Overcoming the Negative Emotions
por Elisabeth Cavalcante em STUM WORLDAtualizado em 30/09/2004 20:33:25
Translation by Elizangela Joslin de Oliveira - [email protected]
Exercising control over negative emotions is a permanent challenge for those who seek balance and serenity. The events in our life, most of time, take us away from the path and make us to feel weak and unable of keeping the power inside us.
Every time the feeling of powerlessness invades our interior, we must remember that those emotions are only one small part of us, and not the totality.
The card the Taro: “The Devil”, pictures our shady side such as fear, shame, guiltiness, jealously, desire of revenge, blocked sexuality, and it symbolizes all kind of negativities that we are able to raise.
The proverb tells us: “The devil is not as ugly as they paint it”. This sentence summarizes, in a very simple way, a great truth: we are the “Master of our life”. It means we have the power to defeat him (the devil) only when we assume it’s not so scary as we had imagined.
Recognizing the devil builds up our lower self, the antithesis of our enlightened being, is fundamental for us to win the fight against unbalance.
We all have a wise, benevolent, harmonious, and righteous Higher Self, which can guide us every time life and problems become unbearable.
How to achieve it? Expanding the consciousness, assuming the Higher Self is always there waiting we recognize its existence, and freeing his direct communication. Meditation is the most effective way to bring atop the divine energy we carry inside.
However, it is needed an inner work based on true effort and perseverance. No victory comes by chance, only by consistent decision and hard discipline in order to succeed..
Many psychologists agree that this lack of understanding of our shady side is the main cause of the world pandemonium nowadays. Our strong emotions, fanaticism, revengeness, violence, and confusions, (not recognized or harmonized in our personal life); now explode in massive scale such as: World Wars, chaos, conflict, and general destruction. At a certain moment of life, when our own negative aspects are not recognized as part of us, they seems to act against us on the surface. Considering the world’s contemporary events, it is more likely that we keep a deep understanding and agreement with this satanic force.
Jung says:
“The civilized man’s instinctive force is immeasurably more destructive and more dangerous than primitive man’s instincts; which, in some level, constantly lives his negative instincts. Therefore, no war from the past history could be compared with a war among ‘civilized nations’ and an unmatched level of horror”
From the book: “Jung and the Tarot”.
