In the secret cave of the heart, two are seated by life’s fountain.
The separate ego drinks of the sweet and bitter stuff,
liking the sweet, disliking the bitter,
while the supreme Self drinks sweet and bitter,
neither liking this nor disliking that.
The ego gropes in darkness, while the Self lives in light.
So declare the illumined sages.
—Katha Upanishad - Part 3, Verse 1
When my bag was “stolen” (as mentioned in the prior post), my immediate emotion was anger. Often when emotions are triggered, I resort to journaling as a way to process them. I’ve found that the first step in moving past an emotion is to confront it head-on. Writing things down over the years has helped me do just that. Once they’re off my chest and down on paper, it provides me with an opportunity to examine them from a bird’s eye view and reflect upon the situation.
Here, after the initial outpour of blah, blah, blah, complain, complain, complain, I was able to process what happened from a centered state of being and realize, “I still have my health, a bed to sleep in tonight, and the means to replace the items I lost. Tomorrow, I’ll begin that process and life will go on.”
The very next morning, I happened to read one of Robert Greene’s meditations in The Daily Laws, where he described this process perfectly: “It might be wise to use a journal in which you record your self-assessments with ruthless objectivity.”
I loved that, ruthless objectivity. Centering yourself in a neutral position to observe your own actions is a necessary step toward detachment. By doing this repeatedly over the years, the process has become mostly second nature. When the emotional self rears its ugly head in the moment, I’m able to recognize it happening and pause to reflect on what’s arising.
The ego is the enemy when it comes to unconsciously maintaining illusions, as described perfectly in the quote above with reference to disliking the bitter aspects of life in preference of the sweet. But the supreme Self drinks in the bitter and sweet of life all the same, to avoid groping in the darkness of angry emotions and living in the light of observing life for what it is.
This line of thinking also parallels the Taoist philosophy of wei-wu-wei—going with the flow of life—and I love to see similarities between religions.