Question

In the talk yesterday evening Rosemary mentioned to substitute worldly pleasant/unpleasant/neutral feelings with spiritual feelings. Could you explain this? How does this work?

Answer

Pleasant worldly feelings... I'll give you an example: Someone praises us. That's a pleasant worldly feeling. But because it depends on somebody else and their opinions, it's not totally dependable and it could easily turn into blame. So it's not a very secure type of happiness and in order to let go of attachment to this craving we have for praise, for this pleasant worldly feeling, we develop a pleasant spiritual feeling. That is learning how to have Sympathetic Joy with ourselves for beneficial things. Learning how to have Sympathetic Joy with others. That's an example of changing that type of pleasant worldly feeling that is not so dependable and makes us vulnerable, too. Pleasant spiritual feeling is more under our power to control.

Unpleasant worldly feelings...there are a lot of them because of Dukkha. So I won't go into great detail on unpleasant worldly feelings because you know about them. But an unpleasant spiritual feeling: "knowing there's more to do", that's an unpleasant spiritual feeling. "There is more to purify", that's an unpleasant spiritual feeling. "Moral Shame" is an unpleasant spiritual feelings but it's very necessary in order to develop more wisdom. Unless we investigate into our past actions and see whether they are skillful or not, we won't take responsibility for them and then we won't know how to avoid them in the future. So that's an unpleasant spiritual feeling.

Neutral worldly feelings. I talked about that yesterday. If we turn that into Equanimity which is a neutral spiritual feeling, then we don't have to have more Dhukkha for ourselves.

Our apologies if there are any errors in the above text. If anything seems to be wrong or confusing in any way, please feel free to contact the teachers for further clarification.