You are here now but your mind is not. Your mind has raced to the future and it does not see good. It sees “bad” things coming, “bad” things that will happen to you. And you feel something in your body. Something we call emotion. Your mind is at work and your body is reacting. Emotion is your body’s reaction to your mind.
Love, joy, and peace are aspects of your true nature. When you are still without the activity of your mind trying to sabotage you, you can experience true love, true joy, and inner peace. They are connected to your being. They do not have opposite because they do not arise from the mind but from beyond it.
When you are unconscious, you often call pleasure joy. But it is not. Joy arises from within you but you derive pleasure from something external. When that thing that gives you pleasure leaves you, you feel pain due to its absence. The thing may even give you pleasure today and tomorrow give you pain. When it comes to addiction, the “high” gives you pleasure and the “low” that follows afterwards gives you pain. In this way, pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. This is nothing like the aspects of your true nature – love, joy, peace - which you cannot get from external things.
These aspects of your true nature are obscured by the activity of your mind. Through thinking compulsively, your mind serves as a noise-maker that hinders your connection to your nature. You do not feel connected to your true nature because you are not conscious. Love, joy, peace are already part of you. Seeking them in external things is vain. They are within you already. What you have to do is to connect to your true nature. The sky may be cloudy but that does not mean that the sun is gone. On the other side of the cloudy sky is the sun. It is there but obscured by the clouds. Your true nature is, but it is obscured by the mind. The mind cannot however destroy your true nature. The disturbance of your mind causes you to feel emotion. That is literally what emotion means – “disturbance.” The word “emotion” comes from the Latin emovere which means “to disturb.”
There is an energetic charge that results from the amplification of a thought pattern. You feel this as emotion. The emotion usually succeeds in taking over you because you are not conscious. You have not being able to bring the presence of your being into the Now. With enough presence, your emotion cannot take over you. But you lack presence and you identify with the emotion unconsciously. In other words, the emotion becomes “you.” A loop develops between your thinking and your emotion. Both power each other. The thought pattern which is magnified results into an emotion in your body. You magnify the thought by giving it your attention and dwelling on it. The emotion this creates energizes the thought pattern. And it goes on: the thinking-emotion loop.
The emotion gives you pain and your mind fights the pain so that it can remove it. But it never succeeds. Imagine the Inspector General of Police trying to find a murderer where he himself is the murderer. The mind can never find the solution to emotional pain because it is part of the problem.
The solution then is to free yourself from your mind. Disidentify with your mind and become conscious. The mind which has held a place of power is toppled and you connect to your being. This is consciousness. When you are conscious, the true nature of your Being will reveal itself.
