Our immediate experience of life can be summed up by how we feel about things. How we feel about ourselves, other people and the world around us. Emotions and feelings are part of life. How you feel about something will create an emotional response, but feelings and emotions can be quite differently expressed. Feelings relate to the internal experience (or our internal reaction to stimuli) and emotions are the external expression (or our reactions). The easiest way to consider the difference is that emotions are usually played out in drama around you. Feelings are subjective and internalised. To take this one step further, what you feel inside may not be reflected by what you show externally. For example, you may feel sad inside, but this may be externalised as anger (emotionally) to others. Alternatively, I have met many people who are meek and unassuming, yet when I delve deeper there is usually seething anger that’s buried, hidden below their mild persona.
Whether internal or external, feelings and emotions are labelled good and some are labelled bad. Most of the time we know and understand what initiated the feeling or emotion and relate to it with some clarity and sometimes, we don’t know what caused us to feel a certain way. At this point, whether you know the origin or not, I need you to accept that whatever you experience is a part of you and your experience of life. A lot of the time you will automatically do what comes naturally, like laugh or cry. There’s a gamut of emotional responses and a gamut of causes. Many people move through life accepting whatever their responses are to what happens to and around them without question. People choosing to consciously journey also accept, yet with a difference, they choose to understand their responses. Especially the perceived negative ones.
It is when you recognise that a feeling stays with you and it begins to impact you subjectively or your associations with others, that you should investigate what is REALLY happening. This is a large part of being conscious and it is the first step in truly engaging as a force of humility. Check in with yourself constantly how you are impacting others and certainly remember to check in with how you are impacting your Self.
How you relate to and perceive your feelings and emotions is very important. It is our habit to glorify the positive ones and attempt to squash and ignore the negative ones. Often we attempt to remove the negative by any means possible. Some ignore them, others medicate to dull or use a variety of drugs and addictions to distance themselves from them. The ambiguity here is that we revel and allow positive feelings and emotions to flow and be expressed and negative are repressed. The truth is, facing negative feelings and understanding their roots will open you up to allowing more of the positive ones into your life.
Let’s rather speak of Light and Dark to replace positive and negative. If the Light in you is expressed as happiness, the Dark would be expressed as sadness. If Light is love, then Dark is hate. For each expression, there is an opposite to it.
Consider these two quotes:
The only devils in this world are those running around in our own hearts, and that is where all our battles should be fought ~ Mahatma Gandhi
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an uprooted small corner of evil.
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.”
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
Gandhi’s quote is a call for us to look within. It eloquently describes our personal responsibility to how we function in the world. Consider how often we 'point the finger' at others, ready to blame, criticise, humiliate, judge and condemn. When it's suggested that we point the same finger at ourselves we rebuke it immediately as unnecessary nonsense. In fact, we can be prone to defensiveness when it's suggested. Defiantly we announce, ‘I’m a nice person’. That’s no lie, however, there is still a call to action in the announcement to prove it. How many times have you seen this other Gandhi-ism, 'Be the change you want to see in the world' then thought how profound and true it is, shared a meme on social media that depicts it and received a heap of ‘Likes’ for it? Perhaps for a moment or longer you would 'be’ that change you want to see and then life gets in the way and you find yourself being the same You, living in the same world. That’s how fleetingly we engage with the deeper truths of ourselves. It is the habit and certainly not fashionable in New Age circles to speak of our deep dark spaces, or as Gandhi put it, ‘the devils in our own hearts’, because the idea to entertain any darkness, it is suggested, is to invite more darkness in. So the tagline of ‘Love and Light’, is commonly used to deny the darkness. There’s nothing wrong with ‘Love and Light’ and I encourage you to resonate with it, but always with the awareness that it is just half the story. Try this for size… ‘Love and Light To Your Dark Night’, which is balanced and a call to reflect and to receive.
The second quote, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, describes the ‘devil in the detail’ of Gandhi’s quote. Two individuals from remarkably different cultures describe the heart of humanity perfectly. Solzhenitsyn wrote many things with the same essential lesson from personal experience and witness of the suffering of others.
