Understanding Emotions .. Sw. Tejomayananda - 9

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At one level it can be said that we should conquer negative emotions

with positive ones, but even then our inherent problem will not

disappear. The reason is that there are not two, there is only One!

But since we don't know that there is One we have created two, and

therefore there is a problem. Though we may say that love is a

positive emotion and hatred is negative, actually seen hatred is only

a perverted form of love! We have desires and when they are not

fulfilled, all other emotions are displayed. Anger and jealousy are

only desires manifesting in other forms. If we desire something and

someone else gets it, we become jealous. But if we never wanted it,

we are unaffected. It is the same with love, we may love someone but

the moment a sense of possessiveness come in, problems are created.

Emotion is a power and desire is also a power, but they are one and

the same force.

 

Take food, for example. Is food good or bad? Is it nourishing or

harmful? As we all know, food can be both. When eaten in unhealthy

combinations and at the wrong time, food can be harmful. But the same

food, when eater rightly, becomes nourishing. In the same way, one

and the same feeling when dealt with properly will become a blessing

and when handled incorrectly becomes a curse. It is a question of who

is handling it and how. A razor blade in the hand of a barber is a

blessing but in the hand of a child, may prove to be dangerous. There

is physical handling and the intellectual handling. We have so many

emotions and depending upon how they are managed they can either be a

blessing or a curse. For example, not everyone can assimilate love.

Some just do not know how to love. Even when somebody loves us, we

may have our own ideas of how they should show it. And if it is not

expressed in a particular way we feel disappointed and unloved.

Sometimes a husband and wife genuinely care for one another, but

there may still be a problem, because their expectations of

expression of that love are different. Sometimes they get divorced

and later on we see them getting along quite well. So now they meet

as friends, but when they lived together they became enemies! It is

strange that they do not understand how it all happened. Remember

that emotion is a force, and desire also is a fore. When desire is

not fulfilled, it gives rise to a display of negative emotions and we

do not know how to deal with them.