The Illusion of Emotion Hold Your Horses and Don’t Get Pulled In

On the subject matter of non-self, consciousness, awareness, spiritual awakenings and psychic energy, I recently posted this Nisargadatta quote on Facebook:

“On what we think as REAL taking your idea of yourself for example: “You cling to personality, but you are conscious of being a person only when you are in trouble; when you’re not in trouble you do not think of yourself.”

And I did so because I came to this quote rather magically (I believe in magic@!) after having an experience that relates to the quote itself.

Someone asked, “But how do we overcome thinking about ourselves when not in trouble?”

Logical question; good question I suppose. Surely, I don’t have all the answers but perhaps my humble speculation will be of some use to someone, other than my self. Let me share my experience and that may be self-explanatory.

The other day I was in a place of no-fear, no- desire, non-attachment and for the most part this is what we may call a contented happiness state. I say it that way because extreme happiness – or the kind of cartwheels in the street and jumping up and down type of glee is really the result of some type of attachment. But life itself, the marriage of consciousness to life is contented happiness. A state of (for the most part) non-self, just merged with the harmony of life, flowing in harmony with what is and this type of non-self. No strong desire, no craving, no yearning, no fear, no anger, no frustration—like that. Those are states that attach us to self—thinking of our self. We may say, as the Buddhists do, that these are states of self-cherishing.

I was in such a state of flow with life; neither here nor there; doing what comes natural; no strong push or desire—and just letting the mind become blank periodically. And then—DRAMA WALKS IN THE DOOR!

So here comes this energy around me and it feels like it sucks you into your body. In fact we have expressions like this—“I got sucked into that” or we say “I got pulled into it”. That’s how it felt quite dramatically and literally. My ‘self’ wanted to become engaged with the energy and I felt my consciousness being pulled back into ‘self’ when moments earlier I was in a state (more rather than less) of non-self: no fear, no desire, no attachment—only flow. Now the flow was being yanked and tugged by my ‘sense of self’–mostly self-identity.

You know how it goes when one begins to feel insulted, right? That feeling comes up in us and we say things like, “Do they know who they are talking to?!” It’s ME, the all-important ‘me’!! Yeah, personality was starting to think about how it was receiving an insult.

I’ve heard it said, “A spark of truth can burn up a mountain of lies.” The truth that I could return to being an atom of existence or let myself be pulled in was before me—a choice.

When I remembered this—when I remembered that the energy which the personality was being tempted to wrestle with, the energy that was starting to be sucked in by the personality began to dissolved once I remembered the nature of reality being illusion.

Oh yeah, trust me—I know. Been there and done that so many times I’m an expert at making illusion really real! It’s all a play of cosmic matter.

When we become identified personally with any energy we become a slave to it.

When, on the other hand we remember what I heard my higher mind saying at that moment that I began to become sucked in which was IT’S NOT REAL, the “self” subsides and mind merges back into the previous state of no fear, no desire, no attachments, no anger, no craving and so on—everything decreases and wanes and subsides into silence.

Then we stand apart from the illusion having not been sucked in and we become master of the energy instead of the other way around.

Footnote: I am grateful for the experience from the Drama Queen because I don’t think I’ve experienced the energy quite so clearly and witnessed the two opposite states so dramatically and felt the pull in such a profound way!