Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
reaction, the emotional reaction, is pretty much inherent to the
outer event, whatever it is, I mean that's how I always experienced
it, the thing caused me to feel the way I felt. But if you slow it
down, and if a person can watch him or herself what's actually
happening in the moment, when the external thing first takes
place there's a really immediate internal response that's on the
level of feeling, and this is before the mind gets hold of it at all. So
if you can notice that there's actually a succession of events, first
there's a very immediate first impression feeling, then very quickly
the mind gets hold of it and starts to manage it, often it's some
kind of thought that makes it possible to escape the feeling, or
somehow manage that initial feeling, and manage the external
event. If a person can notice that that's actually a two-step thing,
that there really is that first feeling, and then there's what the
mind does with it, then it becomes possible to realize that if you
can watch what the mind is doing with it, you can also decline to
back up and let yourself just stay with the feeling. And so the
emotion that we end up reeling from ends up being what really
stays with us and causes our neurosis and so on, the emotion
comes about as a result of the thinking.
So once the thoughts are in motion, this is all going on in an
unexamined way, thoughts are in motion, and then the emotions
start to be generated, it looks for all the world as though that
emotion was directly tied to the outer event, but sometimes just
watching what goes on in the interior; if I can watch and see that
actually there was that very early feeling. If we can stay with that,
and not take refuge in the mind which then causes the painful
emotions, then it becomes possible to feel the feeling, give it its
due, but then move onto the next moment without that terrible
emotional residue that we typically generate in any difficult
situation.
In my own life, I didn't watch all that happening, even though I
thought I was pretty self-aware. At some point I began to intuit
something of it, and I mention something about that, I can't
remember if it's in the first book, but I know in the second book I
went into it in a way. So for me the whole issue of choice comes of
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