Of course there are emotional states that feel ‘negative’ to all of us in the sense that they don’t feel good to feel, and so we label them as such. It is also humanly natural to prefer positive over negative feelings.
But just because these two orientations are so, does not mean it is appropriate to label and then relate to uncomfortable or difficult emotive states as negative. As we will talk more about later, there are always reasonable reasons why ‘negative’ emotions exist in the first place. This means all emotive states, no matter their theme or dynamic, need to be embraced and worked through as integral to aligning one’s expressed life to its essential nature as emotive. Many times positive emotions are wound-based, and need to be embraced and worked through to become healable, and so-called ‘negative’ emotions are not, and don’t.
The problem is that labeling emotive states as negative is inevitably followed by resisting, disowning, or repressing them. We are conditioned by virtually all guiding paradigms in our history, east and west, to avoid indulging and deeply feeling emotive states that bring us down, make our everyday life more difficult, or seem to impede the manifestation of our dreams. But contrary to virtually all secular and spiritual paradigms, especially in buddhism and modern self-empowerment offerings, what are called negative emotions do not magically disappear by disowning, transcending, resisting, or repressing them. Only paradigms that have never recognized emotivity as our essential nature, which is all of our prevailing teachings past and present, east and west, teach the fantasy that they do.
Because emotivity is our deepest aspect of being, it also means what we call the human unconscious is also emotive in nature, and not some kind of energetic garbage disposal unit we use to permanently delete difficult emotions. As such, emotions on both sides of the positive/negative spectrum are actually not transcendable, disownable, resistible, or repressable. Once driven out of conscious awareness through will’s use of transcendence, resistance, repression, or disownment, what are called negative emotions are simply driven into the unconscious.
All the while believing in the fantasy that disowned emotions are gone and no longer exerting any effects on the being, the conscious self is thus blithely unaware that they remain to fester in the unconscious. Flying under the radar of the conscious self, they ruminate and roil in a stormy unconscious sea compressed down by will and in that way gain obstructive power under that pressure. As they do, they form the basis for a multitude of other dynamics that express the disowned emotive nexi downline into will, ideation, action and outcome, distorting those elements as they arise.
This distortion creates unconscious wound-based will, unconscious wound-based ideation, unconscious wound-based action, and unconscious wound-based outcome because the entire spectrum emanates from the default wounded emotivity of our essential being, from which we can never escape. In that way, because our authentic version of selfhood requires alignment with a non-wounded emotive base of being, all wound-based expressive aspects of being splay us from that authentic selfhood and create false, limiting, self-stagnative, and self-destructive states of both individual and global being.
Said another way, attempting to use will, which is downstream to emotivity, to resist, extinguish, transcend, or repress upstream emotive content artificially drives that content into the holding tank of the unconscious. This roiling wound-based foundation of selfhood is neither stable nor in alignment with our essential being and so results in a downline-manifested inauthentic version of self powered by the less essential aspect of will and mind. Sourcing our human lives from will, our secondary aspect of being, instead of emotivity, our primary aspect, thus creates a false, wound-based, and unbalanced self-authority.
All paradigms in our history, east and west, secular and spiritual, directly or indirectly teach us to use will in that way to transcend, resist, repress, or disown troublesome emotive states to be functional, spiritual, or enlightened. This has tragically resulted in distorted uses of will, dysmorphic ideational content, misbegotten actions, and stagnative or destructive outcomes created by a wound-based false self-authority that splays us from our authentic being and the Spirit-based life we would otherwise live.
This reality thus actually increases human suffering, the opposite of paradigms that teach suffering is only abatable through the non-abidement with states of so-called negative emotivity. This irony was originated and is perpetrated by all of our guiding religious, secular, and spiritual traditions. Only spiritual attainments grounded in a healthy and emotively mature personal self-authority, which can never be attained while justifying the transcendence, resistance, repression, guiltification, or disownment of ‘negative’ emotions, represent states of real spiritual maturity.
