Why do we have so-called negative emotions such as fear, anger and hatred? If they didn’t exist, life would have been an easy ride, right? Like heaven on earth?
A melange of emotions exists in us to support our growth on earth. Life on earth wasn’t kind or conducive when humanity came to existence. The two poles of emotions which we bundle-term as ‘good’ and ‘bad’, are opposites and a precursor to our learning, in assisting our growth on the earth realm.
All emotions have a purpose
These emotions were required to negotiate life on Earth, to survive. In order to fight dangerous situations, the emotion of fear existed to save life. Jumping off a cliff to get a feel of flying is an enticing idea but fear existed to stop this, so that ‘naturally’ you don’t end your life. Hunger existed, making you angry so you went out to hunt for food, also tame fear, and knew how and when to let fear work or not work for you. Jealousy is essentially an emotion to compete, allowing you to bring your best too. Greed exist(ed) to fulfil your desires. All these emotions helped humanity to evolve from cave life to the present life.
At the time, the consciousness of humanity, that is, the collective, too was still evolving from lower levels. Today, it is still evolving and the remnants of the past ‘surviving’ emotions are still playing role. Lower consciousness in the past was highly active for basic survival needs. The survival today is of different nature but humans are still guided by these emotions, where ‘negative’ still plays out-of-proportion part. Our job is to balance all these emotions. The evolved souls, through conscious effort and practice, operate out of high consciousness (equilibrium) than of the past. This is done by balancing all nature of emotions, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’.
The cycle of humanity too goes through stages of consciousness as an individual, a single self, goes through (in form of seven prime chakra consciousness). An ‘awakened’ individual operating out of higher consciousness (upper chakras; wisdom, intuition, truth, inner light) influence others. And adds to the evolution — involution rather — of the humanity, collective consciousness.
It is not a coincidence, then to say, if an individual focuses on raising his/her consciousness (awareness, qualities of balanced goodness), add to humanity’s consciousness. The first duty of an individual lies to the self and emanates from the self, before sermonising others, or going about correcting the behaviour of others.
Raising collective consciousness
A collective consciousness is a replica or a mirror or a reflection of consciousness of each individual combined; look over a geography/ location and bring into awareness the consciousness-stage of that group. A whole is generated by sum-total of parts.
It all starts from the self (work). Work begins with you (the self), rest is then a natural, organic process of purification of the collective.
Coming back, these so-called negative emotions still exist in latent or active form to help in our evolution. For example, if one is to fight injustice, one needs to invoke the emotion/feeling of anger, not in the crude form but in a manner that the energy of anger gets channelised constructively. All ‘negative’ emotions help but their energy needs to be directed to be used constructively instead of destructively, else, the true purpose of their existence goes waste. Karma builds.
Lurching between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, humanity has come this far in their consciousness since the cave ages. There’s a whole lot of work still to do. And it all begins with the self, the single self.
Urmila Rao is an emotional healer and a forgiveness teacher. All the ideas expressed herein are her own and not professional advice or medical prescription. Her email: hellokarmicwellness@gmail.com
