Ask Parvati 28: Enlightenment and Emotions - Part 5: The Rise and Fall of Emotions

PART 5: THE RISE AND FALL OF EMOTIONS

(Continued from Body, Mind, Emotion And Compassion)

“The single most vital step on your journey toward enlightenment is this: learn to disidentify from your mind. Every time you create a gap in the stream of mind, the light of your consciousness grows stronger. One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.” - Eckhart Tolle

Learning to witness is essential as we learn to let go of our identification with our ego and our emotions. On the journey towards enlightenment, we will experience periods when the mind is still and pure. In this state, we can witness and watch life from a place of spacious presence. Life arises. We witness. We are part of life, also dancing, yet still, watching the dance.

This space between thoughts is where truth lies. In this, is the eternal, the reality of existence, the enlightened presence. As we learn to meditate and evolve, we learn to find more space between our thoughts and emotions, so that the grip of our mind softens and our emotional flux becomes more balanced.

There is a reality that exists beyond our mind and beyond the up and downs of our moods and our feelings. This is an infinite space that is, that always has been. Our purpose is to rest in the fullness of that space and allow ourselves to be one with it. In that space is pure consciousness. All of life is pure consciousness arising, yet we think, we separate, we identify with our minds and allow our ego to control our life. We become constrictive and we lose sight of that space.

As we progress along the path to enlightenment, our emotions provide us with humbling guideposts, mirroring the way we identify with our mind. We learn how involved we are with the story, rather than witnessing what is in the space of fullness. When we are a witness, we are not cold, but warm, connected, and ultimately compassionate. Witnessing does not mean not having feelings, not expressing vitality and interconnection. Witnessing means remaining rooted in the expansion, even when experiencing potentially constrictive situations. We see the constriction. We understand it for what it is. It is identification with the temporal, with the mind, with the passing.

There is a difference between joy and happiness. Happiness is passing. We feel happy, then we feel sad. But joy is connected to the infinite space beyond the mind, to the eternal voice of the soul as it expresses itself in this human form.

Enlightened masters tell us to watch the rise and fall of the mind, like the waves of the ocean. The waves are not the ocean, just the surface agitation. The ocean is deep, powerful and vast, just like the space beyond thoughts.

I would imagine that perhaps enlightened masters do not feel emotions the way we do, but rest in the field of pure compassion. Based on the scriptural reference in the Bhagavad Gita, I would guess that an enlightened being is beyond the rise and fall of emotion, as he resides in the all-pervading field of pure consciousness: “When you have reached enlightenment, ignorance will delude you no longer. In the light of that knowledge you will see the entire creation within your own Atman and in me.” - Bhagavad Gita 4:35

Along our path to enlightenment, we learn to respond to, rather than react to emotions, until we are in a oneness state of pure consciousness, residing in pure compassion. Until such time, we witness the rise and fall of our emotional landscape, like waves upon an ocean. As we watch the waves, even delight in their dance, we remember that we are as vast as the ocean and as open as the sky.

(Continued tomorrow with Guidance From The Enlightened)

REMINDER: Don’t forget that today submissions are due for this week’s Ask Parvati blog. Send your questions to ask@parvatidevi.com

 

Ask Parvati 28: Enlightenment and Emotions - Part 4: Body, Mind, Emotion and Compassion

PART 4: BODY, MIND, EMOTION AND COMPASSION

(Continued from What Is The Mind?)

“When the self-created wall of the ego is lifted, you will realize that the dualistic nature of the world is only an external appearance, and that, in essence, everything is a whole, a single unity.” - Amma

When we “want”, we are directed by the energies of our mind and ego. When we are directed by our ego, we inevitably suffer. We can hurt ourselves and we can even hurt others. Our mind does not liberate us. Identifying with our mind restricts us and causes us pain.

Eckhart Tolle’s statement is succinct and clear: “Pain is inevitable as long as you are identified with your mind.” In our process of enlightenment, we learn to slowly dissolve the grip of our mind so that we may return to the field of pure consciousness and become enlightened.

As we dissolve the grip of the mind and of our ego, we face our emotional landscape. Our emotions exist as a bridge between our body and our mind. They are a way our mind expresses itself through our body. As we allow for more space in our mind, our emotions come more to the surface of our field of awareness. So too does the electrical information of all that is around us, including the emotions others may feel.

Emotions move through our body as a means for us to understand more viscerally our mental reactions to thoughts. When we feel afraid, our heart races. When we feel angry, our temperature rises. We feel in response to our thoughts. But our thoughts are not always pure and clear. In fact, our mind tends to only be a collection of expectations and memories. So our emotions tend to be based on the past and the future.