Believing any emotive state is extinguishable and transcendable just because we can temporarily transcend or repress them out of conscious awareness with will and mind is perhaps the deepest tragedy of our self-understanding as individuals and as a species. That this simple understanding has been so absent in all of our philosophical, religious, and spiritual leaders and the ways of life they teach is the exact measure of our personal and planetary travail and suffering.
Many foolishly believe buddhism’s acceptance of all arising dualistic states, especially negatively-charged emotive states, does not teach repression or resistance of those dynamics. But this is a horrifically distortive metaphysical sleight-of-hand justified by the explanation that mindfulness-based transcendence neither resists nor indulges in any arising dualistic dynamic, meditatively watching from a neutral space without passion. Followers of buddhists then naively believe their teachers that no repression of negative emotive states is occurring.
But as said, learning to not identify with feelings by describing them either as dualistic, transitory, or illusional, does not touch the actual congested content of our emotional states and their will body and mental body correlates. Transcending them as buddhism teaches only views emotive states as presenting or being packaged dualistically, and mistakenly assumes that if one transcendentally dispenses with the dualistic packaging, one dispenses what was within the packaging. In this way, the actual essential content of the emotive states is resisted and repressed, the more you do so, the more you are rewarded by your guru.
This entire dynamic just uses a false ‘acceptance’ as a resistance-based way to not let the troublesome emotive content affect the self so as not to impede enlightenment, and never questions the emotively-wounded and unconscious motives for seeking enlightenment in the first place, cast out of one’s reach by transcendence.
The content of transcended emotions thus remains in the unconscious of the emotional body of all meditators and enlightened teachers and continues to exert distorting effects throughout life. In such a case, the conflict is just driven further into the unconscious through a spiritual drug rather than a physical, mental, behavioral, religious, or philosophical one.
As such, all enlightened teachers in buddhist traditions are literally transcendental drug dealers, teaching followers to sell out their emotive essence exactly as they were taught by their teachers, who were taught to do so by theirs, and theirs by theirs, all the way back to Gotama.
So even though they deem themselves further evolved, buddhists are no more advanced than denser dualistic mystical traditions that sell the drug of existential guilt to their congregations. Guilt is a drug only purchased by adult children and transcendence more by adult teenagers, but both have exactly the same effect, the denial and suppression of our innocent and essential emotive-based humanness.
This means anyone who has enlightened in eastern traditions or attained any level of advanced consciousness in the past in any paradigm using that orientation to negative emotions has done so from the basis of their wound-based false self-authority, which undermines and invalidates in deeply limiting ways the true extent of the attainment. Of course, in a paradigm like buddhism where self itself is an illusory by-product of the mind’s dualistic function, the distinction between wound-based emotively immature self-authority and emotively mature self-authority is invisible to it. As such, the unconscious wounds of enlightened teachers remain invisible, tragically believed they no longer affect the being.
In EBE, a real soul-based selfhood exists far upstream of mere mental body function, and so could never be an illusory product of such a downstream aspect of being. It can be directly self-verified that what Gotama called the illusory self is just an alias/template of our upstream emotive-based soul-selfhood held in the mental body as a fractal of that soul-based eternal selfhood. In that way, Gotama mistook that ephemeral alias or template of self held in the mental body as self entire, reasonable for the level of consciousness of the Dark Age, because it is actually ‘unreal’ relative to that more upstream soul-selfhood.
As such, his teaching was a stunning improvement over Hindu superstition and mysticism. But his mistake was never realized, leading millions of followers over the millennia to a consciousness dead-end, all the while believing his teaching was the final solution to consciousness liberation. All those who have enlightened within the paradigm of buddhism thus have a very arduous road ahead of them involving many lifetimes to outwork. Their inauthenticity of being, sealed in by enlightenment, deeply fixates them in the immature emotive state that sought the enlightenment in the first place as an escape from the burdens of consciousness. This prevents further emotive growth in the life they enlightened in because the wounds responsible for the motive are now buried under a mountain of Sunyata. Buddhists are thus mired in error to the degree they embodied the error, enlightened people the most.
