Mind and Emotions:
Tomás Núñez. ThD
The mind and emotions play with us. It is essential to become aware of how emotions cannot discern between expectations and reality, between what is believed and what is. When the mind anticipates a situation, when it foresees that there is a possibility that something will happen in the future, whether this is something good or something wrong, it immediately activates the corresponding emotions of anxiety, nervousness, fear, anticipation, desire, anger, indignation, etc. We enter into an anticipated emotional state, even though, in reality, such a situation is still only a glimpse of what may happen.
But the mind and emotions do not distinguish the Present moment from the future, and feelings can be powerful, almost as much or more during that period of anticipation than at the moment in which what we imagine can happen will happen; this is why the process of becoming aware of the way our mind and emotions operate becomes crucial because moved by assumptions or imaginations we can be motivated to act in a certain way in the face of wrong signals, in the face of false expectations that once the mind automatically discards them the emotions change or disappear.
That fear, anxiety, or anticipation that robbed us of peace and worried us for no reason can disappear in an instant when the mind anticipates different future scenarios. The present moment has not changed; only our expectations of what will happen in the future have changed.
Observe when that happens in your life, become aware of how emotions do not depend only on the present moment but on our expectations of the future, as well as our judgments of the past, and notice how many of our emotions, the majority, do not correspond to reality but to our mental process. Indeed, it is not easy to choose our emotions; they arise unconsciously, but we can discern when to act according to these emotions and when it is better to wait and ignore them until we are more sure of what is happening or can happen.
Anticipation and not reality is the leading cause of anxiety and fear, and the same happens with our negative judgments of the past, which are the leading cause of sadness and suffering and not the reality of our present moment, in this way, it is possible that in the middle of the tranquility of the night we are not able to fall asleep and we are victims of emotions that anticipate a tragedy that in reality will never happen or maybe there was never the possibility that it would happen but our emotions are activated mercilessly by us, and despite this, until the mind concludes or anticipates different scenarios these emotions will not disappear.
Appreciating and becoming aware of this helps us to go through difficult moments when our mind is clouded by strong emotions that do not correspond to the present moment but to an expectation about something that may or may not happen or about something that has already happened and even though this only exists in our mind, our mind is not able to distinguish between reality and mental projection and in this way, it is constantly robbing us of the tranquility of the Present moment.
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