“Emotional mastery is the ability of human beings to introduce into their consciousness an element of instant intelligence that neutralises an emotion that would otherwise take control of their consciousness.” BdM
CP 155
MASTERING EMOTIONALITY
The content of this page was written in English by the BdM Intl Diffusion team. If you read this page in another language, the translation will be done by an artificial intelligence (AI) service, so the result must be interpreted with discernment.
Man’s evolution towards a higher consciousness does indeed require that one day he will be able to master his emotions. But what does mastery of emotions mean? Does it mean living without emotions? Does it mean having no emotions at all? Or does it still mean controlling your emotions in a way that reminds us a little of the mechanical aspect of a robot?
Obviously, mastering our emotions as a conscious being goes much further than that. Emotions are an energy in Man that balances his animal body, that balances his astral energy, and that enables him to live, on the human level, according to a natural law, that is to say a law that ensures that Man can, or is capable of benefiting from an inferior nature, just as he can benefit from a superior nature.
It’s not a question of living like a robot, it’s not a question of man being devoid of emotions, it’s a question of man being able to realise, at the very moment he is experiencing a certain emotionality that is taking control of his intelligence, to be able to put a brake on the abuse, on the exercise of this emotionality which takes control of his consciousness, which takes away his clear-sightedness and which prevents him from being mature in his intelligent action.
It’s certainly not human emotionality that’s bad, it’s the way in which human beings use their emotions in life, which needs to be adjusted so that this same emotion, instead of doing them a disservice, serves them, makes life more pleasant, makes life easier, and allows them to feel human.
But man’s mastery of emotionality increases as he develops a centre of higher mental consciousness, that is, from the moment when he can reconcile the inevitable with reality, that is, from the moment when he is able to see that certain things, certain events in his life, produce conditions that need to be adjusted according to a higher intelligence, so that he, eventually, can live a much more balanced life.
It is from this point onwards that Man is able to really control his emotions, in other words to adjust that dose of energy within him which, if not perceived from a higher plane of consciousness, could wreak enormous havoc on his life and prevent him from living a normal, stable and pleasant human life.
The problem of man’s emotionality is always a problem linked to a certain unreasonableness in his consciousness, in other words to a way of seeing things that does not coincide with his reality, but rather with his body of desire. And it is here that Man finds himself trapped by emotionality, it is here that he sees that there is a link between emotionality and the animal part of his consciousness, i.e. that part that makes him suffer, that subjugates him and prevents him from being himself, i.e. free.
The big problem with emotionality is the freedom it takes away from man. If emotionality gives something to man, it’s good, but if it takes something away from man, it’s negative, it’s no longer good, it’s out of balance. And from that moment on, Man must begin to master it, that is, to channel it creatively, to channel it in a way that can bring him, over time, a certain new balance that is the fundamental mark of a new consciousness.
But it’s not easy for man to control his emotions, because man loves his emotions. His emotionality is part of the colouring of his personality, it gives his personality a certain function, a certain colour, a certain quality which allows the individual to identify with a facet of himself which, in fact, is false; a facet which is not real and which constitutes a kind of abomination against Man.
It’s obvious that if man is to learn to control his emotions, he has to learn to know himself. It is precisely because of his emotionality that he does not know himself. But to know ourselves, we must slowly, gradually, learn to realise that there is a connection between our emotionality and our action, and that this connection often gives our action a quality that is not real, so that our action, instead of being progressively creative, progressively balanced, leads us into conditions of life that, instead of improving, deteriorate, and eventually make us slaves to a past that no longer makes sense.
Mastering emotionality is not an art, it’s part of human awareness, it’s part of the ability of human beings to take control of a certain amount of energy that subjugates their consciousness, so that they can raise that consciousness and eventually give themselves a foothold in life that is directly proportional to their ability to be intelligent in life.
Being intelligent in life does not mean living without emotions. Being intelligent in life means removing from life those emotional aspects that prevent us from progressing, that prevent us from giving ourselves what we need, that prevent us from being slaves to a condition that, often or very often, is linked to the past.
If we look at the phenomenon of emotionality, we see that emotionality has a lot to do with the past. In our emotions, there are many links with previous situations that have imprisoned us so much that the slightest change in this situation causes us to release this emotional energy, causes us to feel uneasy, an inability that renders us totally powerless, powerless to change our lives, powerless to give our lives the shape we know they need, but are unable to give, because we have lost the power to make this life what it should be, that is, to be real.