Emotional maturity is essential along the path to enlightenment. We are sentient beings. We feel. It is part of our nature. Just as with thoughts, there is nothing wrong or bad with emotions. There are painful ones and more pleasant ones. But they too, just like thoughts, are temporal. They are not eternal. They come and go. So just as with thoughts, we learn to find the space between emotions.

When the mind is clear, wisdom may effortlessly arise. Similarly, when our emotions are quiet, we may experience the well of compassion. Compassion is not an emotion, but a state of being. Unlike emotions, it is eternal. It is vast and unbound, unaffected by the temporal. It is a state that arises through the release of our identification with our emotions. Amma says:

"Compassion does not see the faults of others. It does not see the weaknesses of people. It makes no distinction between good and bad people. Compassion cannot draw a line between two countries, two faiths or two religions. Compassion has no ego; thus there is no fear, lust or passion. Compassion simply forgives and forgets. Compassion is like a passage. Everything passes through it. Nothing can stay there. Compassion is love expressed in all its fullness."

As we evolve, we learn to move beyond the chatter of emotional reactions and allow the room for compassion to arise. But first, we must learn to witness the ebb and flow of what is, the tides of emotions that move through us, that move through others, with balance, presence and space.

(Continued tomorrow with The Rise And Fall Of Emotions)

 

REMINDER: Don’t forget that tomorrow (Thursday) is the last day for submissions for this week’s Ask Parvati blog. Send your questions to ask@parvatidevi.com.

 

 

Ask Parvati 28: Enlightenment and Emotions - Part 3: What Is The Mind?

PART 3: WHAT IS THE MIND?

(Continued from Enlightenment Now)

“When the walls of a reservoir are destroyed, the waters rush out in all directions. Similarly, when the limitations of restlessness and delusion are removed by meditation, the consciousness of man spreads out to infinity and merges in the omnipresence of Spirit.” - Paramahamsa Yogananda

The mind only knows division. It knows the past as a body of memories. It feels it knows the future as a body of projections. Even though we feel we have lived the past so it is therefore for us “fact”, it is still only a collection of perceptual experiences that make up our reality. It is no more fixed, in essence, than our future, which is a series of perceptual projections based on anticipation and expectation.

When we explore the mind, we see that in fact, it does not exist by any other means than by the energy we give it. We believe our thoughts. We make them fixed. We feel that person hurt us because we experienced that in our past. That is the truth with which we identify. We feel that terrible thing will happen, because that is what we fear. Most of what we think and feel we “know” is a configuration of the mind, mental constructs to help make us feel in control, powerful, important.

But all thoughts are passing. There is no thought that is fixed, permanent or eternal. Thoughts exist within the realm of the temporal. They come. They go. New ones come again. It is the nature of the mind to think, and thinking it does. It goes on and on - thinking - until we bump up against grace and notice that perhaps what we think may not be so fixed and solid after all.

When we look at our lives, we see that what we think in fact is not all that reliable. We think for sure we will get that promotion, or that we won’t get it. We get ourselves all worked up about it, either with excitement or with foreboding. Then the opposite occurs and we are relieved, happy or sad. When the thing we like happens, we are happy. When it does not, we are sad. We are like weathervanes turning in the winds of our passing, ever changing thoughts.

So then what is beyond the mind? Is there something that is not subject to moods, to the ebb and flow, to every whim and change? Does the eternal exist?

Most of us have had, at some point or another, an arresting experience where what we thought was real, turns out to be false. We are shocked, shaken, and a whole new reality opens up to us. In that opening, something magical occurs. Perhaps we notice it. Perhaps we are too afraid of it, so we shake it off and close down again.

If we remain open, we begin to see that between our thoughts is a space, just like the pause that exists between each inhalation and exhalation. In that pause, lies possibility. Yogis have taught this wisdom for millennia through meditation and breathing practices, in which the aspirant learns to observe the space between.

Amma guides us through our attachment to our ego by saying: “By extinguishing the smaller flame of ego, you will lose your identity as a small, limited individual. Nevertheless, this is absolutely nothing compared to what you gain from that apparent loss - the sun of pure knowledge, the inextinguishable light. Also, when you lose your identity as a small, limited self, you become one with the bigger than the biggest, the universe, the unconditional consciousness.”

