9: Emotions are Real; Only Your Reality is False

Continuing the healing, Don Miguel asks this question: if the voice of knowledge inside our mind isn't real, then what is? Emotions! he responds. The chapter then continues to describe how emotions work within us, how we have learned to repress them, and most importantly, how we can use them in the healing process.

Every emotion comes from our essence, our true spirit. Everything we perceive with all of our senses in the real world stimulates an emotion. From beauty to physical danger. But it's important to understand that everything we perceive in our virtual world will cause an emotion as well. All the false judgments we make on ourselves will cause an emotion. All that false thinking.

When that voice of knowledge, those false beliefs, our egoic mind, judges us or others, we will feel hurt, we will feel sadness, and we will feel anger. And then that voice will judge us badly for having those emotions as well, and soon we're caught up in this vicious downwards cycle and only want to repress all emotions. Depression settles in.

But with awareness of true spirit and the practice of not believing in our little world of self-limiting knowledge, we can use our emotions to hunt down those deeper untrue beliefs that still lurk somewhere in our mind. First, feel the emotion. Process the sadness, the anger, the fear, the whatever feeling you are having in that present moment. And if it's reason for being is not there in the physical world, if some real train is not bearing down on you, then follow that emotion to its virtual cause. And there you will find some false belief. Now go to work and disbelieve it! The emotion was real. It was the cause that wasn't.

In another lecture this year at Merrimack College, I heard Don Miguel compare our emotions to the light spectrum, that love is the complete spectrum. Fear, anger, and that romantic concept we have of love, are like colors that are filtered from that spectrum. But love, real love, is that complete unfiltered spectrum of emotion that recognizes ourselves in everything, because everything is one single field of energy. Love is just another word for saying everything is one. And the 7th Truth and 2nd Healing says: feel the reality of emotions, and follow them to the virtual lies that cause our suffering.