It’s not a question of the individual controlling his emotionality in a psychological sense, it’s a question of Man becoming aware of his negative emotionality when it arises and being able to put the brakes on its deteriorating activity, from the moment he feels within himself a loss of control over his situation. Then, his life is a loss of control created by emotionality, by the overabundance of emotionality and naturally, proportionally, by a lack of intelligence.
Man’s intelligence is a creative factor in his life, while emotionality is a factor of expansion or contraction as the case may be. If emotionality is expansive, it is good; if emotionality is retracting, contractive, it is not good, because it prevents Man from being himself, it prevents Man from living up to his creative potential.
Mastering emotionality requires conscious Man to realise that the distribution of this energy in his psychic bodies, in his invisible bodies, involves a very large dose of affliction which affects, diminishes and colours the mind, the emotions, the vital and obviously the material body.
It is to Man’s advantage to master his emotionality in a creative sense, that is, to transform this energy into higher energy, so that he can release, from all this lower movement of energy, a higher movement from which consciousness, intelligence, vision, clairvoyance, stability and balance can grow.
We have to consider that our past is a past that has been ideologically constructed, because of our close relationship with society, with a psychosocial consciousness. As a result, today we are beings who do not live by our own energy, but who live by an energetic condition within us, established on the foundation of memory, and which feeds constantly on emotionality in order to readjust all the movements of memory, all the events that arouse memory in us. And this can be extremely tiring, extremely painful over the years.
And this is why, one day, Man who becomes aware, Man who becomes more and more creatively intelligent, Man who enters into his identity, must take control of this energy in a creative way, in order to give himself, on the human level, a constant of life. That is to say an ability to live, from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, in a condition that is more and more progressive, more and more elevating, more and more continuous, more and more constant. So that he can rest his mind, his emotions, his vitality, his physicality, which will eventually lead him to age much more slowly and to enter naturally later into a natural, glorious old age, an old age in which senility will not take control of the terminal part of his existence.
When we talk about controlling or mastering emotionality, we are talking about mastering the energy that weakens man, not the energy that makes him stronger. It is the part of Man, the part of Man’s consciousness that weakens him that needs to be mastered. Emotional energy is a kind of force within us that is not used to its full potential. It is a force, an energy within us that does not give us the value of our reality, and that is why this so-called emotional energy, the so-called negative energy, must be brought under control, that is to say, brought under a kind of control that arises from Man’s mental centricity.
In our lives there are events of all kinds that can happen to us, there are conditions in our lives that are likely to affect us emotionally, but conscious Man, Man who realises the nature of reality, learns, little by little, to control the emotionality that is the product of the overload of these conditions on our emotional body.
The conscious human being learns to realise more and more that between his material life and his psychic life, there are events that must be rendered, that must be concretised in order for there to be evolution on the mental, emotional, vital and material levels. If Man realises this in a concrete way, he wastes less time, he wastes less energy with the emotionality that arises when these events make themselves felt in his life. And gradually, he comes to master this energy, he comes to understand it, he comes to no longer suffer from it in the same way he did before.
So from that moment on, Man begins to control his energy, his emotions. It’s not a psychological control, it’s a state of mind that enables him to maintain the balance of his canoe as it goes down the rapids of life. Whether we look at the creative energy of the higher mind from any angle, we will always see only its lower, planetary, experiential aspect. Emotional energy is always a lower quality of consciousness.
There is never a creative aspect to the emotional energy, to the emotionality that we will one day have to master, precisely because this energy is not part of the higher consciousness of Man, it is part of the lower, animal, planetary consciousness of the human being. And if man does not one day succeed in mastering this energy, he will never be able to benefit from a higher consciousness, i.e. a consciousness that is capable of rising above the nominal value of events, in order to experience these events in a totally vibratory way, instead of experiencing them in a psychological way.
Self-aware human beings will see that as they become more aware, or as they become more conscious, their emotions will evolve. As man’s higher mental consciousness evolves, so does his emotional consciousness. And over the years, he realises that the emotions he used to feel are no longer felt, that it no longer even reaches his natural centre of activity, precisely because the mental centre is more developed, the mental centre is capable of temporising this energy, in other words, it is capable of controlling it, it is capable of subduing it and it is capable of giving it free rein, as the need arises.
On the other hand, mastering emotionality does not mean hardening man. It’s a very serious mistake to think that way. The mastery of emotionality means the vibratory control of this energy when Man is faced with an event that risks making him suffer for nothing or excessively. Emotional mastery does not involve karate or martial arts in the psychological sense of the term. Emotional mastery is the ability of human beings to introduce into their consciousness an element of instant intelligence that neutralises an emotion that would otherwise take control of their consciousness.
