From Self-centered Emotions to Sacred Emotions by Gita Saraydarian

"...touchiness, nosiness, irritability, and emotional volatility…. You have all the messes caused by selfish sensitivities as well as anger, jealousy, hate, fear, depression and others to take care of. Now you are going to conquer them....the goal is this: that you really control your emotions. Emotions are not really reactions or responses to the conditions around you. They are already within you. So many locked-in emotions are found within your system: hidden fears, hidden expectations, hidden jealousies, hidden greed and anger. They are all hidden in your emotional nature and you must bring them out one by one and sacrifice them on the altar of your vision and go forward.” (Initiation, Path of Living Service, Torkom Saraydarian, p. 111.)

When I read that the emotions are not really reactions or responses to the conditions around us, they are already within us, it made me sit up and take notice! These emotions of touchiness, nosiness, irritability, greed, anger, fears, and volatility are in us already. They are locked-in emotions and hidden deep inside of us. Since they are very volatile, they need to be dealt with in a very sensitive and diplomatic fashion.

The emotional body is made up of seven levels. The lowest three levels have the more gross emotions and, as we move higher, they become more sublime and inclusive and harmless. At the lowest level, they are the most volatile. They are reactive and move too quickly to be easily controlled. At the highest level, they are crystalline, like a mirror, reflecting the beauties of our intuition. When our emotions are expressed from the highest part of us, we are solid, dependable, and not easily or quickly volatile.

I wanted to understand the statement about sacrificing these volatile emotions “on the altar of your vision and go forward.”

To sacrifice in its esoteric definition means to make sacred. How to make the emotions that are gross and self centered sacred? By seeing the inner essence of the emotion and seeing if there is anything inside of that emotion that can be rescued and used. To make an emotion sacred means the individual needs to move from self-centeredness to seeing a bigger picture of life. A self-centered person sees all events as if they were all about them. A person who is able to make emotions sacred is a person who is spiritually and emotionally mature and is thinking and feeling and acting with consideration about others. For example:

Take touchiness, this is not so bad when it becomes sacred; then it is sensitivity to all of life. A touchy person is one who is always sensitive to the outside world but interprets everything personally. A touchy person is all self absorbed. But when such a person becomes self-confident and values himself, touchiness is made sacred; it becomes sensitivity to others, to the world, to events, to ideas and inspirations. It can even be the beginning of developing real higher psychic powers.

Nosiness, when made sacred becomes the ability to observe in detail and see depth and eventually to see the depth in many planes and levels. A nosy person is interested in the affairs of others for personal gratification. Such a person has low self-esteem and has no confidence in the value of their life, so they put their nose in other people’s life. Now, when such a person becomes emotionally mature and secure and is interested in seeing the beauty in others, then his or her nosy character will develop into great skills of observation. Deep meditation, investigation, and observation take a large amount of digging, a spiritual nosiness of a kind, which eventually results in understanding the deeper layers of life rather than the surface life of other people.

Irritability can also be made sacred. It can give way to calmness and love. Irritability sometimes results from not having our way, feeling that others are not changing fast enough, life dealing us a blow, having hatred and anger and such inside of us, and being hyper-sensitive to life. It can even result from not knowing the purpose and direction of our life and feeling frustrated and useless. It can be from having huge ideals and being unable to manifest them in life and feeling deeply disappointed. It can even be a kind of chemical imbalance. To sacrifice irritability means to increase the love, the acceptance of life, the tolerance of oneself and of others, and seeing life in its many dimensions and lifetimes. We can see our life in its complexity and wholeness and stop trying to change everyone else. Irritability takes energy and it blocks our nerves with sediments. Removing irritability and moving that energy to a higher level means right use of our energy and our sensitive nature.

Emotional volatility can also be made sacred. This means that the energy in the person is being wasted in self-centeredness. Take that tremendous energy of the emotions and turn them into love, into labor, into action, into service. In making volatility sacred, we harness that energy and put it into better use. It can mean passion, drive, urge to serve, continuity of promises and keeping your word.

Hidden fears: How to make these sacred? Fear comes from attachment to the physical part of life; it comes from not being comfortable with our karma and what it has in store for us; it comes from guilt and knowing that the spiritual law will be applied even to us; it is at the very core the identification with matter and not knowing that we are in essence Sparks of God. To make our fears sacred, we can change it to reticence and discernment. The continuous use of forgiveness of ourselves and of others really helps us overcome the fears. There is no other way of overcoming fear except by moving into soul beingness and concentrating on the qualities of our life as souls and be willing to accept the law of karma and the laws of nature. Fear can be overcome only when we develop our spiritual senses.

Greed can be exhibited in material as well as spiritual sense. I want to have more and do more so I collect and covet more. Can I change that to being more? Can I change that to more striving? Can I change that to serving and sharing more? That would make it sacred. Greed is desire for more, so in essence the desire for more is changed to desire and striving to be more of your true being.

Anger is a tough one but I think that you can change anger into taking action. Anger’s result is to hurt oneself or others. Personality anger means separatism and trying to dictate what others do. Whereas anger changed to soul based response would be deep concern and caring and taking positive and uplifting actions. Spiritual anger is not anger for what I want or what I want to dictate to others, nor is it anger toward any person or persons. Spiritual anger would be such that we are called to action, to change, to service without any attachment or personal gain. It is not really anger as such but righteous indignation.

These kinds of low-level expressed emotions hurt us and hurt everyone around us. They prevent us from having mature relations with others and prevent us from feeling loved, successful and healthy and happy. As they are expressed, these emotions show that the person is totally self-absorbed, regardless of what they do in life; everything is all about them and how they see the world. Such people cannot be depended on and you cannot live with such persons. They are generally selfish and do not consider the feelings of others around them. Eventually, they are left alone whether physically or by the emotional and mental and spiritual distancing of their loved ones and friends. A person who is able to navigate effectively out of these choppy waters becomes mature and dependable person, a person rich in family and love and friendships.

Negative emotions as expressed from the lower emotional levels make our life absolutely miserable, but they can also effectively be taken to their higher counterparts. They are two sides of the same coin. Once they are uplifted to the essence of the energy that is behind them, they are no longer toxic substances in our life but have in fact been transformed. Emotions have a tremendous power in our life, and that power can be harnessed and disciplined to reflect the deeper mysteries of life. Deeply felt emotions give us the power to act and to do. If emotions are healed and uplifted, our minds and our spiritual senses have the freedom to operate truthfully. Conversely, if our emotions are self centered and of low level, our entire life is poisoned by them in the physical, mental, and spiritual sense. Volatile and ugly emotions do a lot of damage and prevent the logic and pure reason from operating in our life. Beautiful emotions on the other hand let us be the true being that we are, a part of the Divine manifestation.