当下的力量 5

EMOTION: THE BODY'S REACTION TO YOUR MIND

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

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 build-up 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.

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You sap that an emotion is the mind's reflection in the body. But sometimes there is a conflict between the two: the mind saps "no" while the emotion saps "yes,' or the other way around.

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.

So observing our emotions is as important as observing our thoughts?

Yes. Make it a habit to ask yourself. What’s going on inside me at this moment? That question will point you in the right direction. But don't analyze, just watch. Focus your attention within. Feel the energy of the emotion. If there is no emotion present, take your attention more deeply into the inner energy field of your body. It is the doorway into Being.

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An emotion usually represents an amplified and energized thought pattern, and because of its often overpowering energetic charge, it is not easy initially to stay present enough to be able to watch it. It wants to take you over, and it usually succeeds — unless there is enough presence in you. If you are pulled into unconscious identification with the emotion through lack of presence, which is normal, the emotion temporarily becomes "you." Often a vicious circle builds up between your thinking and the emotion: they feed each other. The thought pattern creates a magnified reflection of itself in the form of an emotion, and the vibrational frequency of the emotion keeps feeding the original thought pattern. By dwelling mentally on the situation, event, or person that is the perceived cause of the emotion, the thought feeds energy to the emotion, which in turn energizes the thought pattern, and so on.

Basically, all emotions are modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond name and form. Because of its undifferentiated nature, it is hard to find a name that precisely describes this emotion. "Fear" comes close, but apart from a continuous sense of threat, it also includes a deep sense of abandonment and incompleteness. It may be best to use a term that is as undifferentiated as that basic emotion and simply call it "pain." One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove that emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. The mind can never find the solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the solution, because it is itself an intrinsic part of the "problem." Imagine a chief of police trying to find an arsonist when the arsonist is the chief of police. You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego. The mind is then toppled from its place of power and Being reveals itself as your true nature.

情绪：身体对思维的反应

情绪是什么？我陷入情绪的时间比陷入思维的时间多。

我这里所说的“思维”，不仅仅是指思考，还包括你的情绪以及所有无意识的心理——情绪反应模式。情绪在思维和身体的相遇处产生。它是身体对思维的反应——或者可以说，它是思维在身体上的反映。比如，一个攻击性的想法或敌对的想法会聚集你体内的被我们称为愤怒的能量。这时身体准备开始战斗。身体上和精神上受到威胁的想法促使身体收缩，这就是我们所谓的恐惧在身体上的反映。研究显示，强烈的情感甚至会导致身体的生理变化。这些生理变化代表着情绪的身体层面或物质层面。当然，你通常不会意识到你所有的思维模式，通常只有通过观察你的情感，你才能对它们保持意识。

你被你的思维、喜好、判断以及分析控制得越多，也就是说你的观察者意识越少的话，你的情绪能量的负荷就会越强，不管你是否意识到了这一点。如果你不能感受到你的情绪，或是切断了与情绪的联系，那么你最终会在纯生理这一层面体验到它们，它们会以生理问题或疾病的形式出现。近几年来，有许多关于此方面的文章，所以在这里我们不需要再来细说。强烈的无意识情感模式可能会显化成发生在你身上的外部事件。比如，我观察到那些内心充满愤怒而没有意识到这一点，也没有表达愤怒的人，更容易从言语上或身体上遭受其他愤怒之人的莫名其妙的攻击。这是因为他们散发着强烈的愤怒波动，被某人无意识地接收，从而引爆了这个人自己内心潜伏的愤怒。

如果你很难感受你的情绪，那么请先试着将注意力集中在你身体的内在能量场上。从里至外感受你的身体。这将会使你感受到你的情绪。稍后我们将会对此做详细的讨论。

你说情绪是思维在身体上的反映，但是有时这两者之间也会发生分歧：当思维说“不”时，情绪可能会说“好”，或者反之。

如果你真的想了解你的思维，身体总是会给你一个真实的反映，所以请在你体内去看或是感受它。如果两者之间有明显的分歧，那么思维永远是说谎的一方，情绪则始终是真实的。这里所说的真实，并不是指你是谁的终极真理，而是你当时思维状态的相对真实。

表面的思维和无意识的精神活动之间的冲突当然是很常见的。你也许还不能把无意识的思维活动变成有觉知的，并感受到它，但它总是会以一种情绪的方式在身体上反映出来，好让你能察觉到它。运用这种方式来观察情绪，和“倾听或观察思维”有异曲同工之妙。唯一的区别是，思维存在于你的大脑里，情感却具有强烈的生理成分，所以你可以在体内感觉到它。然后，你可允许情绪的存在，但却不要受它控制。你不再是你的情绪，而是一个观察者。如果你这样做，所有无意识的东西都将会被意识之光所照亮。

所以，观察我们的情绪像观察我们的思维一样重要吗？

是的。你应该习惯这样问自己：“此刻，我内在发生了什么事情？”这个问题将会把你引向正确的方向。但是，请不要进行分析，观察就可以了。请将你的注意力集中于内在，并且去感觉情绪的能量。如果没有情绪存在，那么请更深地去关注你身体的内在能量场。这就是进入本体的大门。

情绪通常代表着一个被强化的以及被注入能量的思维模式，由于它的能量是蓄势待发的，所以一开始我们不容易维持临在的意识而观察到它。它要控制你，而且它通常都会得逞——除非你有足够的临在意识。如果你由于缺乏临在意识而陷入无意识的情绪认同之中，这是很正常的，而且这种情绪会暂时地变成“你”。通常，在你的思维和情绪之间有一个恶性循环：它们相依为命。思维模式通过情绪创造了一种它自己的被放大了的反应，而情绪的振动频率又一直为原来的思维模式注入活力。

基本上来说，所有的情绪都是一种原始的、无差别的情绪的变形，这种情绪源自我们不清楚自己在名字和身体之外究竟是谁。由于它的无差别性，我们很难找到一个准确描述这种情绪的名称。恐惧可能是最贴近的一个答案，但是除了不断地感到威胁之外，它还包括一种深深的被遗弃感和不完整感。我们把它称为“痛苦”是很合适的，因为它和前面说的那种最基本的情绪一样，是无差别的。思维的一个主要任务就是反抗或消除这种情绪上的痛苦，这也是思维活动如此之多的原因。然而思维顶多也只能暂时地将痛苦掩盖住。实际上，思维越是努力去摆脱这种痛苦，痛苦就会越深。思维永远不会找到解决方案，它也不会让你找到解决方案，因为它本身就是问题的一部分。请试想一下本身是纵火犯的警察头目努力寻找纵火犯的情形。除非你停止从思维认同中获取你的自我感，否则你将不会从痛苦中解放出来。只有停止思维认同，你的思维才会丧失它的力量，本体才会以你原来的本性显露出来。