What about emotions? I get caught up in my emotions more than I do
in my mind.
Mind, in the way I use the word, is not just thought. It includes your
emotions as well as all unconscious mental-emotional reactive
patterns. Emotion arises at the place where mind and body meet. It is
the body’s reaction to your mind — or you might say, a reflection of
your mind in the body. For example, an attack thought or a hostile
thought will create a buildup of energy in the body that we call anger.
The body is getting ready to fight. The thought that you are being
threatened, physically or psychologically, causes the body to contract,
and this is the physical side of what we call fear. Research has shown
that strong emotions even cause changes in the biochemistry of the
body. These biochemical changes represent the physical or material
aspect of the emotion. Of course, you are not usually conscious of all
your thought patterns, and it is often only through watching your
emotions that you can bring them into awareness.
The more you are identified with your thinking, your likes and dislikes,
judgments and interpretations, which is to say the less present you
are as the watching consciousness, the stronger the emotional energy
charge will be, whether you are aware of it or not. If you cannot feel
your emotions, if you are cut off from them, you will eventually
experience them on a purely physical level, as a physical problem or
symptom. A great deal has been written about this in recent years, so
we don’t need to go into it here. A strong unconscious emotional
pattern may even manifest as an external event that appears to just
happen to you. For example, I have observed that people who carry a
lot of anger inside without being aware of it and without expressing it
are more likely to be attacked, verbally or even physically, by other
angry people, and often for no apparent reason. They have a strong
emanation of anger that certain people pick up subliminally and that
triggers their own latent anger.
If you have difficulty feeling your emotions, start by focusing attention
on the inner energy field of your body. Feel the body from within. This
will also put you in touch with your emotions. We will explore this in
more detail later.
You say that an emotion is the mind’s reflection in the body. But
sometimes there is a conflict between the two: the mind says “no”
while the emotion says “yes,” or the other way around.
If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a
truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your
body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will
be the lie, the emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who
you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time.
Conflict between surface thoughts and unconscious mental processes
is certainly common. You may not yet be able to bring your
unconscious mind activity into awareness as thoughts, but it will
always be reflected in the body as an emotion, and of this you can
become aware. To watch an emotion in this way is basically the same
as listening to or watching a thought, which I described earlier. The
only difference is that, while a thought is in your head, an emotion
has a strong physical component and so is primarily felt in the body.
You can then allow the emotion to be there without being controlled
by it. You no longer are the emotion; you are the watcher, the
observing presence. If you practice this, all that is unconscious in you
will be brought into the light of consciousness.
So observing our emotions is as important as observing our thoughts?
Yes. Make it a habit to ask yourself: What’s going on inside me at this
moment? That question will point you in the right direction. But don’t
analyze, just watch. Focus your attention within. Feel the energy of
the emotion. If there is no emotion present, take your attention more
deeply into the inner energy field of your body. It is the doorway into
Being.
An emotion usually represents an amplified and energized thought
pattern, and because of its often overpowering energetic charge, it is
not easy initially to stay present enough to be able to watch it. It
wants to take you over, and it usually succeeds — unless there is
enough presence in you. If you are pulled into unconscious
identification with the emotion through lack of presence, which is
normal, the emotion temporarily becomes “you.” Often a vicious circle
builds up between your thinking and the emotion: they feed each
other. The thought pattern creates a magnified reflection of itself in
the form of an emotion, and the vibrational frequency of the emotion
keeps feeding the original thought pattern. By dwelling mentally on
the situation, event, or person that is the perceived cause of the
emotion, the thought feeds energy to the emotion, which in turn
energizes the thought pattern, and so on.
Basically, all emotions are modifications of one primordial,
undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of
who you are beyond name and form. Because of its undifferentiated
nature, it is hard to find a name that precisely describes this emotion.
“Fear” comes close, but apart from a continuous sense of threat, it
also includes a deep sense of abandonment and incompleteness. It
may be best to use a term that is as undifferentiated as that basic
emotion and simply call it “pain.” One of the main tasks of the mind is
to fight or remove that emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for
its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up
temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the
pain, the greater the pain. The mind can never find the solution, nor
can it afford to allow you to find the solution, because it is itself an
intrinsic part of the “problem.” Imagine a chief of police trying to find
an arsonist when the arsonist is the chief of police. You will not be
free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from
identification with the mind, which is to say from ego. The mind is
then toppled from its place of power and Being reveals itself as your
true nature.
Yes, I know what you are going to ask.
I was going to ask: What about positive emotions such as love and
joy?
