Spectrum of Ecstasy: Embracing the Five Wisdom Emotions of Vajrayana Buddhism

by Ngakpa Chögyam, Khandro Dechen

Here two Western-born lamas of the Nyingma tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism explore what it means to be utterly emotionally alive. Written in contemporary, nonacademic language, this book is a radical challenge to the misconception that inner Vajrayana is primarily an esoteric system of ritual and liturgy. The authors teach that emotions can be embraced as a rich and profound opportunity for realization. This fiercely compassionate battle cry rallies all who are audacious enough to appreciate emotions for their supreme potential as vehicles for awakening.

Genres: Buddhism, Spirituality, Religion, Meditation, Psychology, Personal Development, Nonfiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1986

Reviews

[Thubten · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sublime. Anything by Ngakpa Chogyam will delight the senses and train the mind.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides an excellent background and very comprehensible instructions for the tibetan buddhist tantric/dzogchen practice of trek chod, which is taking emotions as the path of enlightenment.

For this book to be most useful for you, you will need to have had a decent amount of meditation experience, with sufficient development of the space and awareness to perceive the arising of emotions and take them as an object of meditation.

There aren't many reviews of Chogyam here but on Amazon he earns 5 stars from those in his lineage and 1 star from those that consider him a pretender.

I am neither in his lineage, nor do I require my instructors to be native tibetans. And from my point of view this is a fantastically indispensable book that has informed my current practice a great deal.

[Nick Brown]

recommended by the aro meditation email course, quote :

"Meditation provides a space to approach difficult emotions gradually and learn that they cannot control you. You can, after all, stop at any time. As buried thoughts and feelings surface, regard them impersonally, without pushing or pulling at them. Be curious about each emotion: what would it be like to experience it fully? If you allow intense emotional sensations to ‘do their worst’ – you will find that they cannot harm you. Discovering this counteracts fear. Eventually nothing remains lurking in the depths which can dismay you.

Recommended Resources

This course has room for only a basic introduction to the meditative approach to emotions. The book Spectrum of Ecstasy, by Aro Lamas, explores the topic in depth. It shows how meditation can transform neurotic, conflicted emotions into joyously unproblematic equivalents.

[Deep · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and concise ideas from Tantric Psychology.

Take away is practice of Shi-Ne. And an orientation to embrace emotions and reality of the moment as the path.

[Jared L · Rating 1 out of 5]

The content of the book is interesting. The author talks about emptiness and breaks down emotions into five elements and their positive and negative aspects. For example, water element in the negative form is anger and in the positive form is clarity. After explaining this way of perceiving emotions he finally gives the method which is 1) understand this system of categorizing emotions 2) see if this system matches your own experiences (if so move to step 3, if not find a different method/system) 3) notice when you are acting in automatic emotional patterns 4) "stare into the face of the arising emotion".

I am not a Tibetan practitioner. The book didn't click with me. There are parts of the book that I disagree with from personal experience. The author frequently talks about how anger comes from fear. This is not my experience. Most of the time I am angry, there is not fear. For me, anger tends to come about if I want something and don't get it. For example, I want to watch a show and the internet cuts out. Sometimes anger arises in that situation. But there's no underlying fear that I can perceive.

I also had a hard time understanding the difference between pawo and khandro. Perhaps people familiar with Tibetan teachings already understand them.

I wonder what the point of dividing the emotions into the five elements is. The emotions and elements could be divided differently. I also don't understand why emotions are tied to elements. Why say water is anger instead of saying anger is anger? However, the grouping of emotions to elements does make a certain sense, but why do you have to buy into this elemental slicing of the emotions to practice steps 3 and 4? I already sort of do steps 3 and 4 but in a different meditation system.

The Q&A was helpful, interesting, and clarified things.

Separate from the content, the writing of the book was not great. The author uses big words and flowery language. At first, I thought maybe that was because the ideas were so complex that they were best expressed through ambiguous metaphors. But as I read more of the book, I believed that the ideas could be communicated more simply.

The book would be improved if it had an overview at the beginning and if the chart at the end of chapter 12 was in the front of the book.

One of my favorite quotes is,

"When we operate in this way, we artificially separate experience into two fields: ‘perception’ and ‘field of perception’. The term ‘perception’ applies to the act of perceiving – the way in which we register the presence of the world through our sense faculties. The term ‘field of perception’ applies to the world that we perceive. Attempting to establish that our perception and the field of perception are independent creates monstrous confusion. With this divisive logic we distance ourselves analytically from direct experience. Perception and field of perception are inseparable, and when we attempt to separate experience into distinct fields, we lose our ‘knowing’ and end up ‘knowing about’."

Overall, this is a decent book and I learned things from it. It didn't click for me, but it might for others.

[Vlad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, a 5, even though the book will certainly be a drop by anyone used to careful epistemic language - it jumps between poetic, metaphorical, and experiential languages on a drop of a hat without much upfront warning, on top of being heavily rooted in dharmic ontology. It certainly triggered redflags over and over for me - roughly every second page - but thanks to the folks we've been reading this together with we made it through, and I am grateful for that.

Two core things for me:
1. Emotions as (energy + distortion\"liberation" of it). And from this view, a different (vs sutric) approach to emotions - instead of letting the energy dissipate, it can be... I really don't know the better word than the authors use - liberated. Basically feeling the same drive but recognizing that the direction is terribly misguided by the whole slew of internalized misconceptions, and - in letting go of that neurosis - becoming able to apply it more intentionally and openly.
2. Spelling out distorted\"liberated" versions of the "primary" vectors of the emotionspace. Surprisingly big portion of my own challenging experiences maps out into some combination of these 5 - and having the pointers at how the same impulse can be experienced in the non-neurotic way makes 1. much more concrete and applicable. This is probably the deepest any kind of poetic\impressionist explanation ever touched me.

[Jig-zèd · Rating 5 out of 5]

An introduction into working with emotions as the path of Tantra, Ngak'chang Rinpoche is a wonderful poet, teacher, and writes here with clarity, precision and breadth of experiential knowledge that is bound to explode your concepts into tingling sensations of delight or at least tear your conceptually conformed underpants. The Aro printing as well as the copy from Shambala publishers reproduces Rinpoche's calligraphy for each chapter, an appreciable addition to the commentary on the elements. Each chapter follows with a Q and A from Khandro Dechen and Ngak'chang Rinpoche and their students. . . . It, has been emotional.