In the space between, we open up to the field of pure consciousness that has been there all along. It seems that is why our way of understanding change is not the same as how an enlightened being understands change. We see the change we need to make through the lens of our limited, ego self. We either see our self as good, or bad, because that is all the ego can do: divide.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says to Arjuna: "What is day for me is night for all beings, and what is night for me is day for all beings." This reference reminds us that what we perceive with our minds is not the way for the enlightened master.

The change we are inspired to embody in the process of enlightenment is one that dissolves the grip of the mind and opens us to the field of possibility that lies as a substratum beyond it. This, in essence, is at the root of meditation practice and ultimately, enlightenment: becoming one with the space through which pure consciousness arises. Eckhart Tolle goes on to say:

“As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.”

As we begin to loosen the grip of our mind and ego, we create space in which we can explore possibility. Part of what arises in the space is the flow of our emotions. So how do we learn to master that flow along our path to enlightenment?

(Continued tomorrow with Body, Mind, Emotion And Compassion)

 

Ask Parvati 28: Enlightenment and Emotions - Part 2: Enlightenment Now

PART 2: ENLIGHTENMENT NOW

(Continued from What Is Enlightenment?)

“Self-realization is the knowing - in body, mind and soul - that we are one with the omnipresence of God; that we do not have to pray that it come to us, that we are not merely near it at all times, but that God's omnipresence is our omnipresence; that we are just as much a part of Him now as we ever will be. All we have to do is improve our knowing.” - Paramahamsa Yogananda

It is my understanding from my meditation practice, and from guidance from great teachers, that our state of unity with the One already exists, but we, for the most part, cannot see it because we are so busy, so caught up with our mind. This is why great masters tell us, it already is, that we can rest into the perfection of the now.

We on the other hand are used to identifying with our mind, to feeling that our ego is in control. We do not allow ourselves to trust and to let go. It is a bit like we are so focused on a tiny speck of cloud, thinking that it is the entire world, we miss the vastness of the sky and the infinite expanse of the universe. Amma describes this attachment to our ego so beautifully:

“Nobody likes to let go of the ego - it is so precious to everyone. However, once you have attained the state of egolessness, the world won't disappear, as you may think it will. The world will continue, but a chance takes place within you. Something is uncovered. You start seeing everything with the wonder and innocence of a child.”

We know that we are evolving, and that through evolution, we change. So we know that change is part of the process of moving towards enlightenment. However, the greats tell us that enlightenment does not actually involve change in the way most of us would think it to mean.

Most of us see change as to mean “be other than you are”, a sort of moving away from and moving towards something else. Yet the enlightened masters tell us that what we seek does not exist “out there”, but only in the infinite expanse of the now. We are told that what we seek is already here. We are told that what we are is already perfection. Great teachers like Eckhart Tolle say, “You find God the moment you realize that you don't need to seek God.”

Those kinds of thoughts can quickly become mentally confusing. Like the famous Zen koan by the Japanese teacher Hakuin Ekaky, “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?” designed to throw a wrench in the mind’s sense of control, statement from the enlightened can leave us feeling confused, our minds reeling. For example, how can we become enlightened and also not change?

Most of us who are seeking to better ourselves or who consider enlightenment as a goal know that we have bad habits that must be overcome in order for us to evolve. In Sanskrit, teachers refer to these as our “vasanas”, our negative tendencies. We know we get ourselves into painful situations and we would like to stop doing so. So how can we already be in a state of perfection?

It seems that most of us get caught up in “wanting” to be other than we are, and therein lies the rub. We “want” to be free. We “want” to be happy. We “want” enlightenment. We “want” to have fewer emotional reactions or more emotional connection, so we live with anticipations and expectations, in dissonance with the fullness of the present moment. How many of us know how to let go and be with what actually is, now?

Eckhart Tolle says, “Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.”

The benevolent group of channeled guides from the Causal Realm known warmly as The Team beautifully repeat in most of their teachings that we are to practice non-resistance to what is. In previous blog entries, I have explored this idea in many different ways. If we are to move into an enlightened state and flow with emotions with wisdom compassion, we must practice non-resistance to what is.

We tend to live in a push/pull dynamic, resisting what is because we deem it “bad”, or we grab onto it because we deem it “good”. This is what the mind does. It divides. It categorizes. It tries to control, so that we feel important. But we are told that enlightenment is beyond the mind, so we know that somehow, the mind, our thoughts and our ego interfere with the experience of enlightenment.

We speak of the mind easily, as though we understand what it is. But what is the mind? How does it interfere with our evolutionary journey towards the One? And how do we get beyond it?

(Continued tomorrow with What Is The Mind?)