Negative emotional states are nothing else but certain thoughts currently active in our conscious or subconscious mind. Emotions are always just thoughts.
For each individual, a certain thought, according to his/her mental framework can be neutral or carry an emotional charge. This charge can be positive – those are liberating thoughts or negative – contracting, limiting thoughts, those that cause negative emotions. Our experience of life, that is, everything we experience in whichever form is created solely through thoughts. Within us, there can be no emotion created past the thoughts. Every emotion is actually a thought, but often that’s not visible to us – it seems that emotion exists by itself, or that it is based in something in the outer world or in our bodies, that it’s a part of us or an entity that haunts us or anything else apart from our thoughts. Also, most thoughts that create negative emotions act from our subconscious, so we are not aware of them. In this case, it is very easy to believe that emotions are created by something else than thoughts.
Surely you can think of a situation in which you usually have an emotional reaction. The moment you just think of this situation, this thought creates emotion, usually in a milder version than the actual situation, but in this example, you can easily witness this mechanism – the creation of emotion through thought.
As long as we believe that emotions are coming from something other than thoughts, what it looks like to us is that we are victims of the circumstance for which we believe is the source of the emotion. And we believe that this emotion cannot be changed as long as the circumstance doesn’t change – and so we catch ourselves in a trap. Because of the misunderstanding about where the emotion really comes from, we are trying to change the circumstance.
When we understand mentally or at least believe that emotion really comes from our thoughts, the next step is an attempt to change, control, and manage our thoughts. It may work at times, but often, no matter how hard we try, we fail to change our negative thoughts. And generally through effort and trying we just bury ourselves deeper into the current negative state.
To get out of the negative emotional state it is not necessary to analyze, control, or change our thoughts, or to be aware of them, it’s not necessary to do anything. The only necessary thing is to understand the nature of thought.
The next step, that enables true freedom and gives us the opportunity to pass quickly and painlessly through negative emotional states is an internal insight, ie. understanding the nature of the one and only thing that creates our life experience – thought.
Thought is just a thought, an assertion, an idea, a concept by which we explain what we experience. No thought is true in itself, it’s just a tool, a medium that creates experience. So the nature of thought and thus our entire experience is at its core illusory. We do not see what is, we see our thought about what is. And since every negative emotional state is created through thought, we experience just our thoughts about something, not something in itself – so we experience an illusion.
What troubles us actually does not exist.
Whether you understand the illusory nature of thought or not, we can all agree that thoughts are something that constantly changes. The human mind creates about a few tens of thousands of thoughts in a single day. They are something that constantly comes and goes. A saying says: “See thought as the ever-changing weather in the mountain.” In the same way as cloudy and sunny periods are taking turns in the mountain, thoughts are changing with their positive and negative charges in a human mind. After the sunny period, what always eventually follows are clouds, and then what always comes after the clouds is the sun again. And it’s a normal natural process, it’s natural that good and bad moods interchange in us, there is nothing wrong with it, but the effort of trying to be in the good mood all the time is the idea of our personal mind which is not in accordance with the natural flow.
Negative emotional state, in itself, is harmless and fast transient (remember how negative emotional states function in young children), it becomes suffering when from plain thoughts with negative emotional charge, that in themselves are not the problem, a problem is created. We start to line up other thoughts on top of the initial thought and after a few moments, there is a mental structure of greater size which creates a great emotional weight by the number of thoughts charged with a negative charge.
Attempt and desire to change thoughts and to return to a positive emotional state actually adds more thoughts on a pile of thoughts that already troubles us and thereby creates even greater difficulty and more intense emotions. This very desire reduces the ability for the thoughts to change their natural course by themselves. By its content, this desire is non-acceptance of what is – the current situation, and it is the only brake that can slow down or prevent natural change.
At the moment in which we are immersed in negative emotions, such condition comes with the feeling that the problem is real and that the situation will not change if we don’t do something about it. This is the biggest delusion. The inner state is always changing. By itself. Negative emotions always pass, it is the nature of thoughts – the eternal change. And this will happen faster if you accept it, if you don’t try to change it, if you leave it to your inner intelligence, natural flow to do its job, to return you to your natural unburdened core condition. We don’t have to do anything.
Understanding the nature of thought which wakes up through contact with the Three Principles Understanding gives us the ability to see the creation of negative emotional states through our own thoughts better. Suddenly we realize that what we are creating cannot hurt us as long as we know that we are the ones that create it. As a consequence, what happens is that negative states become less intense and last much shorter without us doing anything about it.