From Solzhenitsyn again, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it was necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
We are stuck with the evil that dwells within us and to deny that is an evil in itself. Those who deny it always find themselves shattering and paying for their deception in some way. Choosing happiness is one thing, but expecting it to last while you are denying the inner darkness that triggers your anger, sadness, anxiety, frustration, guilt, humiliation and depression is foolish and irresponsible. You cannot be truly happy and joyous without a great relationship with your more uncomfortable aspects. When referring to good and evil, I refer to Light and Dark aspects of ourselves. Just as there are differing levels of light and dark, good and evil have gradients, however with good and evil the level of intensity is better described as engagement. That means, minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day and so on, you choose to what extent you engage with good and evil within you. Consider this, given the same circumstances, all of us will perform acts of extreme good and extreme evil. There’s a beautiful story that comes from the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. An elderly woman faced a man who had violently tortured and murdered her son and husband. Part of the process allowed for the victims families to speak directly to the persecutors. The woman was asked how she felt justice should be done considering the devastating loss the man had inflicted on her family. The man bent his head to listen to her. She asked for three things. The first was to be taken to where her husband was burned, so she could gather up the dust and give him a decent burial. The second was to ask the man to visit her in the ghetto twice a month to share a meal with her so she could pour out to him whatever love she had left to give. The third was for him to understand that she offers her forgiveness. To honour her husband whose last words were, ‘Father, forgive them’ and because ‘Jesus Christ died for us to forgive’, she asked to be assisted to walk over to the man, take him in her arms, embrace him and tell him he is truly forgiven. Overwhelmed by what he had just heard, the man fainted. In the courtroom the families, friends, neighbours who had all suffered years of oppression began singing ‘Amazing Grace’. Two extremes of experience met face to face, energy to energy met in that moment. Instead of the expected hatred, bile and a call for his execution, which would epitomise his experience of evil, he received a download of unparalleled grace, which his brutal past had never prepared him for.* It stands out to me from this story that the elderly black woman had two choices, not that I believe that she considered the choice of hatred in that particular moment, because she would have relied on her strength of faith and processing what she truly felt was appropriate up to that moment, but that she had the tools within herself to choose the way of love, rather than choosing the knee-jerk, commonly all-too-human response of attack and hatred.
Looking at the extremes of good and evil in this story, and they are extreme,
What separates us is our experiences, perceptions, values, rules and beliefs
Consider the most recognisable graphic expression of harmony and balance of the Yin and Yang symbol.
It characterises how seemingly opposite forces are complementary. Both sides give rise to each other to illustrate how interrelated they are and interconnected. Yin and Yang depicts hot and cold, fire and water, male and female as well and light and dark and any other opposites. Neither can exist in balance and harmony without the other. To look at it another way, hot means nothing without a concept of cold and light means nothing without a concept of what darkness is. Very importantly, recognise that both sides create a whole, not a dualistic pair, a whole and complete entity. Just like YOU.
Without Darkness, Light has no form. Without bringing Light into the Darkness, you can’t see things with any clarity. Imagine living in light all the time, like a bright sphere. There’s no shadow, just light. Add a few corners, where secrets can hide, your once bright spherical abode all of a sudden is more interesting. It’s been given form that only the shadow in a corner can deliver. Without shadow there’s nothing to give form to walls, chairs, tables or anything. Conversely the same can be said for living in a dark environment. See how both the Light and Dark need each other to allow for depth and richness of living. Similarly, without being able to genuinely live as the Lightest version of your Self, you cannot deny your Darkness. It gains you depth and in turn lifts you into a being of great power. If you force yourself into living in the Light without developing a great relationship with your Darkness, you will soon fall apart and very likely into depression, become anxious or overwhelmed. Depression, anxiety and panic are calls to action from your Soul to go deep into your Darkness. Anything you deny will demand attention. In the dark, light shines its brightest and the shadow aspects of your Self are where you’ll find the source of your greatest potential. It’s unsustainable to live a balanced and harmonious life if you reject a part of you which balances you.
How does the Dark express itself in you?
Most of us walk into life wanting happiness. We search for people to share our journey with us because we are social animals and because we are all creative (communicating, cooking, expressions of love etc) in some way and an integral part of creativity is to have other people to share it with. At all times you have an influence in creating Life for yourself. As you journey through life you’ll meet and will have met individuals who trigger aspects of yourself that cause you to respond in ways that bring up your more negative aspects. Situations arise at work or in social settings where someone will trigger responses that send you into a negative spin. Rather than delve too deeply into individual situations right now, just acknowledge that what these triggers do for you is make you aware of the darker elements of your-Self.
It doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, it means you’re a human with a history. Already you seem more interesting!
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