Here’s how I think of it: very happy people exist. Their default state is cheerful, they rarely worry, they only feel bad if something seriously bad happens to them, and they recover faster than average from misfortunes. I think it makes sense to aspire to be a very happy person.
I don’t think the same is true of people who literally never feel even slightly bad, no matter how bad the situation is. What I’ve heard is that even advanced meditators will e.g. feel grief if their children die. They just won’t add to the grief by acting it out unskillfully and being dicks to everyone around. Literal equanimity, in literally all circumstances, is an abstraction. I haven’t seen it in real life, I’m not sure it exists, and I doubt it would be good if it did exist.
It is probably difficult or impossible to permanently reduce all your “negative” emotions to zero. It is definitely not possible to reduce their strength in any kind of uniform way. But in my experience you can most certainly reduce the intensity of your negative* emotions. The effect is uneven but it is certainly not small.
Agreed.
Here’s how I think of it: very happy people exist. Their default state is cheerful, they rarely worry, they only feel bad if something seriously bad happens to them, and they recover faster than average from misfortunes. I think it makes sense to aspire to be a very happy person.
I don’t think the same is true of people who literally never feel even slightly bad, no matter how bad the situation is. What I’ve heard is that even advanced meditators will e.g. feel grief if their children die. They just won’t add to the grief by acting it out unskillfully and being dicks to everyone around. Literal equanimity, in literally all circumstances, is an abstraction. I haven’t seen it in real life, I’m not sure it exists, and I doubt it would be good if it did exist.
It is probably difficult or impossible to permanently reduce all your “negative” emotions to zero. It is definitely not possible to reduce their strength in any kind of uniform way. But in my experience you can most certainly reduce the intensity of your negative* emotions. The effect is uneven but it is certainly not small.