Emotion vs. Feeling

[Dover]

Some of us will be participating in the Oprah/Tolle class next week, so I thought I'd post something from his earlier book, The Power Of Now, about emotion:



"Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance. But they are not what I would call emotions."

..............................................



Question: What about emotions? I get caught up in my emotions more than I do in my mind.

Tolle: 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.

Question: 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.

Tolle: 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.

Cont'd on page 2

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[I Have A Dream]

1. This is really good. Thank you for posting it, Dover.

I have "The Power of Now" but haven't been able to make myself read it. Maybe if I took it in chunks like this, I'd be able to get through it. (I think that it's a really important book that I need to read.)

[Dover]

2. Yeah, I read it in chunks when I first got it. And I think that's a great way to

go about it. It seems like that may be a benefit with the upcoming class too. I hope we can all discuss this stuff. My mind will tie me in knots if I let it, with this material, which is a clever way to NOT let it in.

I have experienced this joy and peace in my life and it does eminate from a very different place than emotions.
And while I still waver in and out of this still place, practicing presence always brings me back to it. So even if someone doesn't 'get it' with their mind, if they can just practice that stillness that leads to presence, they will get there eventually. I was well on my way to that place even before Tolle's book came along. But he clarified it and brought it even more strongly into consciousness, which was like an affirmation that I was headed in the right direction.

[Dover]

3. Dream, I was thinking about what you have said now a couple of times

about sensing that Tolle's work was important and that you 'needed' to read it, which I understood to mean that you have a resistance to it to overcome. You might look more closely at what is behind the resistance energy or the 'should' instead of trying to simply overcome it. Who knows, there might be more importance in that awareness than the book could provide right now.
There is something about that "need to" that sounds more like a 'should' or duty, which is never a very strong motivator. At least not for me. "Need to" is not the same as "want to" or ready to. I've come across books that I too sensed were important but knew I was not ready for on some level. I tried, but I just couldn't penetrate them or get focused. So I put them on the shelf, and sometimes it was years later that I went back to them, at last hungry for the reading and ready for their message. Might what you are calling 'attention deficit' be related to an inner resistance to what feels like a should rather than a calling or readiness?

I don't know how much hunger and readiness is tied to that 'need' you mentioned, but just thought I'd share that.