In EBE’s view, even great spiritual masters can never transcend the weight and distortion their conflicted emotions have in their heart-fields because congestions in our emotional bodies are simply not transcendable by any means: they won’t just magically go away because we are not feeling them, not relating to them, not identifying with them, or replacing them with nondual access. That they remain is proven by malignant abusive behaviors in enlightened teachers who actually believe themselves free of ego, and their benign sophomoric teachings in general.
Being taught we need to learn how to transcend ‘destructive’ emotions by no less an authority as the current Dalai Lama, is just another indicator how spiritual teachers east and west remain so confused about the nature and dynamics of the human emotional body and how it relates to mature spirituality. We cannot ever be free of any part of ourselves ever, only temporarily abandon it in the name of functionality, positivity, or enlightenment. As we will see later, healing these parts fully is a case of reclaiming them, not abandoning, transcending, or resisting them.
In summary, what happens when we label or relate to any thing about ourselves as ‘negative’ is that a critical contraction of being occurs, regardless of whether that judgment comes from a psychological or spiritual source. This contraction occurs so automatically that it even feels natural and warranted. When we are taught that certain moods, feelings, or behaviors are undesirable or negative, it will feel natural to shut down to feeling the core emotions which seem to be the source of this apparent negativity.
Thus, we cut off from deep emotive reactions to life that actually source all passing feelings or states our families, cultures, or spiritual orientations deem negative that we are taught to resist, repress, or transcend. In EBE’s emotionology, this notion is rejected utterly. It holds that all self-stagnative or self-destructive life content we create in action and behavior does not come from our negative emotions at all, but instead, comes from the fact that we consider those feelings negative in the first place and thus resist and disown them.
In other words, our nonproductive, destructive behaviors actually flow from the non-acceptance of our so-called negative emotions, the opposite of orienting to that as a failure of repression or transcendence. We are conditioned to do this by first labeling these emotions as negative, then resist feeling them, thus denying them expression in healthy and constructive ways. It is in this way that EBE maintains that all the violence in the world occurs not because we do not control our rage or hate effectively, it is because we control it too much, and forcing it to then compensatorily and violently flow from our over-controlled negativization.
The cause for all this misunderstanding is the ignorance of the colossal difference between an emotive nexus that arises in us, and what we secondarily do with it or how we express it. What is negative is not the emotion that sources playouts or actions harmful to self or others, but the actions and outcomes that are activated into manifestation from that emotion by wound-based false self-authority.
The key to this abysmal misunderstanding in virtually all of our paradigms of the human condition is the mistaken assumption that if we do allow ourselves to deeply feel and abide with those kind of unsupported emotive states, we will by necessity act upon them. This assumption is based in Dark Age orientations that adult human beings are children with no impulse control who are powerless to stop expression of the so-called negative emotion into action and behavior.
Real children actually do become or automatically activate into behavior the emotions they feel. This is completely appropriate for the dependent state of emotional development they are in. They have not yet learned to disown, resist, or repress direct outer expression of their inner arising emotive states, and developmentally lack the ability to do so. But while natural to a child’s dependent state of development, such laminations of inner emotive states to outer expressions is of course not appropriate for the independent development state of a human adult.
Our historical narrative however, is that human adults actually do fuse to their emotive states like children and act out impulsively, which is why our paradigms teach of the negative emotivity that triggers the expression. Why as a species we are developmentally fixated in this way is explained in Chapter 4, as a direct symptom of never having been adequately fed in our emotional bodies in childhood, even by well-meaning and loving parents.
EBE mantains that only emotively immature adults fixated in childhood wound patterns lack the impulse management to not express every emotion they feel. So EBE does not teach that we must express outwardly all of the emotions that arise in us, obviously. As adults, guided by upstream states of emotive maturity, we must learn to use will and mind wisely to create lives not driven by anarchical emotivity like a child naturally does in their proper developmental phase.
