The Last Hurdle

Weekly Message, November 19, 2005
The Last Hurdle
Written and transcribed by Terry Grant

Ishvara distinguishes between "feelings" and "emotions." For Ishvara, feelings are spontaneous expressions of True Nature. Examples of feelings are joy, compassion, and the experience of connection with all that is. An emotion, on the other hand, is the energy that arises from misunderstood or unresolved experiences of the past. Examples of emotions are chronic anger, resentment, and depression. Emotions greatly distort our experience, and suck away the energy we need to reach the next level of awareness. They are the last hurdle for humanity's entry into The New Consciousness. Ishvara speaks of this in a message that I have edited from a talk he gave on October 23, 2005. - TG.

Ishvara:

Everyone is a student of Life, but not everyone pays attention to the lessons. There is a consequence to paying attention to the lessons, and there is a consequence to not paying attention. One is a high road, and one is a low road.

The intellect is often a trap, because the intellectual-personality-belief mechanism you call a self is always jockeying for the best position, the best attitude, the best look. Unfortunately, the emotions have the biggest say over that. You might like to think that the personality is created from all the highest ingredients, but it is not. One’s attitude toward life is something that is adopted, picked up from past interpretations of experiences.

The home of emotions is belief--beliefs about how the world is, about how you are, about your position, the stands you take. Everybody participates in this. When you think about emotions, you can see that they are learned reactions and projections, nothing more. There is no solid evidence for their existence. When they appear, they are tied to beliefs, concepts, and things that have been accepted as reality. One cops an attitude: "This is how I am; this is how I appear to others; this is what others expect of me; this is what I expect of me; this is what I expect of others."

Emotions seem to be quite solid, especially if you are running into them. They seem quite formidable. But if you can back away and take a good look, you can see the foolishness, the stupidity, and the ignorance that reside in them as thought forms, beliefs, and concepts. You can look at emotions and see them as snags, neural pathways that suck the energy of Life into an interpretation or projection.

This is not really understood. Psychologists and psychiatrists approach emotions from various directions, making them real, giving them some concrete foundation, but as I look at them I see they are really illusionary. They are illusions, somewhat like a Velcro strip that hooks to everything that gets near it. Emotions are like that. They grab onto anything--whatever can be pressed into service--to provide a form of validation.

The next step for humanity involves the transcendence of emotions, because they snag you every time you turn around. They ensnare, they trap; they seem quite powerful and fearful. Maybe it’s too bad there isn’t an energy reservoir for them. You could put a sump pump on the reservoir and suck it dry. Then there would be no energy for the emotions. But the nature of emotions is that they grab onto whatever is available, squeezing the juice out of it, milking it for everything it’s got, applying the energy to a certain belief, a concept “about.” In that process, neural pathways become dedicated to interpretations, ways of being, and ways of seeing.

Dedication to those things is not intentional. They are simply accepted as normal. At first glance one says, “Well, that’s the way it is. That’s how they are.” Everybody seems to believe them, participate in them. So what are you to do? You can express emotions, but they are a bottomless pit. The more they are expressed, the deeper you go. There doesn’t seem to be any future there. You can deny them, remain aloof, unattached, or detached, but still they seem to remain an obstacle that grabs you again and again.

So it seems to be quite a dilemma for the human being. You put too much importance upon the emotions, seeing them as solid, absolute things, while in actuality they really are illusions, past interpretations of circumstances that were beyond your control. Or you try to remain detached from the emotions, but find yourself being hooked by them nevertheless. You are not guilty in this dilemma, but you are responsible--responsible without guilt. That’s not an emotion. It is a way of being.

The emotional realm can be very separating and egotistic, masquerading itself as all-important. It is as if you have a life boat that springs a leak. You decide to fix the leak, so you cut a large hole in the boat in order to make a patch. Now you have a bigger leak. Everything you do to try to stop the leak only makes it worse. It was a small leak to begin with, didn’t have much energy to it, but by focusing on it and making it important, by permitting it to be significant, you have given it more energy, and it grows and grows, until you are totally overwhelmed, totally defenseless against the seemingly inevitable.

The hurdle to entering The New Consciousness, to being the new species, the new human, is the emotional realm, because it takes so much attention. It gets so much focus that you lose sight of the real, the higher purpose. You lose sight of how your life has already transformed. You lose sight of the progress you have already made and you fall back into the arena of projection and attachment, trying to fortify the rightness of that level, trying to enforce it upon the arena of Life. It happens over and over. At some point you must look at it and discern, "Why is this so important? Why is it so important that my position is 'right,' that my feelings (which are really emotions) be validated, that they be seen as something momentous?"


This message is part 1 of 4 parts and will continue with "Just Seeing It," part 2 of 4; will follow with "Judgment Day," part 3 of 4; and conclude with "It Doesn't Matter," part 4 of 4.


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