A long time ago, the Dalai Lama felt the need for emotional transformation because he found the new generation to be more selfish and materialistic. So he commissioned scientists for a lofty mission: To help turn people, irrespective of their religion, into more self-aware and compassionate human beings. The Dalai Lama asked his friend Paul Ekman — a psychologist who advised the creators of Pixar’s Inside Out, an animated film set inside a girl’s head map out the range of human sentiments.
Dr Ekman is going to launch a website with a map of human emotions which people can study. Dubbed the Atlas of Emotions, the Dalai Lama hopes this project will work as a tool to cultivate goodness in the world by defeating the enemy within i.e. our emotions. “Ultimately, our emotion is the real troublemaker,” he said, while adding, “we have to know the nature of that enemy”.
Agreed, but can we transform emotions into compassion by creating a website? Osho has created a number of active meditations which have catharsis as their foundation. According to him, these practices help thrown out all the chaos within. Once this is done, a silence descends on you. The emotions Dr Ekman talks about are part of the Freudian unconscious, which is full of negative energies.
Osho separates the Freudian unconscious from the “real unconscious”. The Atlas of Emotions is a useful development, but it only touches the surface of the problem. The domain of emotions is vast and unexplored and it is meditative catharsis that will take within.
