Selection of attractive conditions
Your inner, psychic world is a world of perceptions and the states consisting of them. No matter what you experience, you can always distinguish (with proper training) individual perceptions. These perceptions are pleasant for you at the moment or unpleasant for you at the moment. Perceptions are divided into several types: emotions, thoughts, desires, sensations and confidence.
You absolutely do not have to experience unpleasant perceptions, which include primarily negative emotions (NE) and the negative states consisting of them – anger, hatred, self-pity, boredom, contempt, resentment, jealousy, gloom, irritation, depression and others. There is no such law of nature that obliges you to experience all this or part of it. This may seem surprising, but nevertheless perceptions and states can be controlled, they can be chosen, and one can engage in the engineering of perceptions. And it’s not so difficult to learn, for example, step by step to experience less and less NE. Do not suppress them, do not justify, do not supplant, do not “accept as is”, namely, do not experience.
Testing NE is simply a bad habit, and you can get rid of it just like other unpleasant habits – step by step, eliminating them over and over: the moment NE arises, you take your attention off of it and transfer it to what something nice. At first it seems insanely complicated, but only at first. A new habit will gradually form – the habit of removing attention from the NE and directing it to some pleasant perception, whether it is a sense of beauty or tenderness or sympathy or anticipation, etc.
People call NE emotions, but this seems uncomfortable to me. I would call them a kind of “cancer of emotions.”
There are so-called “enlightened perceptions” (EPs), which are, in my understanding, true emotions. People often call them “positive emotions,” and I like to call them enlightened perceptions. I have already listed some of them – sympathy, a sense of beauty, anticipation, tenderness, but there is also a sense of secrecy, anticipation, a call, aspiration, tenacity, gratitude, seriousness, joy, and many others. One of the generalizations I have made is the assertion that there is a law of nature, according to which if at some point you do not experience NE, then at that very moment you begin to experience EPs. The converse is also true – as soon as EP was created, at that very moment NE does not exist anymore. The habit of experiencing EPs is cultivated in the same way as any other skill we need – by frequent repetition, re-digesting them.
It is easy to discern from experience what a gigantic difference is between NEs and EPs. In fact, they seem to be at different poles, they are opposite to each other, they are fundamentally incompatible. The more meaningless it becomes senseless that they are attributed to one type of perception, to emotions. It also makes no sense how to call the term “food” and delicious cake, and rat poison.
Many people, feeling some growing discomfort, increasing senselessness of life, are looking for ways to regain the joy of life, and throw themselves into the arms of yoga or religion. They sit in fanciful poses, cast bizarre spells, talk with imaginary entities and naively believe that this will bring them deliverance from their suffering. Sometimes, in fact, this gives a result due to the very fact of confidence that the result should be – a kind of mental placebo. But as a rule, only monkey labor comes out of this, because people don’t understand the main thing – they don’t understand the real reasons that their life is going downhill. They do not understand that the main focus of the struggle must be shifted to eliminating NE, cultivating joyful desires, and testing EPs.
A society in which there is no definite and decisive opposition to NE and dogmatism will never live in peace, no matter how we complicate the laws, no matter how we increase penalties, whatever devices and mechanisms come up.
The world in which you live is, first of all, the world of NE – we can say this without exaggeration. They appear in so many manifestations, are so closely intertwined in life that sometimes it seems that there is nothing else besides them, and that all you can do is refine them, complicate, diversify, spinning, connecting with each other, making them more layered and intense.
NEs surround you everywhere; they are imposed and cultivated. I’m not even talking about such obvious things as the cult of violence in news and films, but open any “art” book that is considered good and deep, and there you will find “refined” NEs, strong NEs, complex NEs, and if the reader If a complex of NE arises, interspersed with relief and contentment, it is this that is the basis for considering the book “good”, “deeply affecting”. And where do the books describing the life of a person experiencing many EPs come from? After all, in order to write about this, you yourself must have significant experience of this kind, and there are very few such people.
