14 - How Thoughts And Emotions Work

An exploration on both the creative and blocking aspects of thoughts.  The utility of using them when they are helpful and letting them go with they are not.  How thoughts and emotions work and what they do.

These podcasts are meant to supplement your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. They are a compilation of what I have found to be the most helpful over the last 50 years on my path of awakening. I feel these podcasts are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last.  Though they, also, all stand on their own.  Since we are each a bit different, if anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart. All my podcasts and website are free. Enjoy!

Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy.  If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist.

www.williamecooper.wordpress.com for more support.  You may, especially, enjoy the short contemplations and the resource page which gives you some supportive material.

Transcript

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Hello, this is William Cooper. Welcome to Awakening Together. I trust you're doing well. In our last podcast, we looked at being, mainly. The qualities of being and the explosion of being, who you are when you're not covered up. Today, I'd like to look at the other side of the equation. Thoughts, emotions, perspectives. Let's look at how thoughts work and how emotions work. We're kind of in an interesting situation, because as we explored last time, our beingness comes from an infinite place. How do you know? Look. Take some time. Be still and look, and it will become clear. But as you follow your awareness back, you'll see that it reaches into the infinite, into so-called emptiness that we talked about. This infinite, full emptiness, empty only because it's beyond creation and you can't describe it in words, but it comes into existence and down through our body. So here we are, infinite beyond creation, but suddenly we are in creation, experiencing all of creation through our body. It's a very interesting thing to be that which creates and the creation itself. That's where we find ourselves. Well, this light of being uses thoughts and emotions to create, to create further within creation. So when we shine our light of being through what we call a thought, it creates something. It creates an image. It creates, uh, an activity, many things. And the same, when we create an emotion, it forms a 3d feeling aspect that fits along with the images created by thoughts. It's very interesting creation through thoughts and emotions are something like a film negative that is used to create a film. When you shine your light through a thought, the thought creates an image by blocking some of that light, just like a negative would block some of the light shining through it. It blocks it. And what goes through the other side of that negative or that image is, uh, a picture or, uh, an experience same with emotions, emotions work by blocking the being of, uh, of you, your light of being images or thoughts or emotions that block a lot. Those are called negative emotions or negative thoughts, because they're very thick and not much of your light shines through. So you start to feel very depressed and heavy thoughts that don't block a lot are very expansive. Emotions that don't block a lot are very expansive. Nonetheless, even though some emotions and thoughts block more than others, all of them block something thoughts and emotions are maintained by our B by the light and life of our being. And so just like any, any kind of active art like ballet or symphony, uh, or a play, it takes a lot of energy, both to create the play and the symphony or the ballet and to maintain it, to keep doing it over and over and over. It takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of light. So when we create a thought or an image or an emotion, and we maintain it longer than it needs to be maintained, we're using a lot of energy to do that. It's okay. If you have one thought in your world or one emotion or two or three, but over a lifetime, when we create them and they pile up and they get bigger and bigger and thicker and thicker, and we have hundreds and thousands, it diffuses the beauty of our being. And so we become very cut off from ourselves and very, um, expended tired because we're being diffused in a hundred different ways and a thousand different ways. So it's important not only to know how to create thoughts and emotions, but also how to uncreate them. So they're not piled up when we don't need them anymore. They're like computer programs, uh, or lots of information on our computer. It's good to be able to have these things that helps us with what we're doing on the computer. But when we have too many and we're not using them anymore, they're sucking energy. They're draining the battery. They're slowing down the mechanism of our computer when they're no longer needed, but they're running anyway. Same with thoughts and emotions in our world. So what we're looking at along the way is how to dissipate or uncreate the ones that we don't need. And that's really what we're doing meditation for as we go through these podcasts. Yes, to see is to be free. And when you see clearly, it clears up a lot. However, we've built certain, um, structures called thoughts and emotions that continually exist because we continually supply them with energy. And it's not only enough to see clearly, but we have to uncreate them, withdraw the energy and let them fall apart because then they no longer distract us or captivate us. You know, we love our thoughts and our emotions, and sometimes we can get lost in them and cut off from ourselves in that way as well. We become lost in them just like we would a TV show and in our emotions. So we don't want them draining our energy or distracting us, or sometimes they run at counter measures to where we actually are now in our lives. And something that made sense 20 years ago is now hurting us because it's running in a direction that we don't want to go. So it's good to be able to let them go to let them dissipate. Finally, or additionally, when they fall apart, they release all of that energy that went into them to create them. And as we talked about in a prior podcast, there is only one kind of energy, which is love and light and happiness and wellbeing. So you get a rush of energy when they dissipate because that energy is you, it's being supplied by you. So you feel stronger, more powerful with only the thoughts that you need or that you find helpful. Think about this. Do you have more thoughts or less thoughts when you get a massage and you're feeling very, very relaxed and good? Less. You're not covered over. You're just feeling your being more thoughts or less thoughts when you look at the Grand Canyon and you're in awe. Ah, less. You don't have any thoughts. You're in awe. When you see a great work of art, no thoughts. You just are mesmerized by it. When you're in love, no thoughts. When you're in the depths of a religious or relational experience, no thoughts. You're feeling the fullness of your being. That's really what awakening is, isn't it? Feeling the fullness of your being, feeling the natural happiness that's there all the time that you don't have to do anything to get or to experience. You're just experiencing it naturally. That's who you are. That's awakening. And life works best if that's what we're feeling all the time. And then when we want to create, we shine that light through a thought that we create so that we can move nicely in this created realm. We can use thoughts to bake a cake or start a car or walk a dog. Or we can use thoughts in a different way, like creating a vision board or picturing what it is we want and letting consciousness coalesce around that thought and that thing come into existence. We can create in that way as well. More about all this later. In our next podcast, let's explore how we use groups of thoughts and emotions to form personality and what that does and doesn't do for us. It's really pretty interesting. So I look forward to talking to you then. Take care and let's talk soon.