For man to learn to master his emotions creatively, he must already be creative. If he is not creative, that is to say if he is not conscious of a higher centre in his mind, it is obvious that the mastery of emotionality will simply become a game of the ego, will become a hardening of the arteries of his consciousness, and we will see that this Man, in the course of the years, in the course of his evolution, will become harder and harder, more and more difficult, more and more brutal even. And this is bad because he will simply have changed the polarity of this energy.
Mastering energy means achieving a perfect balance between the solar plexus and the mental plane, achieving a perfect balance between intelligence and the lower part of the human being. It’s not a question of extracting from Man this energy which is part of his consciousness, it’s a question of putting order into this part of Man which, because of his unconsciousness, risks creating disorder in his mind if it is left too free and if it is always attached to the past, and if it is not guided in its evolution, in its channelling, in its expression.
Mastering emotionality requires great vigilance on the part of man when certain events occur in his life. Man must be vigilant, i.e. he must be very aware that the events that occur in his life are there as a function of the adjustment of his subtle bodies. Events in human life do not happen for nothing. There is always a reason for events, a reason that Man eventually comes to understand, to discover, to grasp, to know in a perfect way according to the evolution of his mental body, according to the decrease in the activity of emotionality on his mental body, according to his creative capacity to interpret events according to their real nature.
But for this to happen, Man has to be vigilant, i.e. capable of instantly interpreting the value of an event, of not allowing this event to upset or be upset by too great a discharge of emotional energy, so as not to lose control of his mental life and also to maintain a balance between his mental life and his emotional life while this event is there and serves to bring him to a greater and more subtle level of experience, awareness, intelligence and will.
But if we lack this vigilance, we lose touch with the value of the event, and so we repress this energy and obstruct its passage, using energy of a lower order, emotional energy. And all this only serves to delay his evolution, i.e. to prevent him from becoming greater, more conscious, more present, more human.
Emotional energy is always a “smoke screen” in the life of Man, it is always a foggy screen that hides the real value of events, and prevents Man from becoming aware, that is to say taking advantage, of a situation for his own self-aggrandisement. There is no negative emotions that has any value, there is no retarded emotionality that can help Man, even if Man has the impression that immersing himself in such an emotionality relieves him, gives him peace through the pain, or allows him to benefit, in a certain sense, from a suffering that can often be sweet.
The human being who becomes conscious, the Man who discovers his identity more and more, is obliged, forced, as he evolves, to look the nature of his emotionality in the face and to be able gradually not to withdraw from the emotionality he experiences. But to see its real value, its subjective value, its psychological value, its psychic value, its emotional value, its illusory value.
If man sees in his emotionality a real value, this emotionality is good. If he sees in his emotionality a psychic value, that is to say a value which enables him to become aware of a certain much more subtle plane of his consciousness, there is also within this emotionality a progressively creative quality. But if the emotionality is purely psychological, if it is purely emotional, then Man cannot benefit from this energy, because it does not belong to him, it is simply part of his memory, it is simply part of those aspects of himself which are inferior to his free intelligence, to his real intelligence, to his supramental intelligence. In other words, the consciousness within him that can blossom from the moment he understands that emotionality cannot serve inferior man, but can only serve superior man, when the latter has understood that the events that create it must be resolved, understood, as a function of an evolution of consciousness, and not understood as a function of a deterioration of the same consciousness.
If Man is capable of living with emotionality, he is capable of living with the transmutation of this energy, he is capable of living with and supporting the transmutation of this energy so that one day he will no longer be subject to the mechanical, planetary aspects of events. And will come to know a life that is much freer, much more balanced, much more maintained in an order that suits the balance between his mind and his lower nature.
But if Man takes the false direction of controlling emotionality in a psychological sense, he will gradually see himself led to a deformation of his personality, he will lose his human warmth, he will lose the creative value of this transfer of energy and he will cut himself off, he will limit himself in his human relationships, he will become sour.
Living with negative emotions always means not understanding life perfectly. Negative emotionality always means not being able to cope with life perfectly. Living with negative emotionality means not having a perfect and total understanding of yourself.
If we want to master emotional energy, we must learn to understand the relationship between the event and our life, we must learn to understand the value of the event in our life. And there is always a hidden value to an event in a human life; it’s up to Man himself to understand it, to grasp it. And from the moment that Man begins to understand the real hidden profound value of the event in his life, he is able to begin to master his emotions, because he is able to see that through this event, there is an indicator that takes him further in his evolution and enables him to transmute an energy that, previously would have served to keep him in planetary, existential suffering, above which there is no opening, above which there is no corridor that leads Man towards the great and integral identity of himself.