What it does teach is that we must never transcend or disown any emotive state whatsoever, and give ourselves the gift of dwelling with them and feeling them deeply enough to be able to track back their genesis in the unconscious in order to locate their wounded source, and learn to heal them: we simply cannot heal what we do not feel. Even states of peace, happiness, and love can be wound-based, as compensations to cover unconscious dynamisms of dystrophy.
To do this obviously requires a dharma that first opens the door to access the contents of the unconscious in a deliberate and effective way, and offers an objective metric for what constitutes wound-based and non-wound-based emotivity, will, mind, action, and outcome. This has never been possible before now precisely because no psychological, religious, spiritual, or philosophical paradigm of the human condition east or west, modern to traditional, has ever seen emotivity as comprising our essential human nature.
Once investigated in that way, a person must then make the effort in an effective healing path within that dharma to actually heal those sources in the unconscious, such that the unconscious wound-based sources of so-called negative emotions resolve and no longer generate either wound-based secondary ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ feeling-states.
In that sense, the cause of all what are deemed negative emotions and all compensation-based positive emotive states are sourced by unconscious dynamisms of woundedness. The more the unconscious woundedness in our being, the more what we call negative or compensatorily positive emotions or feelings arise in us, and the less the less. And the less the emotive woundedness, the less we create downstream forms of distorted will, dysmorphic ideation, misbegotten actions, and suffering-based outcomes, no matter how satisfying they may be. In such a case, only the inauthentic strategic self experiences those satisfying outcomes as positive.
In short, what is negative is never any emotion. What is negative are the secondary stagnative or destructive intentions, actions, and outcomes that manifest from both wound-based positive and negative emotions. The only way to create a world less convulsed by individual and global suffering is to heal our individual unconscious emotive woundedness upstream of intention, actions, and outcomes within a dharma based in emotivity as the essence of human being. The long term personal result is an emotively mature-based peaceful, more fulfilled emotively mature personal life, and the collective result a more peaceful world in general.
So feeling guilty for, disowning, repressing, resisting, guiltifying, or transcending negative emotive states is the actual invisible cause of our individual and global suffering. This is the exact opposite to what has been taught by all of our dominant paradigms, and is why suffering goes on unabated. In EBE’s view, if such a resistive-to-negative-emotions solution, taught for millennia in one form or another by all of our Dark Age (before the Renaissance, governed by an ‘I do, therefore I am’ imprimatur) religious and spiritual teachers, and most of our Dim Age (after the Renaissance, governed by an ‘I think, therefore I am’ imprimatur) secular therapists and philosophers, was going to work, it would have worked by now.
In that way, that orientation has had its assumption tested in the real world laboratory of human life in earth for thousands of years, and has shown to be an abject failure. This failure is unseen because the ideational content of all such ancient and modern resistance to so-called negative emotions as the cause of sin, unenlightened states of consciousness, and suffering, screens it out.
Only a Bright Age (beginning now, governed by an ‘I feel, therefore I am’ imprimatur) sees the real problem and offers a real solutional path.
At the root of our challenge in all these ways is the assumption by all past and present psychological, philosophical, religious, and spiritual traditions and paradigms that if we feel such a negative emotive nexus deeply, we would be powerless to not have it impact our world negatively or that we will somehow have to act out its negative stagnative or destructive effects. This assumption is based on never having mature states of impulse management present in our species. Instead, we have artificial fuse-to-impulse fixations sourced by a state of emotional arrested development from never having been emotively nourished in childhood by dystrophic parenting.
Lack of impulse management is thus tragically and wrongly viewed as some kind of default natural human nature, rather than a broken dynamic caused by parenting models that have never known what children actually need for nourishment in their emotional bodies. Thus mistakenly assumed to be a natural aspect of human nature leads then to the assumption that if we deeply indulge negative emotivity, we will be ‘forced’ to either endure its impacts on our life or express it outwardly, never realizing it is natural only to wound-based human nature, that distinction never having been made.
