Dear Ram,
I’ve a question for you. I hope you will keep your answer simple. As you know I am perennially short of time.
The question is: what is emotion? What
exactly is it?
Ram:
OK. I’ll try to keep it simple but don’t count on it. It’s a deep topic and needs a bit of
background.
As usual everything starts with the
Self, pure consciousness. The Self is
free of thought and emotion. It does not
change. It is energyless. But it has within in the power to change, to
become. This power is called Maya or
Maya Shakti. When Maya operates, the
world is projected from within the Self where it has been hidden. The first stage of the world is energy, shakti. When the
Shakti is seen through the senses it appears solid, as matter. Before human beings come into being the
insentient cosmos, made of the shakti in the form of
the five elements, is formed over trillions of years. Then the shakti
evolves the sentient beings. Sentient
beings range from unicellular organisms to man, from the simple to the
complex. The sentient beings are the
Self with three bodies, causal, subtle and gross. These three bodies are shakti,
energy in subtle patterns, that act as vehicles for the flow of pure
shakti. Life is the Self in the form of
energy flowing through the three bodies into the world. When it flows into the physical body, it can
act. The Subtle body is made of three
vehicles or limbs, the emotions, the intellect, and the ego. The ego is the subtlest vehicle, the first to
receive the flow of shakti. When shakti flows
into the ego it apparently becomes an individual, a jiva. In fact the shakti
is impersonal and is never contaminated by the vehicle through which it is
operating. Next it flows into the
intellect, what in the West we call the mind, activating it and giving the ego
the power to think. The thoughts are shakti in the form of certain subtle bursts of energy. Then the shakti
flows into the emotions which are grosser energy patterns capable of moving
(e-mote means ‘to move from’ as in motion, motivation, etc.) the body in
response to commands coming from the ego through the intellect. The Sanskrit term is manas, and actually
means mind... so there is a potential for confusion here. The
emotions are just flowing shakti or desire. Shakti becomes desire when it flows into the
Causal Body and Ego. In itself the
Shakti wants nothing. It is just pure
formless energy. But when it associates
with an individual (jiva) that does not know who it is, i.e. that it is the
Self, it turns into desire. For what? For the things in the world that
are meant to make it feel whole and complete, satisfied. When the shakti is
flowing nicely toward the objects and the things that the ego wants are
manifesting in a reasonable way, one feels emotionally satisfied. This emotional satisfaction is just the
experience of the shakti, the energy which, since it
is actually the Self, is pure bliss.
Depending on the nature of the individual’s past experiences, the
vasanas, different positive feelings manifest: euphoria, love, pleasure, etc.
and these feelings give rise to creative activities. But alas, the shakti
often gets obstructed and this causes the negative emotions, usually in some
sort of chain reaction...because the shakti is dynamic and will not sit
still. So when an individual sees that
something that it wants is not going to manifest, or is not manifesting when it
wants (meaning it is tormented by its desire for the object) or when it
manifests an object it doesn’t want, the shakti changes state and turns to
anger, the primary emotion, which, if allowed to activate the body, can cause a
lot of havoc in the world. If not, it
causes dis ease in the body. As noted, the shakti is constantly changing and eventually collapses into
depression. If depression persists
delusion arises and if it becomes a constant emotional state, it eventually
clouds the intellect and discrimination is lost and finally, as the texts, say,
“the soul perishes.” There are many
names for all the subtle varieties of the primary emotions, anger and
depression, but they are all just energy in a blocked or collapsed state. The texts don’t bother to list them all
because people doing inner work on the shakti directly
and/or the thoughts that are causing the blockages.
The emotions are the grossest layer
of the Subtle Body. And, as mentioned
above, they are down line from the ego and intellect. When a person finds that his or her emotions
are regularly disturbed it usually indicates that the ego has identified itself
with a faulty view in the intellect and that causes it to be attached to the
particular vasana arising. This causes
the shakti to get blocked upstream and causes the
negative emotions to arise.
When the ego understands that it is
whole and complete, the vasanas exhaust, its desire for objects burns out, the shakti flows unobstructed through the subtle and gross
bodies and things are emotionally fine.
