VBT – Meditation 51.1

VBT – Meditation 51.1

With Any Emotion

With negative or positive, with any emotion, use this, and there will be a great change in you. If the emotion is negative, you will be freed of it by being aware that it is within you. If the emotion is positive, you will become the emotion itself. If it is joy, you will become joy. If it is anger, the anger will dissolve.

And this is the difference between negative and positive emotions: if you become aware of a certain emotion, and by your becoming aware the emotion dissolves, it is negative. If by becoming aware of a certain emotion you then become the emotion, if the emotion then spreads and becomes your being, it is positive. Awareness works differently in both cases. If it is a poisonous emotion, you are relieved of it through awareness. If it is good, blissful, ecstatic, you become one with it.

Awareness deepens it.

So to me this is the criterion: if something is deepened by your awareness, it is something good.

If something is dissolved through awareness, it is something bad. That which cannot remain in awareness is sin and that which grows in awareness is virtue. Virtue and sin are not social concepts, they are inner realizations.

Use your awareness. It is just as if there is darkness and you bring in light: the darkness will be no more there. Just by bringing light in, the darkness is no more there, because, really, it was not. It was negative, just an absence of light. But many things will become manifest which are there. Just by bringing in light, these shelves, these books, these walls, will not disappear. In darkness they were not; you could not see them. If you bring light in, darkness will be no more there, but that which is real will be revealed. Through awareness all that is negative like darkness will dissolve – hatred, anger, sadness, violence. Then love, joy, ecstasy, will, for the first time, become revealed to you. So, “ON JOYOUSLY SEEING A LONG ABSENT FRIEND, PERMEATE THIS JOY.”

When you are flowing with joy, blissfulness, that is the moment to be aware, but people do exactly the opposite. When they are happy, who cares about awareness? And when they are in anguish, then certainly they start thinking it is time to be aware and get out of anguish. But nobody has ever been able to get out from anguish directly.

First, one has to get out of ecstasy. If you can be aware of your joyful moments in the first place, the depression, the downs will not come. The door to get out is from ecstasy. 

So this is the simplest way: Be happy and be aware. Rejoice and be aware. Love and be aware.

Don’t put awareness aside saying, ‘This is a kind of disturbance; I am in such great ecstasy.’ Awareness becomes like a disturbance; it is not. It may appear like this in the beginning, but soon you will see it will take your ecstasy to higher peaks. Ultimately awareness and ecstasy become one. Then those downs, depressive moments, agonies disappear.