So to prevent the negative playouts from so-called negative emotivity over which our secular and spiritual traditions teach we are helpless to control or manage, we are taught to cut off the root emotive nexus at the base of the impending effects or acts, justifying the labeling of such nexi as negative. When it is finally recognized that as a state of emotional maturity emerges, healthy impulse management arises, and we are easily able to embrace and feel all ‘negative’ emotions without impeding our lives or leading to negative actions and outcomes.
In terms of treating this lack of impulse management from childhood emotional body malnourishment, in addition to buddhism’s drug of transcendence already cited, we have been offered only three other solutions. The first is offered by Dark Age religions that proscribe negative fusion-based downstream behavior using moral codes like the ten commandments, the golden rule, the eight-fold path, or various and sundry assignations of actions and behaviors as sinful or unenlightened as the ways to work against impulsive acting out of emotive dynamics.
That assignation is thus always measured at the level of ‘do,’ not the wound-based emotive and unconscious ‘why’ of the ‘do:’ ‘Do’ this, ‘don’t do that’ in ten commandment/eightfold path contexts; ‘Do’ unto others as you would have them ‘do’ unto you, in golden rule contexts. That this ‘do’-based solution, which has never worked over the centuries to stop human actions deemed negative despite the threat of eternal damnation in the west and illusory consciousness in the east, is still clung to by billions of human beings is an overwhelmingly tragic indicator of our woeful state of emoto-spiritual maturity as a species.
The proof of its failure shown by the unchanged ongoing violence-based state of the world for all of our history is simply ignored, and even more tragically, how much the religious orientations that preach such proscriptive nonsense are themselves historically the source of the majority of world-wide war and violence. Only the stubborn persistence of world-wide Dark Age-based religious and spiritual orientations holds humanity hostage to the failure of their moral codes and ethical systems based on intention, actions, or outcomes. Humanity will only emoto-spiritually evolve when it moves to an entirely new basis for moral codes and ethical systems inherent in the metrics of emotional maturity, described in more detail in Enheartenment and i feel, therefore i am.
Our more modern solutions to addressing childish fusions to arising impulses goes one step deeper, wherein we are not taught to proscribe actions and outcomes but instead taught to use our will aspect of being in some way to resist, repress, or disown the emotive state at cause for the inappropriate or harmful actions so they do not happen in the first place. The second solution is at the level of the physical, and the third at the behavioral, both still at the level of ‘do.’
Physically, we utilize will to use neurochemical intervention to pop a pill to numb down the negative emotive nexus, and behaviorally, we use will to somehow artificially produce a state of happiness or positivity to cover over troublesome emotive states and the behaviors that flow from them. Medicating down the negative emotions and their effects pharmaceutically or behaviorally is all the modern so-called experts can do because they lack the ability to solve the problem at the emotive source and thus only treat the symptoms. Tragically unaware of our essence as emotive, they mistakenly assure themselves they treat the cause.
That these are the only four solution paths, Dark Age use of transcendence or proscription of acts, and Dim Age use of chemicals or attitudes to address how negative emotions create fusions to activate impulses, exposes the confusion inherent in our past and present religious, philosophical, spiritual, secular, and psychological paradigms about human nature and its intrinsic linkage to emotivity as essence. This is why as a species we remain fixated in states of arrested emotional development, despite having evolved further in body and mind.
There is now a way to heal these fixations in EBE without Dark Age moral codes, Dim Age pharmaceuticals, or Dim Age positive thinking and attituding. As emotive maturity oneday becomes the default basis for human life, Dark and Dim Age paradigms that have historically guided and governed our world will molt. In their place a new Bright Age would have room to emerge, allowing us to experience that the personal only impedes the spiritual when selfhood is based in our inauthentic emotive immaturity, and not our authentic emotive maturity.
