[From: Bruce Nevin (Fri 93093 13:16:29 EDT)]
( Bill Powers (930903.0900 MDT)]
"Systematic investigation" wasn't the strong suit of our friends
in the ancient Far East. They were naturalists, not theorists and
particularly not experimentalists or modelers. I take my hat off
to them as observers of the human condition, but I wish they had
been more inclined to put their flat statements of fact to some
sort of test.
This sounds like an informed opinion, Bill. How did you arrive at it?
They lacked the technology we now use for modelling, of course, but there
was a great deal of experimental work, with one's own human organism as
the laboratory. (I'm not talking about ingesting psychedelics, though
there were others who did a lot of that sort of thing too.) And the
watchword in Buddhist practice has always been to take no one's word for
it, always to test everything. Other folks I'll grant (bhakti
especially) were much more authoritarian.
Still hoping Greg can point me to a good illustrative citation. Not that
I expect any text to be convincing, since in the nature of things it
could not present a balanced picture. This is because the literature
here was (is) secondary to practice, and can't be understood without it.
But David was asking about categorizations of emotion. As always, our
categories are few and crude in comparison with the universe of
perception being categorized, in this case, the diverse combinations
of varying sensations in the body that we categorize as emotions. So a
richer set of category-labels might be suggestive, and perhaps even
helpful.
Bruce
bn@bbn.com