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Preparing for Negative Emotions by Maurice Nicoll

The Negative Emotions

  • Various states of depression
  • Various kinds of self-pity and self-hatred (self-hatred is a more subtle form of self-pity)
  • Various kinds of persisting resentment
  • Of feeling badly treated, not being estimated at your proper value—do you know who I am?! Vanity…you don’t recognize my greatness, fuck you!
  • Lamenting, feeling oh so bad about…a lamenting song filled with self-pity, sorrowful, replay
  • Dreariness, envying, always saying you are no good at thinking or at anything you have never even tried, feeding self hatred
  • Feeling owed by others or life
  • Hatred, outrage, complaint
  • Unpleasant forms of self-satisfaction, gloating
  • Contempt of others/suspicion of others, they might be laughing at me, plotting against me
  • Feelings of being meritorious (one of the most unclean of all the emotions and one which perhaps shuts out all influences from Higher Centres more than any other emotion
  • Superiority and feeling right, above or better than others
  • Self-hatred
  • See what one condemns in others
  • What opinions one holds to, I am always right about…, I’m the right one…
  • Complaining/people aren’t waiting on me quick enough, not noticing me/conditions aren’t right, they should fix it
  • See your vanity and pride
  • Indulging in habitual states of worry
  • Indulging in fear (nursing fear, get self-absorbed in fear and crippled by it)
  • Habitual states of crossness
  • Making inner accounts: they owe me this, and that, and this…they did this to me!
  • Notice Inner Songs that take my attention and that I self-indulge myself in. Actually I get hypnotized by them. Examples of songs I get totally identified with: My life is a waste, I’m worthless, I’ve failed at what’s important, They have a better life than me, They were given what I needed, I’ve never gotten the chance I need, I’m an unrecognized spiritual teacher, I’m a loser, I’m a total failure at, I’m a bad mom/dad, etc.”
  • Lying or showing off
  • Making oneself over-important, conceit, superiority, arrogance
  • Twisting truth to injure another
  • Taking pleasure in the failures of other, envy
  • Letting outside events, war, horrors of life, bring you down, feeling convinced that there can be no meaning in things and no God.

Good Householder: a man who does his duty and is a responsible person, but who does not believe in life. It is very important to not let what happens in life weaken your thoughts and feelings and experience of the work itself…

First Conscious Shock: transforming impressions…when you realize that you need not take a thing or a person in the way you are taking them, you transform something and at the same time you insulate yourself. Self- remembering, non-identifying and not-considering all help to insulate us from the influences of life. Our task is to try to imitate higher states of consciousness so as to attract them.

Must learn to Starve Negative Emotions. The more we nourish them, secretly approve of them and secretly enjoy them, the more energy they will insist on taking from us. A person who is a slave to his or her negative emotions is actually a slave, only the trouble is that we very easily enjoy different forms of slavery, not recognizing that we are really in prison. So observe how you talk. Some can only talk negatively. What negative state or talk have you observed in yourself today.

*Study your negative states, for this is one of the most important sides of self-study. Observe them, note them down, and above all remember them so that when they come back again, as they always do, you may gradually recognize them before they can exert their full power—namely before you can identify with them. Especially in the morning clear your mind of negative, unpleasant, and criticizing states before you pass into external life. Study also the justifying statements that compel me to believe in the negative states, i.e., if I punish myself I’ll become a better person, if I don’t indulge in fear and worry I won’t be prepared for horrible circumstances, punishing myself means I’m a good person and that I care (that’s a good one!), if I feel miserable about myself this will inspire me to be better (actually this exhausts all inspiration).

At night go through your negative states and try to see them in retrospect; if you do this genuinely, if you come to the point of recognizing your negative condition and desiring to begin to get free from it, then you may rest assured that you will receive help from ‘I’s (Higher Power) in yourself that wish to work, and they are capable possibly of passing on to a higher level of Being. Note how you experience the Three Centers, body, heart, mind when in negative states.

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