Emotions in the Mirror

From moment to moment in our respective lives we experience many different emotions, happiness, anger, sorrow, exuberance, etc. Every moment of everyday is filled with these experiences, they define our moods and resulting action associated with those moods. In every instance of any decision we make about ourselves, others, or things, we base our opinions and reactions on these emotions.

From the time we are born we learn constantly, what we like what we do not like, things that we have no opinion on at all, all of which is passed on to us through a variety of sensory and experiential actions as well as conditioned responses from previous experience. I say previous experience even at birth as we can see that even a new born baby will display immediate likes and dislikes within the first moments of life, and in doing so display previous conditioned responses to there current situation.

When we think of these emotions we as humans will almost always use terminology in or speech that relates these emotions to some other thing, be it a person or thing, and example is ‘he made me angry…she makes me happy�? we relate all our emotions in this way. Presuming in our very words that these things posses the powers and qualities of these emotions and maintain, in their existence, the ability to produce emotions in us. As we speak these simple statements thought our lives we create conditioning within ourselves furthering this belief of the power of things and other to be the cause of our emotional state, blaming others for our anger, attaching to things as the reason for our happiness, perpetuating this cycle of conditioning that produces suffering when we experience these actions. When we look closely at our emotions and where their root causes are, we can come to many realizations of their true nature. Examining each emotion in this way will illustrate the lack of ‘power�?things and others have in producing anything at all within the individual.

So lets look at the most destructive of our emotions, the one that causes each of us continued suffering thought our lives, anger. We as human being develop from the time of birth, the sense of self. In doing so we create a defensive barrier of sorts that produces emotional responses to the actions of others, or we formulate bias opinion on things as they relate to self. Our anger in relation to any situation is almost always thought of in this manner "s/he or it…made me angry". In these very words we find the root of our suffering, assigning power and ability to things and others to place or produce emotional response within our minds, always blaming something else for our present mental state of anger. Lets take, as an example, the actions of men and women in intimate relationships. Everyone has experienced in their relationship with another times of stress and anger, generally we each associate that current feeling as some thing the other person has done that has caused us to be upset, "he didn’t take the garbage out…or she never cleans the house" just examples J , and hence we feel that this other person has created this anger in us because of our reaction to their inaction. What we fail so often to see in these situations is that the anger is our own, we produce these feelings within ourselves in response to our current surroundings, but we blame our surroundings for producing these feeling within us. I would ask everyone who is choosing to read this to look at your own reaction to the words I type, if these ideas presented here were to produce an emotional response within you, where within these words do you find the power for them to act, at what point do they jump of the screen and into your mind and start producing discomfort? Well, of course, they don’t. It is in this same manner that things and other lack this ability as well, other people do not posses the ability to take a handful of anger and open up your mind and set it inside, it is produced within yourself. Your anger in relation to every situation is your own, mind made, mind produced. We can never hope to change others, nor should we try, if the actions of another produce anger then that anger is your own and it is you, as the producer of the anger, that must facilitate the change in your mind to end the cause of the anger. The actions of others are just that, action, our response to those actions are mind made not a product placed in you by those actions.

Many would argue to the contrary that when someone is kickin your butt that it is they that are making you angry, their action of causing you physical pain is also placing anger within your mind because of their action toward you. This anger again is your own, each of us, if placed in this situation, would produce emotional response, but that response would be mind made. We have the ability to choose not to have anger in relation to this action, even if we are seriously injured by this other person the choice and production of anger in relation to the action is our own. Our suffering in relation to anger is then perpetuated by our attachment to this emotion after the actions and conclusion have come to pass. Our response to that initial anger then becomes hatred and/or the quest for vengeance directed at the supposed cause of our anger. We continue our own suffering because we attach to the action a continued emotional response, hatred or dislike for that individual that we carry with us and escalates when we hear of or see that individual.

When we sleep we have many dreams, in those dreams when find similar occurrences as those found in our waking lives. In those dreams we produce emotional responses to the actions of our own minds, in other words we may produce anger toward a person in our dreams for the same action as above even those this action in this instance was produced by our own imagination. When we wake from the dream we then realize that it was just a dream and the actions of the dream are let go because we realize that they where created by our mind as we slept, and as such they are not a continued source of suffering. Our waking world is much the same as the dreams of our sleep, we create our world from moment to moment and then react to our creation attaching inherent ability to our own creation to cause us happiness or sadness. There is a concept that I have made reference to before called mind like a mirror, if we fashion our minds in this way suffering has nothing to hold on to.

The qualities of a mirror are quite enlightening, there exists within a single mirror an entire universe of existence. The difference in this universe, as compared to our own, is that nothing in that universe is grasped, things and others present themselves to it and when they are gone the mirror universe lets them go without even the wish or desire to retain them. We can display anything we wish to the mirror and when we leave its sight it will not continue to reflect that which we have shown it. This universal mirror is the mind I speak of, the mind that sees and experiences all things, happiness, sadness, etc. but does not attach to them and therefor never suffers in relation to them. Fashioning ones mind in this way produces a reflective quality in yourself, experiencing each and every moment of time fully as it may occur, but never grasping at the loss of that moment or anticipating the next. If an individual develops this mirrored mind all causes of suffering, even the sufferings of happiness, will cease. Take some time in your everyday life to reflect on your emotional state, examine it and its source, then evaluate its necessity…reflect the moment then let it go.

~Mykkyo