Learning to deal with emotions you
don’t want in you, requires a deeper understanding of yourself. You are the
source of all your joy, your miseries, your habits and your overall attitude to
Life.
Fundamentally, no one wants to be
angry or sad, worrisome or anxious, fearful or complaining. Ask anyone and you
will be told that all they want is to be happy. Yet why do the other emotions
come into play?
The simplest way to understand this
is to know yourself. Let’s say someone did something nasty to you. Broke your
trust, or cheated you or conspired against you. Then your entire system erupts
in response and emotions like anger and hatred come to the fore. “How dare you?”
and “Let me teach you a lesson!” are the manifestations of these emotions. And
you project your anger or hatred on that person or on that object. That is
really of no use. Because while that person will perish, at times, unable to
bear your shower of negativity, the source also gets scarred. And the source is
you. So, if you want to check your emotions, go to the source. This happens
also when you are sad. Someone dies. And you feel sad. You feel infinitely sad
for days, weeks, months. The person who died is no longer there, the object of
your grief is absent. But you keep on projecting your emotion on your memories.
These emotional projections are like cinematic projections. They are magnified
and become larger that you! They rule you, possess you only because you allow
them to. For them to become inconsequential, you must go to the source. And
that source is within you, not in the object that you project your emotions on.
So, if you want to get rid of your anger or sorrow or fears or anxiety, stop
focusing on what triggered it and focus inside you, on what’s continuing to cause
it! You will need to turn off the projector if you want to stop the projection!
We are doing this projection business
all the time. With a variety of emotions. In India people go to the beach for
various reasons early in the morning. A jogger sees the rising sun in the Bay
of Bengal and feels refreshed and energized. A child sees it and is excited
about wanting to make sand castles. A man sprinkling the ashes of his dear
father who he has just died the previous evening, wonders sadly, fearfully,
anxiously, how the first day of his Life without his father will be. A lady
looks at the sun and later at the sea, which appears surreptitiously calm,
fearfully and angrily wondering how it will react the next moment – because that
has been her experience with the tsunami of 2004 when she lost her entire
family! The fact is that the sun and the sea are the same. It is the same sun
and sea that people are seeing. But each one’s projection is different.
So the hatred, the sorrow, the
fear, the worrying about that comes out on to objects that are causing you to behave
that way are actually a reflection of how you are at the source. Some part of
you dies each time you express yourself with any of these negative, debilitating
emotions.
That’s why in Buddhism, everyone is
encouraged to be a Buddha. And a Buddha is about compassion. In being unmoved
by what’s coming at him or her, the Buddha projects compassion, because she or
he is compassionate at the core. To reach that state, we only have one way, to understand
who we are. We are all centers of love. If we bail out all the negativity in
us, what will be left is love. Become that center of love, and you will be
unmoved. In fact, you will attract everyone in the Universe, just as a magnet does.
Osho, the
Master, often shared this marvelous Zen story: “One of the greatest of Zen Masters,
Lin Chi, used to say, “While I was young I was very fascinated by boating. I
had one small boat, and I would go on the lake alone. For hours together I
would remain there.” Once it happened that with closed eyes I was in my boat
meditating on the beautiful night. One empty boat came floating downstream and
struck my boat. My eyes were closed, so I thought, ‘Someone is here with his
boat, and he has struck my boat.’ Anger arose. I opened my eyes and I was just
going to say something to that man in anger, then I realized that the boat was
empty. Then there was no way to move. To whom could I express the anger? The
boat was empty. It was just floating downstream, and it had come and struck my
boat. So there was nothing to do. There was no possibility to project the anger
on an empty boat.” So Lin Chi said, “I closed my eyes. The anger was there, but
finding no way out, I closed my eyes and just floated backward with the anger.
And that empty boat became my realization. I came to a point within myself in
that silent night. That empty boat was my Master. And now if someone comes and
insults me, I laugh and I say, ‘This boat is also empty.’ I close my eyes and I
go within.””
Maybe you
may want to use this technique of the empty boat. It works miraculously!
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