language of the religion) and other contemplative or ritual observances. Next day is celebrated as the first day of the year when people visit each other and grant and beg for forgiveness. 11 Emotions and Ethics – a Yoga Therapy Historically, in all systems of the Sino-Euro-Indian traditions, as also in the theologies of the three Abrahamic religions, principles of human conduct are universally viewed as emanating from and rooted in metaphysics. From the Vedas to the recent Acharya’s, the Buddhist and Jaina and other guides of India, K’ung-Fu-Tzu and Lao Tzu in China, all teachers and saints of the three Semitic faiths, European philosophers from Pythagoras and Thales to Immanuel Kant have all reiterated the same view and have examined the interdependence between the spiritual and the ethical, the way of devotion and the way of conduct. They have all taught the principles of altruism, selfless conduct, and cultivating sublime emotions. Yoga teaching of yamas and niyamas falls within the same unified system of metaphysical ethics. In this, according to sage Vyasa’s commentary on the Yoga-sutras, ahiṃsā, “nonviolence”, is the primary yama-niyama. The other nine are rooted in it, arise from it and are practiced to support the same. Thus, the violent emotions are seen as part of the kleśas, “afflictions”, to be purified and burnt. However, in common thinking emotions (bhāvas) and sentiments (vi-bhāvas) are not viewed as coming within the realm of ethics, the principles of conduct. Neither the essay on anger by the Roman Stoic philosopher Lucio Anneo Seneca, nor the 6th chapter of Bodhicaryāvatāra of Shantideva have much meaning in this view. In European philosophy, the view of metaphysically based ethics remained as fundamental until about a century and half ago. There were many factors that led to the change of views as we can see in the examples below: • Survival of the fittest as part of the process of evolution (Charles Darwin). • Sexuality as the primary guiding urge of human personality (Sigmund Freud). • Utilitarianism to justify capitalism-imperialism (John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham). • Economics as the primary factor in the development of civilization (Karl Marx as well as the western philosophers of capitalism). They all created a trend that rejected the philosophies of altruism, the purity of thought and the sanctity in emotions. Self-centeredness and individualism became the philosophy of life for the urban-industrial civilization worldwide. The principles of counselling underwent a change. The principles of dharma and nish-kāma karma, of ariyo atthangiko maggo (“the eightfold noble truth” of the Buddha) became irrelevant. In the practice of American psychology and counselling, “I am I”, “you are you”, and “permission to be angry” became common stock phrases. Instead of being counselled to undertake confession, pashchaat-taapa, “penitence”, and praayash-chitta, “atonement”, many patients have been taught to express hostility, instead of replacing it with self-calming internal devices of more ethical-transcendental nature. Since there was no need to calm one’s negative attitudes, to practice equanimity, to divert the power of anger towards creativity in love, the entire humanity involved in the urban-industrial civilization became prone to a tendency towards an inadvertent self-destruction, a slow suicide. The level of stress rose, the discharge of stress hormones into the neuro-physiological systems reduced the strength of the immune system, weakening the resistance to disease. A calm mind induces the brain to produce endorphins to cope with challenges from “adversaries” without becoming overtly negative towards them. An angry and disturbed mind reduces the same sources of self-soothing. Infectious diseases, terminated through very welcome modern discoveries, thus gave way to more and more psychosomatic and autoimmune illnesses. Those investigating the cardiac problems now know that much of the cardiac illness is a product of wrong diet. But wrong diet itself is caused by the destructive emotions of greed, lack of a feeling of fulfilment and general inner satisfaction, an inner emptiness and loneliness that one tries to fill not by fulfilling the mind but by overfilling the stomach.
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