How to Control the Harm Caused by Negative Emotions
On the first day of the Lunar New Year this year, I called my fourth uncle to wish him well and chatted about family matters. There are some conflicts in our family involving my branch, mostly arising from accumulated grievances among the four brothers—my father and his three siblings. I told my fourth uncle that because of the pandemic I cannot return home now, but I hope to forgive everything on behalf of my own family; at the same time, if our family has done anything wrong, I earnestly ask other family members to forgive us, so that kinship can dissolve all accumulated grievances.
My fourth uncle strongly endorsed my stance. He told me that when a person chooses forgiveness rather than hatred, he feels much lighter. My fourth uncle did not receive much formal schooling, but he has read widely. His home was my first library; by primary school I had finished the Chinese classical literary canon, because his home held a large collection of Chinese classical works.
In upper primary school, because my older brother loved buying books, I also read through the world literary classics he could then buy. In the countryside of our era there was no other spiritual life; reading was the only pastime, and books helped us pass many idle hours. My older brother was in fact deeply influenced by my fourth uncle as well; his reading habit was also cultivated by my fourth uncle's library.
When young, my fourth uncle had a bad temper. He was overly straightforward and had a chivalrous heart, so he would often slam the table over things he disliked or fight on behalf of people who were bullied, sometimes coming to blows with the aggressors. Moreover, because he had achieved real martial-arts skill, few opponents could be found in the surrounding villages, and everyone feared him. This made him impatient in solving problems and prefer that others listen to him. His gaze was sharp as lightning; let alone a fight, merely staring at someone with a cold gaze could make the other person's heart quail.
My father and his three brothers were very similar in temperament. None of them was a bad person—one could even say they were all full of a sense of justice—but none was good at forbearance. My father also practiced martial arts, but when young he was like the clan elder, skilled at using reasoning to resolve difficulties for family members and villagers. He had read some books, served as a village cadre for several years, and was highly respected in the village. After he stepped down from the cadre post, villagers still came to our home to ask him to judge disputes; he was like the village judge, mediating conflicts and adjudicating right and wrong. In my childhood, our home was lively at night; many villagers in conflict came to ask my father to mediate, and the opinions he gave after mediation always convinced everyone.
For this reason, I feel my father and his brothers all ended up going to extremes: in family life they did not know how to respect others' views and overvalued their own judgments and feelings. Over time this developed into an authoritarian style, always wanting others to obey their opinions rather than listening to what others said. Since all four brothers were this way, disputes among them naturally multiplied. Accustomed to communicating through this authoritarian approach, they were often unhappy and could not forgive one another.
Such a way of communicating is commonplace in China, and perhaps worldwide. Authoritarianism is everywhere in our lives; there is always someone who, in the name of saving the world, interferes arbitrarily with others. This style of mutual intransigence, in which each person wants the other to obey, easily develops into hatred and violence. For it is not a communication model based on respect, understanding, and tolerance, but one that demands that others obey one's commands.
However just such a communication model may appear, its essence cannot escape the shadow of violence, and often both parties to the exchange are full of errors yet lack self-awareness. Most of us grew up in such an environment; we customarily call it the "paternalistic" management model. Our parents love to criticize their children most for being "disobedient," always demanding that the children obey.
From childhood I disliked this model, and I believe most children do as well. Today's new generation dares to resist its parents, so the situation seems to be reversing. Only after the age of thirty did I realize that having grown up in such an educational model, we become poor at communicating and cooperating with others, and end up as lone heroes; when we do cooperate, conflicts abound and we tear at one another—each person's heart easily harbors resentment toward others, always with the impulse to solve problems through violent words or violent action. This actually makes everyone miserable. Forgiving others, though it makes oneself much more comfortable, is something most people cannot do in a lifetime, and so they cannot let themselves off the hook either.
Hatred and violent impulse harm others and also inflict great damage on oneself; many people live unhappily because of such negative emotions. Buddhism speaks of eight sufferings of life, one of which is "being joined with the unpleasant." This refers to two people who hate each other being together; the Buddha held that the various pains arising in the hearts of mutually hating people who are together are among the most painful things in life.
