You are asking this question to a person who is totally unqualified. I have never faced ups and downs in my emotional life. The only emotion that I have experienced is my relationship with my guru. My relationship with my parents was very casual. My relationship with everyone I have met in life, everyone I meet, has been just casual, even as you meet a friend on the plane when you depart at the airport. The same thing I have followed throughout my life, because I believe that I came alone and I will go alone. Nobody will follow me, neither my wife nor my father.
My happiness is an outcome of my destiny. I am happy, not because of my father or my government, no sir! I am happy, not because of my father, brother or sister. It is my karma. Man came alone and he will go alone, and in between this coming and going, there is the span of his life. He has come to play a part and with whomsoever he comes across he becomes attached and tries to find an excuse for other people. Therefore, I find great difficulty in answering this question.
However, I have heard from my guru, a wise man, and from many other people, that emotions cause crisis and explosions if they are not sublimated. Suppose you make a dam and collect the water and close the dam at the top. What will happen? The water will overflow. It will destroy everything beyond it. Or suppose at some place a crack forms and that crack becomes bigger and bigger. All the water will come at one time destroying the whole city and country. Therefore, what one should do is to control the dam according to the input of water. If the water is coming say 10,000 litres per hour, you must let out 10,000 litres per hour. In the same way, our emotions must be channelled.
There are various ways of channelling emotions. One is by paternal, maternal emotions, fraternal, romantic and sexual emotions. These are the channels through which the emotions are channelized but the people to whom you are giving your emotions do not respond qualitatively. You express your emotions to your mother and she does not respond properly. You express the emotional or sexual relationships with your wife and she does not respond properly.
So the emotional response in both the parties is inadequate. If I talk to you nicely and you do not look at me, that is inadequate. Therefore, explosion and crisis takes place. Emotions are not bad. One should have emotions. If you kill your emotions, you cannot have devotion. Emotion is a very important part of man’s life and one should not kill them, but there should be a proper response from both sides.
If there is no response from both sides, you get explosion and crisis. You get respiratory attack, neurosis attack or weeping and crying and all kinds of dramas. All kinds of explosions take place and these explosions in the course of time, become your personality. For a few days, a week or a month it is alright, but every day the same and every day the same; it is going to be your second nature!
Emotion is a kind of relationship between two individuals. If you have a child, you have certain attitudes to him. That is called emotion. He has certain attitudes to you. That is called emotion. I have certain attitudes to you and you have certain attitudes to me. That is called emotion and emotion is an expression of the heart and not the brain. Therefore, emotion has no eyes; emotion is blind. Intellect has eyes. It has no heart and that is why there is crisis and there is explosion, if the emotions are not responded to properly.
Everybody is searching for fulfilment of emotion. You are trying with your wife, son or daughter and everywhere you get disenchanted. You love your children for fifteen years or twenty years and at some time you are disenchanted. Therefore, I have heard there is a solution. I said I have heard; I am not sure. You have to sublimate your emotions, not only channelize. You have to sublimate them, but how do you sublimate them?
If you believe in God, God is both your father and mother, your brother and friend, your husband and wife and he is your enemy. You dislike him, you like him too, because hatred is also an emotion. You have to sublimate that as well. Ah, you are only sublimating good emotions, while the bad emotions are in the pocket! You must realize the fulfilment of all your emotions in God. You find it difficult because sometimes people find difficulty in having this relationship because God may not like it. He may be a puritan and say, ‘I am not your wife, if you say that I am your wife I am going to say no.’
So then you find a guru and it is possible to sublimate or direct all your emotional energies at him. If the guru is wise and he is cautious and if he is not caught up in your emotional net, he can definitely help you. Sometimes the gurus themselves are caught in the currents of emotion. He must understand what is happening. He should know what is happening and respond properly, correctly and without causing an explosion. Therefore, gurus are very shrewd people.
It is also possible that the guru is like an ocean. Why do I say this, do you know? For thousands of years all the rivers are feeding the sea but it does not overflow. That means the guru is not affected by the emotional experience. There is a third method also I have heard about. Give yourself to music, painting, culture, poetry and writing. This also helps you to sublimate your emotions and avoid explosions and crisis.
The last method and I don’t know if you will like it or not. Keep in your mind that one day you will become a swami. Today it is not possible, ‘I have a wife, a husband, a child, a job and I like my beard, I like my hair, I like my bath and cosmetics. I like to dance and jump but still I would like to become a swami, some day.’ If you think like this, it should work like a panacea.
Another important thing I know is nature; to become one with nature, the sun and moon, the ocean and the rivers, the valleys and the forests, the birds and the singing of the birds, the rock and the desert land. I am talking about nature. I am not talking about these man-made beauties, like the Empire State Building in America or the Eiffel Tower. That which nature has created I call natural.
You have an emotional accident, just as you have a car accident. If you can appreciate it, put your mind deep into it, if a flying bird can take away your mind, if a flowing river can make you forget your tragedies, if the rising full moon can blow off your emotions and you feel like counting the stars, you are beyond emotional accident.
1983, Spain