As the personal and the spiritual began to share space no longer taught to be adversaries by Dark Age paradigms or mutably linkable by merely changing biochemistry, behaviors and attitudes by Dim Age orientations, all outer violence would finally be recognized as always having been sourced by undiagnosed inner emotive violence and would thus have the room to be replaced by benevolence. The mature ability to manage impulses through an acceptance of all of our emotional realities, regardless of their content within an overall dharmic path of change, would then be embodiable by human beings.
This acceptance is essential in ending the outer behavioral play-outs of these otherwise neutral emotional aspects. Acceptance of both emotional and mental states has always been taught as the end of the problem rather than the barest of beginnings. This kind of guidance will forever prevent healing and actually increase suffering over the long term. Instead, we must first accept each and every arising state we are taught is negative, unenlightened, dualistic, or of a past scripting context and then, to bring to a healing end, embrace it deeply enough with effective healing practice to work it through to its unconscious base emotional source.
Because distress and suffering is neither created nor stored in the mental or higher spiritual levels, but in the emotional body, only homeopathic emotive medicine for emotively-held woundings will create an authentic and enduring basis for healing. Implicit to this is the basic premise that any impulse which leads to stagnative or destructive behavior is unconscious emotive malnourishment at work, not being inherently bad, evil, or unenlightened. People who become emotively nourished with a sense of authentic self-worth simply do not engage in destructive behavior. What we call evil or unenlightened behavior is only one part of us lovingly protecting another part from pain or a perceived danger, creating actions based in unconscious fear.
At the most basic level, defining something as ‘positive’ or ‘negative,’ or as ‘good’ or ‘evil,’ is always a function of a value system linked to a paradigm that legitimizes the metric as part of its world-view. Secular and religious paradigms have thus created ethics based either upon revelatory or humanistic value systems respectively within which they then define human aspects and behaviors as either being positive or negative. A distorted paradigm that never saw through to emotivity as essence will inevitably create a distorted picture of the human condition. This, in turn, creates distorted definitions, values, and judgments of human behavior. This leads to distorted ethical guidelines, which then create distorted human beings who continue to energize and accept the entire distorted picture.
In another direction, it is generally held that we can only change things that we do not accept. Social activists may believe that poverty levels, insensitivity to the environment, or women’s dominance by patriarchy are unacceptable, and thus are moved to some sort of social action. But the deeper truth is that we cannot change what we do not accept, because non-acceptance creates resistance to that which we wish to change, and resistance of something always creates persistence of the something that is resisted.
Sexual abuse by clergy in a paradigm that resists natural sexual expression; patriarchy in all walks of life continuing because men never heal their hidden issues of resistance to mother and so project it onto women; and abuse of devotees by gurus who resist the self entirely and so abdicate self-responsibility, all persist through the algorithm of resistance. It is this hidden presence of resistance that inhibits the change we intend.
Yeshua the Nazarene referred to just this underlying dynamic when he encouraged humanity to ‘turn the other cheek’ when faced with adversity. Gandhi was saying the same thing when speaking of our proclivity for repeating cycles of violence: ‘An eye for an eye until the whole world is blind.’ Both men were trying to get us to see that we cannot change anything we don’t first accept, and in that acceptance comes a very different kind of intervention for change.
EBE thus maintains that the idea of accepting first that which we wish to change is not just a principle of social or spiritual change, it is a principle of change itself. This principle is critical when applied to the arena of emotional transmutation. If we label and energetically relate to an emotional experience as negative we cannot help but energetically contract ourselves against it in nonacceptance. This creates intrapsychic resistance that behaves much like a positive-feedback loop: resistance then seeks to keep the negative emotion from arising again and so justifies the use of further resistive mechanisms in action and attitude to ensure that it does not. That emotion is then denied the right to be what it is. True freedom is never against anything, as in that case it is still apron-stringed to that which it struggles to free itself from, the rebellion only a reaction that inevitably remains enslaved by that which is rebelled against.