When a husband and wife hate each other yet must stay together to raise their shared child, marriage becomes a grave; when colleagues hate each other yet must work together for a paycheck, the office becomes hell; when classmates hate one another, it is hard for them to live in peace, and it can sometimes develop into school violence, even into vicious criminal cases—for example, Ma Jiajue killed his own classmates. If we are on a train and the passenger opposite us arouses our hatred, the whole journey becomes unpleasant.
Around the age of thirty I kept thinking about these questions: Why do people so easily hate one another? Why do so many like to solve problems through violence rather than peaceful, friendly coexistence? The answer is very complex, for it is caused by multiple factors rather than a single one. One could say everyone has this problem, only differing in severity. It is driven both by the inner law of biological survival competition—everyone is scrambling for survival resources and mates, so people fight constantly, and this fighting itself arouses hatred and violence—and by defects in the human brain.
Humans have three brains, evolved at different stages; today we call them the three divisions of the brain: the brainstem core (the "physiological brain" governing bodily functions), the limbic system (the "emotional brain" controlling emotion), and the cerebral cortex (the "thinking brain" used to reason). When we were merely reptiles, we had only the "physiological brain," and most reptiles on Earth still do; when we evolved into mammals, we acquired the "emotional brain," and we can see emotion-like responses similar to humans in many mammals—dogs loyal to their masters, wolves aggressive, dolphins friendly, and so on; only when we evolved into higher intelligent animals did we get the "thinking brain," which is unique to primates and especially developed in humans.
These three brains are in fact in constant conflict; we need only observe our own behavior to see this. We frequently experience conflicts between emotion and reason, between instinct and emotion, or between instinct and reason. Although we know that hating people is wrong and that solving problems by violence leaves both sides wounded, many people still live in hatred and prefer violent rather than peaceful ways of resolving things.
Our limbic system—that is, our emotional brain—is the root of our hatred and violent impulses; when we cannot control it, we easily fall under its control.
Most human psychological problems and mental illnesses are related to the limbic system, more precisely to various kinds of damage to it—for example, improper family education or toxic stress can injure the limbic system; certain viruses or bacteria that invade the nervous system can likewise damage it; trauma can damage it; and in the elderly, after brain degeneration, the limbic system no longer functions as it did in youth. Once this region is damaged or degenerates, a person easily becomes either an emotional animal or one with no emotional response at all. Patients in psychiatry, neurosurgery, oncology, geriatrics, and neurology mostly show such problems.
Hatred can inflict tremendous damage on the human body. My fourth uncle intuitively pointed out that hating someone makes oneself very uncomfortable, and deciding to forgive the object of our hatred makes us much lighter. Behind this statement lies a biological law: when organisms hate or guard against other organisms, they remain in a state of high tension, and this high tension exhausts every cell of the body. People who easily hate others therefore mostly tend to have unstable blood pressure, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease, or cancer.
Our "thinking brain" arose in the last stage of our evolution; it helps reduce the various risks brought by the instinctive and impulsive reactions of the "physiological brain" and "emotional brain," improves our health, and extends our lifespan. We are close relatives of chimpanzees and gorillas; we are not even as strong as they are, but because our thinking brain is so developed, the average human lifespan is almost twice that of chimpanzees and gorillas. The thinking brain consists of certain cerebral cortices located above the limbic system. The larger the cerebral cortex and the more folds on its outer surface, the higher the intelligence and the more developed the thinking ability.
We can improve our ability to control instinctive and emotional responses by promoting the development of the cerebral cortex and training the balance of the three brain regions. The best way to promote cortical development is learning; training the balance of the three brain regions, meanwhile, requires loving communication and the training of stress-management skills.
More than two thousand years ago the Buddha already understood this principle. The Buddhist exhortation to "constantly cultivate precept, concentration, and wisdom, and extinguish greed, anger, and delusion" encourages people, through learning knowledge and training their ability to control physiological and emotional responses, to achieve the goal of using reason to master the senses. When a person's reason and sensibility reach a state of balance and harmony, life does not easily fall into chaos, and the chances of contracting deadly pathogens and of conflicts with the outside world are reduced; it is through such an evolutionary process that we extend our lives.
