Emotional reactions are part of human nature. Take almost any man or woman you know or know of, including the towering historical figures and moral heroes of the past; they too quarreled with their spouses. They too, without doubt, sometimes manifested themselves as petty or spiteful or sullen or beside themselves with rage or sunk in the histrionics of self-pity.

So it is a nearly universal phenomenon. That is the first thing to acknowledge. But, along with that, we should recognize that our attitude toward these emotional reactions is not at all supported by the wisdom teachings of the past. Modern psychology and psychotherapy take these reactions very seriously, and many forms of therapy, especially in their popular expressions, entirely support our general relationship toward such emotional reactions as irritation, hurt feelings, anger. And what is that relationship?

It is a sort of attraction, a fascination with them. Somewhere along the way, we have been persuaded to give a great amount of our attention and concern to these reactions, as though they and they alone are the main source of our happiness or unhappiness. These emotional reactions have assumed enormous importance in our lives. But you will look in vain for great teachings in any culture or tradition that give such importance to them.

Does this mean that wisdom tells us to ignore them? Are we supposed to deny that we feel these emotions and that we manifest them toward each other? Certainly not. What is at issue is neither the existence of these reactions nor the pain that they bring. What is at issue is something else — something rather subtle and, actually, unknown to modern psychology.

What to Do About the Ego?

Obviously, if we are searching for inner growth, we must face the question of what to do about the emotions of the ego. And the answer that comes to us from every great inner teaching is that there is something in ourselves that can be free from these emotions. There is a capacity of the mind that can step back from them, a capacity of consciousness to exist independently of the egoistic emotions.

The manner of approaching this capacity and developing it differs in different traditions, as does the terminology used to characterize emotional reactions. The early Christian ascetics in the deserts of Egypt spoke of these reactions as demons, or "sins": pride, anger, lust, avarice, gluttony, envy, sloth. These "seven deadly sins" were understood psychologically as patterns of emotional reaction which unnecessarily diminish or destroy the capacity of the human psyche to be free.

The Buddhists and Hindus often speak of emotional reactions collectively as "the ego"; and the Tibetans, in their powerful image of the "wheel of meaningless life" (the wheel of samsara), symbolize the source of inner slavery by the figures of the rooster, the snake, and the pig — the first representing overmastering, self-affirming desire; the second, hatred and anger; the third, immersion in the "mud" of ignorance and untruth. In recent times, the teaching of G.I. Gurdjieff has introduced the phrase "negative emotions" to refer to these emotional reactions that play such a destructive role in our lives.

At the core of the great spiritual traditions of the world, however, we are advised not to seek to destroy these emotional reactions, but to allow their existence within the light of our free awareness. There is a long and difficult discipline involved here, an art of intentionally relating to our emotions without, on the one hand, seeking to suppress them, or, on the other hand, indulging in their expression. The theory behind this discipline is in part that awareness, or pure seeing, can conduct the power eventually to free the human psyche from the pain and disorder of the egoistic emotions.

But whether or not we are engaged in such a discipline and whether or not we envision for ourselves an approach to the ultimate goal that these traditions speak of, the first step along these paths is worth taking very seriously for anyone searching for meaning beyond the level of physical or social satisfaction. This first step involves the cultivation of an attitude toward the emotions that is not common in our society — namely, that they are not "ourselves," that they are processes which need not have the authority in our lives that we usually give them.

The First Power of the Mind

The Stoic philosophers of ancient Rome, both the Phrygian slave Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius, spoke of this attitude of the mind toward our emotional life. What defines us as human beings, they said, is the capacity of our mind to deal consciously and intentionally with the impressions and experiences that life brings us.

These teachings of the Stoics have often been misunderstood as advocating a sort of indifference or coldness. But a more careful study of these teachings and of others connected to them shows that what is being spoken of is a fundamental power of the mind to separate itself from the confusion and disorder of the egoistic reactions that drive our lives around and around and which are so destructive in our relationships with each other. In fact, the Stoic teaching, if looked at carefully, tells us that it is actually through separating from these emotional reactions that we begin to approach the real power of the mind, not only to see clearly but to love truly, to care truly, and even, in a sense, to hate truly — that is, to "hate" what is truly evil and not merely what goes against our subjective desires or which provokes our subjective fears.

Starting with Thought

What does this mean in practical terms? As a place to begin, it means the cultivation of a certain orientation of thought during the periods when our emotions are less agitated. How do we understand these common and troubling occurrences between men and women who are trying to love each other?

