EMOTION: THE BODY’S REACTION TO YOUR MIND

 

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