Do you resent doing what you are doing? It may be your job, or you
may have agreed to do something and are doing it, but part of you
resents and resists it. Are you carrying unspoken resentment toward a
person close to you? Do you realize that the energy you thus emanate
is so harmful in its effects that you are in fact contaminating yourself
as well as those around you? Have a good look inside. Is there even
the slightest trace of resentment, unwillingness? If there is, observe it
on both the mental and the emotional levels. What thoughts is your
mind creating around this situation? Then look at the emotion, which
is the body’s reaction to those thoughts. Feel the emotion. Does it feel
pleasant or unpleasant? Is it an energy that you would actually
choose to have inside you? Do you have a choice?
Maybe you are being taken advantage of, maybe the activity you are
engaged in is tedious, maybe someone close to you is dishonest,
irritating, or unconscious, but all this is irrelevant. Whether your
thoughts and emotions about this situation are justified or not makes
no difference. The fact is that you are resisting what is. You are
making the present moment into an enemy. You are creating
unhappiness, conflict between the inner and the outer. Your
unhappiness is polluting not only your own inner being and those
around you but also the collective human psyche of which you are an
inseparable part. The pollution of the planet is only an outward
reflection of an inner psychic pollution: millions of unconscious
individuals not taking responsibility for their inner space.
Either stop doing what you are doing, speak to the person concerned
and express fully what you feel, or drop the negativity that your mind
has created around the situation and that serves no purpose
whatsoever except to strengthen a false sense of self. Recognizing its
futility is important. Negativity is never the optimum way of dealing
with any situation. In fact, in most cases it keeps you stuck in it,
blocking real change. Anything that is done with negative energy will
become contaminated by it and in time give rise to more pain, more
unhappiness. Furthermore, any negative inner state is contagious:
Unhappiness spreads more easily than a physical disease. Through
the law of resonance, it triggers and feeds latent negativity in others,
unless they are immune — that is, highly conscious.
Are you polluting the world or cleaning up the mess? You are
responsible for your inner space; nobody else is, just as you are
responsible for the planet. As within, so without: If humans clear inner
pollution, then they will also cease to create outer pollution.
How can we drop negativity, as you suggest?
By dropping it. How do you drop a piece of hot coal that you are
holding in your hand? How do you drop some heavy and useless
baggage that you are carrying? By recognizing that you don’t want to
suffer the pain or carry the burden anymore and then letting go of it.
Deep unconsciousness, such as the pain-body, or other deep pain,
such as the loss of a loved one, usually needs to be transmuted
through acceptance combined with the light of your presence — your
sustained attention. Many patterns in ordinary unconsciousness, on
the other hand, can simply be dropped once you know that you don’t
want them and don’t need them anymore, once you realize that you
have a choice, that you are not just a bundle of conditioned reflexes.
All this implies that you are able to access the power of Now. Without
it, you have no choice.
If you call some emotions negative, aren’t you creating a mental
polarity of good and bad, as you explained earlier?
No. The polarity was created at an earlier stage when your mind
judged the present moment as bad; this judgment then created the
negative emotion.
But if you call some emotions negative, aren’t you really saying that
they shouldn’t be there, that it’s not okay to have those emotions? My
understanding is that we should give ourselves permission to have
whatever feelings come up, rather than judge them as bad or say that
we shouldn’t have them. It’s okay to feel resentful; it’s okay to be
angry, irritated, moody, or whatever — otherwise, we get into
repression, inner conflict, or denial. Everything is okay as it is.
Of course. Once a mind pattern, an emotion, or a reaction is there,
accept it. You were not conscious enough to have a choice in the
matter. That’s not a judgment, just a fact. If you had a choice, or
realized that you do have a choice, would you choose suffering or joy,
ease or unease, peace or conflict? Would you choose a thought or
feeling that cuts you off from your natural state of well-being, the joy
of life within? Any such feeling I call negative, which simply means
bad. Not in the sense that “You shouldn’t have done that,” but just
plain factual bad, like feeling sick in the stomach.
How is it possible that humans killed in excess of one hundred million
fellow humans in the twentieth century alone?4 Humans inflicting pain
of such magnitude on one another is beyond anything you can
imagine. And that’s not taking into account the mental, emotional and
physical violence, the torture, pain, and cruelty they continue to inflict
on each other as well as on other sentient beings on a daily basis.
Do they act in this way because they are in touch with their natural
state, the joy of life within? Of course not. Only people who are in a
deeply negative state, who feel very bad indeed, would create such a
reality as a reflection of how they feel. Now they are engaged in
destroying nature and the planet that sustains them. Unbelievable but
true. Humans are a dangerously insane and very sick species. That’s
not a judgment. It’s a fact. It is also a fact that the sanity is there
underneath the madness. Healing and redemption are available right
now.
Coming back specifically to what you said — it is certainly true that
when you accept your resentment, moodiness, anger, and so on, you
are no longer forced to act them out blindly, and you are less likely to
project them onto others. But I wonder if you are not deceiving
yourself. When you have been practicing acceptance for a while, as
you have, there comes a point when you need to go on to the next
stage, where those negative emotions are not created anymore. If
you don’t, your “acceptance” just becomes a mental label that allows
your ego to continue to indulge in unhappiness and so strengthen its
sense of separation from other people, your surroundings, your here
and now. As you know, separation is the basis for the ego’s sense of
identity. True acceptance would transmute those feelings at once.
And if you really knew deeply that everything is “okay,” as you put it,
and which of course is true, then would you have those negative
feelings in the first place? Without judgment, without resistance to
what is, they would not arise. You have an idea in your mind that
“everything is okay,” but deep down you don’t really believe it, and so
the old mental-emotional patterns of resistance are still in place.
That’s what makes you feel bad.
That’s okay, too.
Are you defending your right to be unconscious, your right to suffer?
Don’t worry: Nobody is going to take that away from you. Once you
realize that a certain kind of food makes you sick, would you carry on
eating that food and keep asserting that it is okay to be sick?