After the age of thirty, I spent more than ten years studying various knowledge related to human physiology and psychology, finally reaching a state in which I could understand all human behavior. If we can understand human behaviors, know the biological reasons behind them, and see that everything is pardonable, we will no longer harbor long-term hatred toward others, still less make ourselves ill from the accumulation of such negative emotions.
Nowadays I mostly like to read biology and medicine books; partly because this relates to my work, but more importantly because they enable me to understand all my own and other people's behaviors and to take an objective stance rather than the subjective stance my father and his four brothers took toward everything.
These cognitions have dispelled the violent impulses in my heart and freed me from hatred toward others; this is an important reason why I now have inner peace and an easy life.
Knowledge can indeed help us resolve inner conflicts, but it is not the only path. Populations and tribes that have never received modern education may be more peaceful than modern people; in fact, the countries with the highest national levels of depression and anxiety are some highly civilized developed nations—for example, Switzerland has a very high prevalence of depression, and anxiety is also more severe among the children of the Silicon Valley elite.
Excessively affluent and exciting life often causes humans to lose inner peace. Modern life constantly stimulates the limbic system, overtaxing the amygdala, the hypothalamic-pituitary axis, and the hippocampus within it. Meditation, dhyana, and yoga have gradually become new trends precisely because everyone's brain is not relaxed.
This is the age disease we are all experiencing: anxiety and restlessness are now spreading worldwide, the number of people with mental disability is unprecedentedly high, and the spectrum of diseases is also changing. Mood disorders are about to overtake heart disease and cancer to top the list of medical burdens.
Inner tranquility is the most reliable source of happiness in life. Once stimuli and temptations reach a certain level, humans not only hate their own kind but eventually come to loathe themselves. For our genes determine that we are in fact social animals, needing peaceful coexistence to have a more serene spiritual world. If an adult finds himself in constant conflict with his spouse and children, entangled in disputes with relatives and friends, constantly disappointed and angered by those around him, and always wanting to be completely alone, he easily becomes mentally tense; over time he will be exhausted, even weary of life, and may choose suicide.
In the clinic we always meet perplexed parents who ask us medical workers why, having provided their children with the best education and abundant material conditions and let them make many friends, the children cannot be happy deep inside and live as if on a lonely island.
The answer is simple: modern children grow up amid noise, their brains running at high speed all the time. Education experts and book authors tell parents how to develop children's brains, raise their IQ, and teach children to love the world; rarely are children allowed a moment of peace—and only in peace do the three human brains develop in coordinated fashion. The more developed the region, the more this is so; hence mental illness is more common and suicide rates higher in developed countries and regions.
Moderate deprivation and boredom are more beneficial to human growth. Only those who have endured the insufficiency and dullness of life from childhood can more easily be at peace when grown, more able to enjoy simple life and be calm and happy without external props—because we have tamed our emotional brain through dullness and insufficiency.
Children whose childhood was rich and colorful often cannot be still when grown; restless, agitated traits accompany them for life, making their existence very painful, and specialized physicians can hardly cure their mental illness. People with inner peace and a happy life are often those who are content with the ordinary and can remain unsated with life in what looks like simple, dull existence. Such people also have more stable emotions and better intimate relationships, because they are more likely to "never tire of looking at" the person they love.
Bertrand Russell wrote specifically about the ability to endure boredom, saying that a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of mediocrities. The author once spent time observing and researching in temples frequented by top students and returned overseas scholars, finding that most who sought release there were so-called upper-class people. All the problems of their first half of life can be summed up as too much brain noise and failure of the three brain regions to develop in coordination; hence in their second half they strive to find ways to empty their minds of distracting thoughts. What they call distracting thoughts are in fact nothing but negative emotions they cannot control; their urgent need for release is nothing but a deep hope that these emotions stop harming themselves and others.