We hardly ever think this way about the phenomenon of quarreling. We hardly ever consider the importance in our everyday lives of the ideas we hold about the nature of our mind. We have been told by the prevailing modern psychology that our happiness and well-being depend mainly on our emotions. Or perhaps we have heard about spiritual doctrines that tell us we are inwardly divine and capable of pure love. But neither of these views are of help when negative emotions are actually activated. I have seen many sulking Buddhists, resentful yogis, and pouting Christian mystics.

Almost everyone quarrels, and almost everyone is disturbed by these quarrels. But two people who are living together and trying to love can help each other by a shared understanding of the nature of the emotions — both their overwhelming power when they are active and their overall secondary reality in the developing human being, in the man or woman who is searching for an inner life. As Epictetus says:

The gods then, as was but right, put in our hands the one blessing that is best of all and master of all, that and nothing else, the power to deal rightly with our impressions, but everything else they did not put in our hands. Was it that they would not? For my part I think that if they could have entrusted us with those other powers as well, they would have done so, but they were quite unable. . . .

But what says Zeus? Epictetus, if it were possible, I would have made your body and your possessions (those trifles that you prize) free and untrammeled. But as things are — never forget this — this body is not yours, it is but a clever mixture of clay. But since I could not make it free, I gave you a portion in our divinity, this faculty of impulse to act and not to act, of will to get and will to avoid, in a word the faculty which can turn impressions to right use. If you pay heed to this, and put your affairs in its keeping, you will never suffer let nor hindrance, you will not groan, you will blame no man, you will flatter none. What then? Does this all seem but little to you?

The point is that wisdom tells us of another capacity within ourselves, the possibility of a life that is not at the beck and call of our subjective emotions. It is a life of mind and of intense, but nonagitated, feelings. It is our possibility — and, wisdom tells us, a human being cannot be fulfilled without the cultivation of this possibility. Anything else that passes for happiness is at best hedged in by tension or by self-deceptions that are inevitably exploded. This pseudohappiness is what the ancient teachings sometimes call "pleasure." "Pleasure," we are told, can bring happiness only to the extent that it is free from fears and illusions about who and what we are and what our future will be and what the well-being of others consists of.

A human being is built, structured, for the happiness that comes from the cultivation of a deeper power of mind and feeling than is offered to use by the automatic processes of emotional reaction.

At the same time, these emotional reactions are overwhelmingly powerful when they are taking place.

It is important to have more accurate thought about the nature and function of these emotions. Such thought can be developed and entertained in our minds in between the occasions of emotional agitation. The question is — odd though it may sound — how to think about quarreling in between the quarrels? And how to support — silently perhaps, and with action and with one's general state — the struggle of the other person to discover and maintain an attitude toward the emotions that corresponds more precisely to their real nature and place in the life of men and women searching for themselves?

We Are Human Beings

Silently — or perhaps sometimes in words, but not too many words — you and I understand that, before everything else, we are human beings in search of our Self. We are human beings: this cosmically unique being whose essence contains the whole of nature and nature's God. We are built to contain very fine, very subtle, and creative elements, the current that sustains worlds; we are also built to contain all the powers and urging of the animal and of the matter of earth. Wisdom tells us we are both — god and animal, heaven and earth — at one and the same time, and through the existence together of these levels something of God is meant to enter the world of humanity and our planet. That is what we are, cosmically, as human beings.

Each of us is a dual being in another sense — a related sense, but not exactly corresponding to this cosmic structure. We have in ourselves the yearning to actualize this authentic destiny, and we have in ourselves overwhelming and massive ignorance of this yearning and what it strives for. We have in ourselves a spark of divine hunger, along with an inferno of fear and tension that calls itself desire, but which is often actually normal physical and social desire mixed with unconscious terror — what the Buddhists call "craving"; what the Christians once called "passion." We are both an expansive thrust upward and a dark contraction downward; we wish and we do not wish for the Self. And much of our emotional life falls on the side of ignorant opposition to the process of self-knowledge.

We are human beings. Before we are man or woman, we are human. Before we are rich or poor, father or mother, we are human. Before we are frightened or foolish or forgetful or fine or coarse or anything at all, we are human. We are human with a human possibility and a human destiny; we can become a new being before we die. We wish for that, you and I, and we do not wish for it. We are human.