In fact, we can easily say that negative emotionality is precisely what causes human suffering. Man suffers in life because of negative emotionality. If negative emotions didn’t exist in man’s life, there would be no suffering, in other words, there would be no suffering that makes man feel like a prisoner of life. There would be no suffering of the kind that makes people feel as if they are being towered over by something greater than themselves. In other words, there would be no diminution in the power of life in the life of Man, whatever the events, Man would constantly feel himself growing, growing, becoming stronger, becoming stronger and consequently becoming more and more intelligent, because there can be no enlargement in the life of Man, on the level of the will, without there being an enlargement on the level of intelligence, since the two go together.
But as long as human beings have not really and fully understood the nature of negative emotionality and have not grasped that events are directly linked to this phenomenon, they cannot understand why they experience emotions. In fact, this is the situation of many human beings: they are emotional about an event and they don’t understand why they are emotional. All they know is that they register a certain amount of this energy within themselves. And because they don’t understand it, its effect accumulates, and there may come a day when Man, for all sorts of reasons, detached or stitched together, experiences an emotionality that he cannot understand, and therefore can no longer control it.
We often come across people on our journey who say to us: “How is it that I am experiencing such and such an emotion with regard to such and such a situation? And I say, “Why are you experiencing this emotion? And they say, “I don’t know”. When a person doesn’t know why they are experiencing such an emotion or such a negative emotion in relation to such a situation, it’s because they have already lost control of their mind, control over their mind, in other words control over their intelligence. Their intelligence is no longer real; their intelligence is purely psychological, purely memorial, purely subjective, and there is a perfect interrelationship between this subjective intelligence and the planetary subjective emotionality of the experience.
So it’s obvious that from that moment on, the individual lives a life that is very poor in ‘resuscitation’, i.e. a life that can no longer surpass itself, that can no longer generate creative will, creative intelligence, in other words the energy that is born of these cosmic principles of Man, the only energy that can give Man perfect consciousness, and therefore perfect freedom.
We have difficulty, because of our blindness, in living actions that are free of negative emotionality. We have difficulty creating actions that are the product of a firm intelligence, of a firm and creative will. There’s always a bit of emotionality in our actions, there’s always a bit of the energy that colours our actions and underpins the mechanical action of our personality, an action that bears no relation to our real identity.
This is why it becomes very, very important for conscious Man to master this energy and gradually bring it to transform itself and become a support rather than a dependency, because as long as Man depends on this energy to live, he cannot live, he is merely surviving. But when Man comes to control or master this energy sufficiently in a creative way, he comes to live, that is to say, to give himself points of reference in life which are perfectly suited to his identity, which distance themselves more and more from his false personality. And which creatively lead him to join the ranks of those, who are still very, very few in number on this planet, who have a so-called creative consciousness, a higher consciousness, a consciousness that is moving more and more in the direction of the future evolution of Humanity or Man, a consciousness that is part of the new evolution and is perfectly integrated into the laws of life.
But who else but Man can establish, on the material plane, the laws of life? Who else but himself? For Man to be able to establish the laws of life on the material plane, that is to say, to live in perfect balance in his subtle bodies, he must understand the laws of emotionality, he must understand the subtle laws of emotionality and realise that within all emotionality there is a part of personality and a part of unconsciousness.
We naturally talk about negative emotionality. But what is negative emotionality? Negative emotionality is emotionality that is not real. It’s emotionality that needs to be experienced in order to balance out some lack of willpower and intelligence in human beings. Negative emotionality is emotionality that cannot be useful to Man, it is emotionality or energy that cannot be used by Man for his growth. So there is no possible germination of a creative will and intelligence in this emotionality.
This is why Man must learn to control it, because this emotionality spreads within him like a weed. And since Humanity is constantly creating negative emotions and since human beings live and are part of Humanity, it is very easy for them to see a constant relationship between their negative emotional energy and the negative emotional energy of Humanity. As a result, a link is eventually established between the consciousness of Man and the social consciousness, and Man never comes to live from a purely individualised, purely integral consciousness, purely identical to himself.
This is why man is not capable of benefiting creatively from his consciousness. He is not capable of feeling one, he is not capable of feeling perfectly balanced. He always feels two, he always feels three, he always feels more than one at a time. And when Man is not capable of feeling the unity of his consciousness, he is not capable, naturally, of benefiting from his consciousness. And it is from that moment on that the event, which continues its eternal rolling in the life of Man, creates shocks in him, creates situations in him that Man can no longer overcome, and eventually Man finds himself impoverished to such an extent that he is no longer able to feel life in himself, that is to say, the strength of his life, that is to say, the strength of his higher mental consciousness, centred on Will, centred on Intelligence and deeply harmonised in a concrete Love that suits a real Intelligence and a real Will.