And conversely, as long as one hangs onto the view that one is
inadequate and tries to obtain some worldly situation or object to prove that
it is adequate, it will suffer negative emotions.
Edward: What is it for ?
What purpose does it serve ?
Ram:
From the inside out, to move you, to get what you want. When you have formed a picture in the
intellect of what you want you need energy to materialize it. In a recent e-mail you said that your visit
to
From the outside
in, to alert the Subtle body to changes in the environment.
The emotions, manas, are referred to as a ‘body’ because bodies are
instruments through which the conscious being transacts with the world. I’ve seen the manas referred to as ‘a counter
across which experience (feeling) is transacted.” Just as the physical body acts as a counter
across which sense information is transmitted, the manas is
the instrument that interacts with the field of emotions. Human beings are entities situated in a vast
field of emotional energy, a collective pool of positive and negative energies
that can either uplift the mind or drag it down. When those jets crashed into the
Edward: Do different emotions have different natures
and different
purposes ?
Ram:
Yes. When the manas
becomes very subtle it can pick up on the pure emanations of Shakti and
follow them to their source, the Self.
This is called bhakti and there are many stages of bhakti, from rather
gross to exceptionally sublime. In
certain people, women particularly, the manas is more
refined than the intellect and it becomes an instrument of inquiry. Uma is one of
those. Her manas is nearly as refined as
is humanly possible, what is called emotional intelligence, so she has had a
very wide range of Self experience since her teens, the kind of mind blowing
experiences that are spoken of in the yogic texts, and understands the
teachings of Vedanta ‘intuitively.’ I had
very few actual verbal satsangs with her before her Self realization. And the information I gave in response to a
question that arose directly from her experience was exceptionally simple, a
four word sentence, but it took her home because she could ‘feel’ it. She cooks like a master chef although she has
had no formal training because she can feel the shakti
in the food. She’ll never mix
incompatible energies because they stress the digestive fire. This is all done through feeling. The Self pervades the whole organism. It informs and regulates the three bodies,
the three limbs of the Subtle body, and the senses, so
the Self is accessible through any of them.
The poses of Hatha Yoga, for example, when
performed in a certain sequence, can cause Self experience. I know this from personal experience.
In grosser people, the emotions are
obviously connected to ideas. Jealousy,
which I find particularly repugnant, is about controlling the object of one’s
desire. The intellect, which in unevolved people plays handmaiden to the ego, knows that
the ego is very attached to a certain feeling, what is incorrectly referred to
as love, and needs a particular object to activate that feeling. So it generates this emotion to frighten the
object into submission by clamping a heavy emotional chain around the subtle
body of the beloved.
You told me to keep the word count
down so I won’t run on but there is another whole overlay that adds a lot to
the discussion of emotion and that is the topic of the gunas, the three
universal energies. When you get into
it your realize emotion is an interesting kind of universal language, a way of
looking at the Shakti, the Self as experience.
Since you enjoyed the discussion above I decided to write up a short
essay on the gunas and their relationship to the emotions.
The gunas and their relationship to
emotion
As I mentioned above everything that
we experience on any level is Shakti functioning on the Gross and Subtle
levels. Emotion, for example is Shakti
playing in one limb (the Mind) of the Subtle Body. The Shakti has three ‘modes’ or forms,
called gunas. You will perhaps recall
my discussion in Chapter Three of Meditation, Inquiry into the Self, of the
three gunas, the energies in the mind and material nature. These gunas, or ropes, bind the mind and
affect the quality of ones thinking and feelings. The type and quality of the emotions are related
to these energies. Psychologically, they
are situated up line from the emotions, in the subtlest part of the Self, the
Causal Body. The Causal Body (karana
sharira in Sanskrit), or what is called the Unconscious mind in the West, is
‘causal’ because it causes the thoughts
and feelings that arise in the Subtle Body... which in turn outpicture as
karmas, experience in the three ‘worlds’.
The three worlds are the world of action, the world of emotional
experience, and the world of thoughts, ideas, and concepts. Perhaps you can read the description of the
three gunas in my book to save me writing them all out here.
