How other people feel can greatly affect how you feel, and if they feel negative, you can get badly affected, and often for no good reason. So learning how to be less affected and even disaffected by other people’s emotions can be a big help in day to day living.
Like most emotional issues it does require some understanding though and takes time to get it to work. So what you need to do is to be inwardly sealed, which means to be aware and watch your emotional responses. If you can gradually reduce those responses, other people will have less affect over you, and you’ll feel and be a lot freer as a person and in what you are able to do. You can keep your inner integrity, and not depend upon the responses of others.
We’re usually in an environment surrounded by the thoughts and emotions of other people; no one exists in a psychic or spiritual vacuum. What comes from others affects the psyche, and if someone’s not on guard, if they don’t keep their own ‘hermetic’ sealing, they will get hooked onto the bait of others, dragged into their states, into their way of thinking, feeling, and acting—just as everybody around us is—and before they know it, they are just caught by the ups and downs and whims of others.
There is a lot to face and struggle with, particularly if you are reactive with people around you. Do whatever task you need to do, but to always keep your inner integrity, so that you are with others, but are always watching yourself, understanding what it is that’s driving those around you, but not getting sucked into the well of their egos that arise, nor your own. People in daily life are just not fundamentally changing, and if you are, then you need to keep yourself sealed internally.
Even though they can’t normally be seen, people’s thoughts and feelings affect others; they travel in waves from other dimensions and hit in the solar plexus. Other people’s emotions can cause corresponding emotions within. The whole scope of the environment, and of the life which is led, can be constructed by egos, by the mind, and does not serve the essence; yet it has to be lived in, this is where learning takes place. So it’s important to learn how to live in the school of life: to be in it, yet to be internally detached from it. To laugh, but not depend upon others’ laughter back; to speak but to be detached from the response; not to depend upon what others think of you or expect from you – yet to wisely go through events, taking into account the feelings of others, learning to use your inner voice as a guide and a judge to get you through different situations, but always to be on alert.
When that guard is lost, which is losing the inner awareness of yourself, then you are caught not only in your own egos, but in the egos of other people around you. And they can drag you into a hell of misery, which is what egos lead to. And if you try to live up to the expectations of others, again it can catch you and drag you right down into a pit. So you’ve got to be strong, you’ve got to stand upon your own inner work, regardless of what other people think about you. And that’s not an easy thing to do, particularly as everyone has different demands.
Most people don’t understand that there’s an awakening that can happen. They expect others to act and react in certain ways; daily life is constructed around it. Work in it, but keep your inner integrity, without depending upon the responses of others. In the beginning this is difficult to do, because so much of how someone acts is in response to others, but don’t be victims of other people – rise out of that.
Get to the point of stillness within, and if you can’t do that, then just ask, keep your inner state at the best level you are able to at the time, to try to stay out of the storm of others’ emotions. Then, when you have time, get some peace and quiet, because peace and quiet is really a friend. Not just the external peace and quiet, which may be difficult to get, but an internal peace and quiet. Being peaceful is a very rare state. You might think people are relatively peaceful around you—they’re not—they’re thinking, going through emotions, constantly in a daydream. Don’t let yourself be dragged down into the pit of others’ emotions and thoughts.
Try to get enough spiritual food to help you to get through daily life and keep the connection with spiritual principles and forces, and to be able to wake up in daily life. Success in this is dependent upon activity. It’s an inner process: by just performing external actions you won’t get it. If you can connect with those forces then you can avoid being so absorbed by life. There are so many things that absorb the consciousness and make it diminish into a daydream, overriding the feelings of the essence. There is so much that fascinates and keeps consciousness in a state of sleep, everyone is so used to living in habits that it’s just easy to slip back into them.
Get to the valuable stillness inside, even if the egos are screaming not to. Keep a mental discipline going, where you’re watching all the time. Use whatever you can to remember to be aware, wake up as much as possible, and feel awake. Use your valuable time to do that, so that go on to create something of great importance, within yourself, which you just can’t buy.
Maintain as constant an observation as you can, so that you see what’s happening within yourself and are aware of being ‘here’, breaking through the hypnotic daydream. When you break through it, you’ll know it, because it’ll be a perception that you’ll feel. And then keep going with it, to get more breakthroughs and train yourself to wake up in your daily life.
Don’t let others determine how you live your psychological life, work to awaken, observe yourself whenever you’re with others to see your reactions of thoughts and emotions. Don’t go along with these, but ask the spirit to destroy them inwardly, maintaining your awareness. And fight within yourself to keep what you have and what you know. It will help you to weather the storms that living brings.
~ From a talk by Belsebuub given in Oregon, USA 2009
