Our emotions create a subtle energy field we project all around us. The field keeps changing according to our moods, our thoughts, our feelings. If we feel loved, feel happy and joyous, the field acquires shades of joy and love. If, on the other hand, we feel dark and brooding, angry, upset or jealous, the field around us acquires negative shades.
Your field can be strong or weak according to your ability to generate emotion. When peak moments happen, when your heart bursts with joy, your emotional field becomes very strong. You exude love and happiness, and when you do that something happens to the world around you. It’s as if the universe doesn’t want to disappoint your joy, and alters reality around you in a way that will keep that joy alive.
Another way of putting it is to say that the spirit of the Universe is joy itself, and when you feel intense joy in your heart, you tap into the infinite power of creation, and this alters reality around you so that you may feel more joy. Whichever way you put it, the point is clear. As the ancient Vedantic verse says, “Yad Bhavam tad Bhavati.” Emotions manifest reality.
Ninety nine per cent of us will never experience this truth in our lives. That’s because our emotional field is rarely brimming with love and happiness, and even if we feel happy we cannot sustain the emotion for very long.
Joy comes and goes like a stone dropped in water — a brief splash, some ripples and it’s gone. When you cannot sustain a strong emotional field of love and joy, you cannot reach out and feel the pulse of the universe, and the universe cannot feel your pulse either. You begin to exist as a cutoff, a separate entity from the universe. It’s now you and you alone. You and the little world inside your head full of disappointment and misery with rare flashes of brief satisfaction.
Your existence becomes isolated and you are denied the bliss that comes when you unite with the infinite field that created you and the universe in the first place.
Therefore, it is very important to train your mind to do two things: one — generate a strong pulse of pure and positive emotion. Two — sustain that emotion and work towards making it stronger and stronger.
You might think this is easy. It probably is if you have led a happy uncomplicated life so far. If you were born to parents who were content and happy, who did not manipulate your feelings, if the life you led so far hasn’t injected you with its toxic venom, then yes, it’s easy.
If, on the other hand, your parents were full of negative emotions — if anger, hatred and violence comes to you naturally — it’s very difficult.
You can always make a beginning and with sustained effort, achieve victory. After a while it gets very simple and beautiful. You wake up in the morning feeling wonderful. That’s because you have slept peacefully, with no disturbing dreams. (The field of joy radiates to your whole self, including your dreams, spreading a smile wherever it goes).
Now, regardless of how the real world is treating you, you have learnt to separate the response of the world as against the response from your heart — you feel good — as you are, where you are.
Even if something horrible has happened, which makes everyone groan with hopelessness, you still feel good. You just flow with pure emotions into a luminous wordlessness. You feel your
emotional field spreading waves into your surroundings, filling you up with love and joy.
If you can sustain your emotional field and reach this level, you will gain new eyes that can see through the misery and unhappiness that pervades this world. It’s as if some power has reached out and is protecting you, lighting up your path as you walk.
You gain new wisdom that allows you to feel grateful for all that you have received. You also find an effortlessness in your achievements. It’s not as if you have become the most successful or wealthiest person in the world. It’s as if whatever success and wealth you have gained has come with a gift of happiness and love that all the riches of the world could never deliver.
That’s just stage one.