' Transmuted Thoughts '...

Egoic consciousness isn’t just a mental phenomenon. The ego also holds tightly onto emotions and feelings, and also onto a general sort of energetic quality that goes along with this egoic trance. The content of our thinking produces many of the emotions and feelings that we experience. In a sense, our physical and emotional bodies are duplicating machines for our thoughts.

In other words, our bodies turn thoughts into emotions and feelings. It’s almost like turning water into wine; it’s an alchemical miracle that our bodies can be duplicators for our thoughts. On one side, there’s the content of thinking; but in our bodies, from our neck down, thinking arises as feeling, emotion, and sensation. I’m not saying that all of our emotions or all of our feelings are derived from thought, but probably at least 90 percent of them originate there.


Not only have we been taught to identify with the content of our thinking, but we’ve also been taught to identify with a certain emotional environment. Every human being has an inner environment that makes them feel like they’re themselves. It doesn’t have to be a particularly positive feeling; some people are identified with a very dense, heavy state of suffering, but when they feel that heavy state of suffering, they feel most like themselves.

Everybody has their own unique emotional environment—somewhat like an emotional North Pole. Not only are we taught to identify with the content of our thinking, but we’re also taught to identify with how we feel. We are also taught to recognize people in terms of their most common emotional states. We say it every day in our common language: “I am angry,” “I am sad,” or “he is an angry person,” or “She often seems sad.” By believing this about ourselves and others, we literally go into a trance with every feeling and every emotion we have.


~ Adyashanti ~
Falling Into Greace