They are inseparable from your natural state of inner connectedness
with Being. Glimpses of love and joy or brief moments of deep peace
are possible whenever a gap occurs in the stream of thought. For
most people, such gaps happen rarely and only accidentally, in
moments when the mind is rendered “speechless,” sometimes
triggered by great beauty, extreme physical exertion, or even great
danger. Suddenly, there is inner stillness. And within that stillness
there is a subtle but intense joy, there is love, there is peace.
Usually, such moments are short-lived, as the mind quickly resumes
its noise-making activity that we call thinking. Love, joy, and peace
cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance.
But they are not what I would call emotions. They lie beyond the
emotions, on a much deeper level. So you need to become fully
conscious of your emotions and be able to feel them before you can
feel that which lies beyond them. Emotion literally means
“disturbance.” The word comes from the Latin emovere, meaning “to
disturb.”
Love, joy, and peace are deep states of Being, or rather three aspects
of the state of inner connectedness with Being. As such, they have no
opposite. This is because they arise from beyond the mind. Emotions,
on the other hand, being part of the dualistic mind, are subject to the
law of opposites. This simply means that you cannot have good
without bad. So in the unenlightened, mind-identified condition, what
is sometimes wrongly called joy is the usually short-lived pleasure
side of the continuously alternating pain/pleasure cycle. Pleasure is
always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from
within. The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain
tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain. And
what is often referred to as love may be pleasurable and exciting for a
while, but it is an addictive clinging, an extremely needy condition
that can turn into its opposite at the flick of a switch. Many “love”
relationships, after the initial euphoria has passed, actually oscillate
between “love” and hate, attraction and attack.
Real love doesn’t make you suffer. How could it? It doesn’t suddenly
turn into hate, nor does real joy turn into pain. As I said, even before
you are enlightened — before you have freed yourself from your mind
— you may get glimpses of true joy, true love, or of a deep inner
peace, still but vibrantly alive. These are aspects of your true nature,
which is usually obscured by the mind. Even within a “normal”
addictive relationship, there can be moments when the presence of
something more genuine, something incorruptible, can be felt. But
they will only be glimpses, soon to be covered up again through mind
interference. It may then seem that you had something very precious
and lost it, or your mind may convince you that it was all an illusion
anyway. The truth is that it wasn’t an illusion, and you cannot lose it.
It is part of your natural state, which can be obscured but can never
be destroyed by the mind. Even when the sky is heavily overcast, the
sun hasn’t disappeared. It’s still there on the other side of the clouds.
The Buddha says that pain or suffering arises through desire or
craving and that to be free of pain we need to cut the bonds of desire.
All cravings are the mind seeking salvation or fulfillment in external
things and in the future as a substitute for the joy of Being. As long as
I am my mind, I am those cravings, those needs, wants, attachments,
and aversions, and apart from them there is no “I” except as a mere
possibility, an unfulfilled potential, a seed that has not yet sprouted.
In that state, even my desire to become free or enlightened is just
another craving for fulfillment or completion in the future. So don’t
seek to become free of desire or “achieve” enlightenment. Become
present. Be there as the observer of the mind. Instead of quoting the
Buddha, be the Buddha, be “the awakened one,” which is what the
word buddha means.
Humans have been in the grip of pain for eons, ever since they fell
from the state of grace, entered the realm of time and mind, and lost
awareness of Being. At that point, they started to perceive
themselves as meaningless fragments in an alien universe,
unconnected to the Source and to each other.
Pain is inevitable as long as you are identified with your mind, which
is to say as long as you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. I am
talking here primarily of emotional pain, which is also the main cause
of physical pain and physical disease. Resentment, hatred, self-pity,
guilt, anger, depression, jealousy, and so on, even the slightest
irritation, are all forms of pain. And every pleasure or emotional high
contains within itself the seed of pain: its inseparable opposite, which
will manifest in time.
Anybody who has ever taken drugs to get “high” will know that the
high eventually turns into a low, that the pleasure turns into some
form of pain. Many people also know from their own experience how
easily and quickly an intimate relationship can turn from a source of
pleasure to a source of pain. Seen from a higher perspective, both the
negative and the positive polarities are faces of the same coin, are
both part of the underlying pain that is inseparable from the mind-
identified egoic state of consciousness.
There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and
the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body.
Ceasing to create pain in the present and dissolving past pain — this
is what I want to talk about now.
CHAPTER TWO
CONSCIOUSNESS:
THE WAY OUT OF PAIN