Thoughts such as these, articulated with much more precision and completeness, and with much more beauty and power, can be found in the writings of the great philosophers, poets, and spiritual teachers of the past and present; these truths can be seen in the images of art and can be sensed directly in certain kinds of music that have been given to the world. But such thoughts, and the ideas they point to, are not only to be entertained in moments of quiet reflection, as a means of carrying ourselves from the realities of everyday life. Such thoughts can be brought into awareness even when there is no impulse to do so; when the problems of living together are tearing at us, when we are troubled with ourselves and each other — in between the moments of great agitation.

Such thoughts can be more than solace and can do more than lead us into a more "spiritual" mood. They can inform our mind and body and emotions that there is, as it were, "someone else" in our house, "someone" important. That is, there is another aim possible in my life and your life. The work of love in this case consists in remembering that you have both a wish and a resistance. Our work consists in remembering this about each other — not only that we are the father or mother of our children and that we have a shared past and have had wonderful moments together, and so on. That is all important, of course. But what we are speaking about here is another kind of remembrance, a remembrance that you will not find described in the popular psychology of our time, a metaphysical remembrance of who we are and what we seek to be and what lawfully stands in our way.

Can intentionally harboring such thoughts actually help the life of living together? Is anyone trying it?

The Long Work of Love

A man and a woman working at love are always, whether they call it this or not, working to free themselves from attachment to the illusions of "life," while at the same time helping each other to answer the normal needs of the embodied human self. The struggle of love is the struggle against making the other into the "world," compelling the other to give what the "world" or "life" promises but can never really give: absolute safety, unearned loyalty and fidelity, fantastical power, ever-ready pleasure.

If "life itself" cannot give these things — and, in the deeper meaning of them, it cannot — then we have no right to try to get them from the other. I have no right to make the other into "life itself." How much of the disappointment with love that men and women now feel in our culture is actually a displaced but unrecognized disappointment with "life itself"?

Wisdom teaches that what we erroneously seek from the "world" is to be found only through the process that opens us to another level of life within ourselves. It is that life, we are told, that can give us what we mistakenly seek outside ourselves. It is "life within life" that can give what "life itself" cannot. And it is a glimpse of that life within life that we sometimes touch when we are in love, when we experience what Stendahl calls "the passions which make for deeper joy."

Being in love, we do not strain for beauty, for power, recognition, safety, health. Being in love, we are for a moment, and up to a point, free from the influences of "life itself." Being in love, we touch complete devotion to another, and in that devotion we experience something of our truer self. Being in love, we live beyond paradox. Love brings opposites together — that is its very definition. In the universe, in nature and between people and within ourselves, love is the force that brings disparate and separate realities toward each other into fusion and mutuality.

Being in love, we find ourselves in the moment we find the other; in love, we touch freedom in the moment we serve another; in love, we touch intelligence and clarity in the moment we are given to let go of thought and cleverness; in love, we become strong and safe in the moment we are given to let go of our last pieces of armor and, in an instant and for an instant, we become completely vulnerable. As was said of Baucis and Philemon, "It made no difference in that house whether you asked for master or servant."

"Life itself" cannot understand these things. In "life itself" we live the illusion of strength, for example, and cannot see that it is weakness to be half-vulnerable, to fear and protect our inner feeling with another feeling that lives and breathes only anxiety. "Life itself" cannot open its doors to the "gods," because it cannot understand the strength of love, the safety of love, the freedom of sustained love. And so it immediately strives to make love into something it can understand. This is the challenge of living together. Being in love is one thing; now we must bring what we have tasted into the arena of "life itself." It is now that the long work begins.

The long work begins. Being in love shows us the power of a life within life. That is, it shows us that there is something beyond the influences of ordinary life in the world. It is here that wisdom teaches mankind to search within. Here wisdom instructs us: what we touch in love is like a sign, evidence that we are meant for quite another destiny than what the world around us can give. This other destiny involves the cultivation — the insemination — of a new life within ourselves. Like every embryo, this new life must be cared for and nourished.

The work of love begins. In the midst of life, with all its needs and demands, with all its compromises and details, with all the forces and energies that the gods and devils have thrown upon this plane of being called human life, in the midst of this ever-surging flood of "life itself," mankind is called — two by two, as is suggested in the myth of Noah — to maintain the human reflection of divinity in a world overwhelmed by violence, confusion, and illusion.




Copyright © 1996 by Jacob Needleman

From A Little Book on Love by Jacob Needleman. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc..