Do enlightened people feel emotions?

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My recent explorations on this topic have been quite illuminating.

Anyone interested in following those explorations can read the answers on this question, there is much discussion on Artem Boytsov’s answer. The signal kept getting lost in the noise, so I thought it would be useful to reframe back to a more neutral question so we can discuss more lucidly.

My curiosity is in the connection that spiritual ‘goal-seeking’ might have to the physical mind. Enlightenment is a weird spiritual goal in that it’s theoretically available to anyone. There is a vast community of people on the Internet and in real life dedicated to exploring the nuts and bolts of changing the mind so as to remove the subject and experience only the object. This is called non-duality and there is an ongoing debate as to whether this state should be considered to be the pinnacle of spiritual achievement.

The primary impetus for this appears to be the wish for the removal of personal suffering. And so the majority of people you find asking questions about enlightenment appear to come from people who are hurting in life and looking for an escape. At least in the West, I don’t have experience of how this stuff looks in the East, and I can only guess that the communities are much, much more sophisticated.

In my opinion, non-duality is an important step on the spiritual path, but it can’t be the last step because nothing can be the last step. There is always another step one can take. It’s just that non-duality is an interesting convergence point that can be defined. Whether you are materialist or spiritual, religious or practicing solo, Eastern or Western, extraverted or introverted, meditative or insight-focused, removal of subject to only experience object appears to be something both achievable and held in high regard by all traditions, even if the names given to non-duality differ wildly.

And the connection to emotion appears also to differ. Most descriptions of enlightened people paint pictures of gentle teachers concerned greatly with the specifics of the teachings and how they’re applied. But not all of them. Some paint pictures of intense, fiery wildmen with lightning-fast tempers that shock you out of your stupor and force you out of your shell and into the world.

Do these people feel emotion, or are they simply acting without feeling? Without a rigorous definition of non-duality can we make any real distinctions concerning emotion as it relates to enlightenment?

So when the endpoints to a path can’t be rationally accessed, usually the process by which the endpoints are reached is a good target for exploration, because everybody is somewhere along the path, even if their paths are taking them in a different direction.

Everybody can understand surrender even if they can’t intuitively grasp enlightenment. Surrender is the unlimbering of a being from ego elements. Ego is the subject that is being removed so that only object remains. It can be broken down into elements, and Buddhist dharma contains maps to recognize those elements, and techniques to release you from them.

In fact any time you see a tradition getting prescriptive rather than merely descriptive, what’s being prescribed is a technique for surrender. Some idea / force / pattern is keeping you from apprehending God / self / no-self. Surrender the former to embody / perceive / receive the latter.

It’s my contention that all of these techniques do the same thing at the fundamental level. If you read enough of this stuff, it’s all the same map to climb the same mountain to experience the same peak vista. And we can even start looking at human activities that aren’t being characterized as spiritual in nature in terms of surrender and enlightenment. Zen imagery is quite popular among software developers, for instance.

So back to the question. Do enlightened people feel emotion?

With all this groundwork laid, I think we can use logic in order to answer. Not feeling emotion is a legible state, it’s something we can test for. Emotion is a physical feature of the brain and we can correlate the lack of emotion-feeling with all sorts of things that doesn’t relate at all to anybody’s map of enlightenment.

So if we’re talking about a physical person, with a physical brain, then there’s no reason at all to think that even one of the maps to enlightenment in the world actually physically turns off the limbic system. As stated before, all these maps share the same core technique, that of surrendering ego elements. Surrendering ego elements is something that anybody can do, and if this led to limbic deactivation then it stands to reason that the medical community would seize on this as an experimental vehicle towards better understanding of psychiatry and psychology.

Therefore we have to conclude that the process by which one attains enlightenment, surrender of ego elements, does not cause removal of the experience of emotion, limbic deactivation. If the process of attaining enlightenment doesn’t deactivate the limbic system, then the endpoint won’t necessarily involve it either.

Yes, enlightened people experience emotion. Just like everyone else. They just have better tools for dealing with it. If you’re not experiencing emotion, then the place to go where that can be investigated is the medical community, not your local Buddhist temple.