When we talk about negative energy, we’re not just talking about that kind of energy we often identify with the tears of the young girl or man who, for one reason or another, is suffering from love, we’re not talking about poetic negative emotional energy, we’re talking about that source of energy that exists in all human beings, even in those human beings who, on the surface, do not display negative emotionality. Negative emotionality is an energy that rests, in fact, on an aspect of consciousness that, very often, is not amenable to external experiential observation.
In all human beings, there is this so-called negative energy that must be mastered, which is part of the lower consciousness of Man.
Look at the Nazi movement in Germany, for example. It is obvious that the Nazis, the SS, on the outside, did not show negative emotions, because this energy had been transformed, illusorily, into a kind of will, of strength. But deep down, these beings, these SS, these abominable Men, represented a kind of negative emotionality where the individual consciousness of Man – I’m talking about the consciousness that should or ought to have had some kind of identity – had been replaced by a collective consciousness that replenished, in individuals, in these beings, a powerful negative emotional energy that became, over the years, used for the destruction of a Humanity.
So the phenomenon of negative energy that we are talking about represents, for conscious Man, the destruction within him of those lower forces within him, those planetary forces that are part of his animal consciousness, that tend to control or take control of his intelligence. That is to say, to take away from him the necessary identity that he needs to be a real Man. It is in this sense that we speak of the mastery of emotionality.
The vast range of emotions experienced by all human beings cannot be explained in a single course. But there are fundamental principles, universal principles, which aim to reconstitute for the human being a possible condition of evolution based on his capacity, as an individual, as an intelligent being, as a voluntary being, to overcome the action of these forces, the mechanical action of these forces, the subterranean action of these forces, which hinder the evolution of his real intelligence, the development of his real will. And which naturally prevent him from living, from knowing, from recognising in himself a profound identity, not based on a deformation of emotions, but based on the inevitably difficult construction of a psychic structure inviolable by negative emotions.
There is a constant tension in the human being between his real intelligence and the subterranean or expressed activity of his negative emotions, and this tension is part of the gradual descent into Man of an increasingly powerful creative energy. This tension is part of the human being’s conversion of inferior energy into superior energy.
But as long as the human being is not aware of these laws, of this reality, he aims to use negative energy in function of his personality, instead of using the negative energy or the subjective energy of his emotions in function of overcoming his present human condition, a human condition which is founded on a psychological matrix which only has value in function of this emotion, but which has no value in function of his pure consciousness.
If Man must come to master his emotionality in order to overcome the effect that this energy creates on his consciousness, it is because he is obliged, in order to become conscious of himself, to strip himself of the coloration that creates in his lower mind and in his emotionality or, in general, in his planetary human consciousness, forces that are not part of him, but part of the impression created in him, from birth, by the ideological forces of social consciousness.
It is inevitably true that today’s human consciousness is conditioned by the social consciousness external to Man. In other words, it is inevitably true and verifiable that human beings are ideologised in their consciousness. So if his consciousness is ideologised, it is because there is a part of his consciousness that does not belong to him. And when this consciousness, which does not belong to him, manifests itself, it becomes manifestly emotionally negative. And it is from this moment that the evolving human being must take control of this energy in order to repatriate it, in order to transform it, so that he can benefit from a much broader consciousness, much less ideologised, and therefore much less subject to the suffering that is always the product of the action of ideology against personal human consciousness.
If Man finds it so difficult to deal with emotionality, to master it perfectly, it is because he is unable to see that this emotionality is also part of his intelligence, his lower intelligence. And his lower intelligence uses this energy to give the ego, to give the personality, some impression of some experience.
It’s not man’s higher consciousness that uses negative emotionality, it’s man’s lower intelligence that uses this energy to keep man in a lower consciousness, i.e. a consciousness that isn’t real and that forces this same being to continue, year after year, to suffer from his existential condition, never being able to leave this ideologised condition to arrive one day at being perfectly free, i.e. perfectly comfortable in his own skin.
Man will never succeed in benefiting from his consciousness by using the support that ideological impressions create in his lower consciousness, by using lower emotional energy to galvanise his consciousness. Never will man be able to use a lower form of energy to give himself a higher consciousness.
This is why the mastery of energy, the mastery of emotionality, is absolutely necessary when Man is obliged to pass from one level of consciousness to another, because this mastery forces him to reconstitute his ego, that is to say to give his ego a facelift (metamorphosis), a facelift which constitutes a personal work on the false face that he had known, that he had borrowed for years and which had become the external manifestation of his personality.
Update on 2024/03/24