The Nature of Emotions and the Role of Meditation in Understanding Life

Let’s talk about emotions. When emotions are mentioned, we typically think of reactions. As complete, embodied individuals, emotions are our reactions to things happening before us or in our minds. But what is the mechanism behind these reactions? This is the topic we’ll explore today. What is it that drives us to react to events?

Emotions and Reactions

We know that newborn babies don’t have many emotions. When they are hungry, they cry; when happy, they laugh—these reactions are based on direct experiences. As a baby grows and begins to toddle, imagine it suddenly falls. In that moment, the baby is bewildered because it doesn’t understand what happened—it’s beyond their comprehension. It isn’t until an adult comes over to comfort, soothe, and attend to the scraped area that the baby starts to understand this action as an injury and learns that being hurt makes one sad. This is how emotions are cultivated, forming the basic responses that make us human. It’s also the origin of our emotions and the earliest way we think about the surrounding world.

In other words, people experience emotions because the brain has the ability to think, and thinking is based on having cognition. We interpret what events are good or bad for us, accumulating this understanding from our surroundings, parents, or even the internet. These sources provide the material for forming our emotions. So, what is the correct way of thinking? There is no such thing as the “correct” cognition—this question itself is flawed. Any cognition is just a mental construct, and none are inherently superior to another, nor can one form of understanding solve another. Cognition is shaped by memory, thoughts, and knowledge, which influence and affect our lives to some extent, but they are not life itself.

Pure Energy and the Role of Meditation

I increasingly perceive emotions, reactions, and thoughts as an invisible web that confines my life. Life is an invisible, vast, random, yet orderly flow of energy. Thoughts attempt to capture, stick to, resist, and compress this flow, which then generates emotions. From the moment emotions arise, we are already distanced from reality because emotions are the brain’s analysis of the present situation based on knowledge, and all of this is illusory and unreal. Through emotions, we fall into the world of thought and become detached from life itself. Of course, the world of thought is very rich—filled with countless teachers, knowledge, philosophy, and religions. We need knowledge for living in this world on a physical level, but not on a spiritual or psychological level, because thoughts are too crude and insubstantial for the soul. What the soul needs is pure energy, and pure energy is nothingness: emptiness, vast space, and silence.

Energy operates according to its own rules, beyond the control of the human mind—it can only be sensed. When I try to perceive the real world around me and within me, the first thing I encounter is my own emotions. They are heavy, demanding attention, impossible to ignore, judge, resist, or be impatient with. I observe them and allow them to exist. When I listen to the birds outside, I quickly start thinking about what I read about birds in a book, where I’ve seen them before, or what kind of bird it is. Then I fall into thought and can no longer hear any real sounds. Thinking and analyzing are easy, but true observation and listening require practice.

Conclusion

Meditation is about clearing away the stickiness of thoughts, gathering all energy, and achieving complete freedom.

I stand in the world, but I do not belong to it. The world is where I work, but it is not where I live. What kind of work? Understanding, observing, listening, and recognizing.