Transmutation of Affect in Buddhist Metta (Loving Kindness) Meditation:

Phenomenological Analysis

Olga Louchakova-Schwartz, draft 3.21.2018,

Talk at the American Academy of Religion, Western Regional Meeting, Berkeley,
3.25.2018

Charting neither the physical materiality of natural objects, nor the insights of
common sense, phenomenology studies constitution of consciousness, that is, how
experience is put together by processes which take place within experience itself. In
this paper, I will examine how phenomenological genetics and generativity
contribute to understanding forms of religious experience in the Buddhist
meditation of loving kindness, or metta. I will engage two sets of concepts, self-
affective phenomenological materiality (Michel Henry), and radical otherness
(Emmanuel Levinas) to understand how the affects in metta are transmuted from
unwholesome (anger, alienation, grief), to wholesome (love, sense of connectedness,
bliss). The paper will show that the self-affective materiality of these feelings leads
to religious experience within the lived human subjectivity (Louchakova-
Schwartz, 7). However, such experience is not just egological, i.e. related to one’s
self-awareness. A transmutation of unwholesome into wholesome affect requires
presence of internal plurality of other selves. In some forms of metta (especially
those adopted as psychotherapeutic practices), the positing of plurality of others
can be intentional. However, even when a meditator focuses on her/his own self in
seeming isolation from others and the world, anonymous plurality of others is
present in one’s consciousness in a manner of a priori (cf. Taipale, 2014). The
wholesome effects of metta depend on bringing the unapparent out of anonymity,
into conscious awareness of the meditator. As of such accounts (from both texts and
live practitioners), the above also brings up a quality of religious or holy in
experience.

SENT to Anna for consideration for her panel, 9.6.2017