This is why allopathic interventions like neurolinguistic programming, positive thinking, behavior performance rituals or cognitive, control-based efforts, or spiritual transcendence of dualistic states cannot ever create heart-deep, authentic well-being or true enlightenment, as they are all based in resistance to what they label as negative emotions or ‘lower’ states of consciousness. The cover-up price we pay for the temporary results we receive by doing so, is that we become more inauthentic at the core while appearing to be more enlightened. With this comes a weight that prevents us from soaring further in consciousness.
The degree to which we label and relate to a certain segment of our emotional range as ‘lower’ or negative, is thus the degree to which we cut ourselves off from fully experiencing the ‘higher’ emotions. Because it is our emotional landscape that represents the deepest aspect of our being human, it cannot be cut up; with certain ‘positive’ parts being given preferential treatment and other ‘negative’ parts prejudicial treatment. The degree to which we avoid ‘low’ is the degree we are locked out of ‘high.’ Believing behavioral, mental or even spiritual resistance to a certain range of our full emotional frequency will give us freedom from the effects of those emotions, only buys us into one of humankind’s oldest illusions.
Relating to the hurt, anxious, raging, controlling, hateful, depressive, or shameful parts of us as being ‘low’ and thus trying to resist them, is a paradigmatically justified form of child abuse. Every time we relate to that part of us as ‘low’ or ‘unenlightened’ or ‘dualistic,’ we say to that part, ‘You’re bad, I don’t want you, you are not welcome here, go away.’
This is exactly a replication and extension of what happened to us in childhood, when major aspects of our emotive-based being were either negligently or abusively not validated by emotively immature parenting. True healing of painful emotions automatically creates an immediate, healthy transcendence of their effects, always. But transcendence alone will always prevent healing because we end up using will, action, attitude, sunyata, God, or enlightenment to cover up what we haven’t healed, like putting carpet over a floor of holes.
Every so-called negative emotion has a sane reason for being with which we are out of touch. This reason can not be communicated and understood until we stop making it negative and thereby first accept it fully without self-judgment, and from there create a healing and energetic dance with its unconscious wounded source. If we thus embrace these emotional parts in this way, they will tell us why they are angry, depressed, violent, hurt or aggressive. This does not happen just because we accept them, it occurs only when such acceptance is in the context of an overall healing ground wherein the aspects of our conflict are slowly nurtured through a relationship with themselves and an open-hearted Other or facilitator. This form of contextual validation is the key to healing the congestion at cause for both the ‘negative’ emotion and its behavioral effects.
This was the lesson Yeshua taught through his friendship with tax collectors and prostitutes. Our so-called negative emotions are like the tax collectors and prostitutes of our internal emotional world, and it is they whom we must serve first if we wish to serve others or Divine Being healthily.
Since we’ve never been taught the difference between healthy ego and unhealthy ego, our past and current religious or spiritual paradigms teach suffering persists because we possess egos. But criticizing ego as the source of suffering is like a bird proclaiming that all problems with flying are due to the existence of wings. Anyone who teaches that our problems stem from ego is using their human ego while doing so, and can only be coming from their own unconscious, unhealed emotive congestions within ego.
Now there is a way to bring along our self-reflective ego in our enlightenment and relationality with Divine Being, not leave it behind. In EBE, ego is simply the relationship your self has with itself. That self-reflective relationship can be productive/constructive or stagnant/destructive, and will always be a function of our unconscious emotive-based self-unworth or Love; but not because of any intrinsic sin, negativity, meaninglessness, or illusion about ourselves or our species.
This call for both self-ownership and self-acceptance of all our emotional aspects of course requires that a means to effectively work with and heal our conscious and unconscious emotional congestion. This in turn requires a means to access those sources that actually cause emotional congestion and how that congestion remains stored within our being. Both of these dynamics are explored more deeply in Chapter 6.