These three forms of the Shakti play
continually in every aspect of the manifested universe, the material world and
the world of mind, the Subtle Body. In
the Subtle Body, one predominates for a period, then another, then the third -
according to their relative proportions in the Causal Body. The Subtle Body is never free of them. The two ‘lower’ energies, rajas and tamas,
are responsible for the primary emotions of fear and desire. Fear is a consequence of not knowing. If I invest money in the stock market I’m not
certain that the market will go up.
Therefore I fear the loss of my money.
People fear the dark, not because it is dark but because it is very
difficult to get knowledge in the dark.
Fear is tamasic. Tamas is a
veiling kind of energy, like a cloud. It
has slow, sleepy waves that obscure perception and therefore knowledge. Jealousy is tamasic. The person fears the loss of a person to whom
it is attached. It also has a rajasic or passionate aspect. The fear arises because of the contemplated loss of
the pleasure associated with the object/person.
Desire is rajasic. Whereas Tamas
is heavy and almost inert, Rajas is a very volatile, unstable energy. It is called vikeshepa shakti,
or projecting energy. It causes rapid
and numerous blasts of stimulating, exciting energy to arise in the Subtle
Body. If you were to record it on a
graph it would generate a pattern of tall spikes and deep troughs. Whereas Tamas is a protective and defensive,
Rajas is a very aggressive outgoing energy.
Perhaps you’re familiar with it.
Lust is rajasic. It needs to
capture and posses the object it desires.
This often takes a lot of work so it supplies boundless motivation. But it is very demanding on the Subtle Body
and eventually collapses into Tamas, exhaustion. The feeling of being emotionally burned out
is tamasic. Envy is rajasic. It wants something it doesn’t have. Depression, sloth, is tamasic. It’s energy pattern
is more or less a flat line. The mind
is so sludgy that it cannot think and cannot therefore come up with the
solution to one’s problems. Rajas and tamas are like incestuous lovers. Where you find one you will usually find the
other. Anger, blocked desire, is
rajasic but can lead to delusion (tamas) if it is allowed to dominate the
Subtle Body. Greed is rajasic. Hate is rajasic. But it is inspired by Tamas, the fear that
comes from lack of understanding.
Cruelty is tamasic, an attempt to push away or destroy objects that one
fears. Possessiveness is rajasic, an
attempt to keep objects that one desires.
It could also be considered tamasic, the attempt to hold on to what one
fears losing. If you look into fear and
desire you will see that they are basically two sides of the same coin,
different ways of viewing the same situation, one ‘positive’ (rajas) and the
other negative (tamas). The coin in this
case is the belief that one is limited, inadequate and incomplete. All the negative emotions are either rajasic
or tamasic. It seems strange perhaps to
classify passion and desire and excitement as negative because they seem
positive with reference to sloth and fear, for example, but with reference to
sattva, the third energy, they are negative.
All the positive emotions, love,
charity, tenderness, compassion, generosity, etc, are rooted in sattva. Sattva is a very subtle energy. Whereas Tamas is fundamentally opaque, Sattva
is like a fine translucent film. When it
is playing in the Subtle Body one is intellectually clear and emotionally
happy. The reason for this is that the
Self, (Chit, Consciousness) which is shining on and pervading the Subtle Body,
is not dissipated by Rajas or obscured and absorbed by Tamas but is intensified
and reflected. The Self is the source of
happiness because its nature is bliss (wholeness) and awareness. This happiness is not felt when the mind is
tamasic and only intermittently appreciated when it is rajasic. We are most happy when we are most aware
because we understand what we are experiencing and doubt, Tamas, does not arise. Doubt is not a happy state because it
confuses and agitates the Subtle Body, the instrument of experience.
How does one create an emotionally
happy Subtle Body? By removing the
relative proportions of Rajas and Tamas and increasing Sattva. When practiced in the right spirit with the right understanding all spiritual practices increase
Sattva. The big advantage of this way of
seeing emotion lies in its impersonality.
It is not identifying the source of emotional dysfunction as rooted in
past trauma but in the universal qualities comprising the mind.
I hope this answers your
question. If it doesn’t there probably
isn’t an answer or I haven’t understood the question.
Love,
Ram