Dealing with Negative Emotions
2021 Gathering, Part Four
Your body is not the real you. Your brain is not the real you. Your brain is not your intelligence. Your brain is just your computer system. So think of using your computer, and your computer is like the physical brain. It is not intelligence. It is something intelligence uses. It is used by your mind. It’s a physical thing, just like your computer is a physical thing. But it’s a very sophisticated computer that we use.
Same thing with our emotional body. Our emotional body is not us, but it is something that we use.
Now they’ve come up with an interesting measure of intelligence, sometime ago, called emotional intelligence.
Regular intelligence is highly associated with the physical brain as well as the mind. But a lot of what they call intelligence these days on intelligence tests and taking tests is associated with having a good functioning brain. You can take a very intelligent person and give him an older computer and he can do amazing things with it. You can take a person that’s kind of backward and give him a sophisticated computer and he can’t do anything with it.
What we can do with our brains is determined a lot by intelligence that goes beyond the brain. So, with our intelligence, we use the brain and many people that have a really good functioning brain, that have really good power of memory, and they do really well in school, and are good at taking tests because they can remember stuff . . . but they may not be that bright.
I remember when I was twenty years old and was on a mission for the LDS Church, I had this companion who had a 4.0 and a perfect score in college. Now my graded point in college was about average. He had a 4.0, but I’ll tell you, that guy was about one of the densest guys I have ever worked with. His real intelligence level was like a child almost.
When he had to give a lesson, he had to review it every time and I never had to review at all. I guess he could read and write and memorize, and was good at taking tests, and had a 4.0 grade point and almost doubled mine. (laughter) But he couldn’t do the stuff that I could do.
So it’s very interesting that if you have a good physical brain, you may be judged to be much more intelligent than you really are. There are people who are highly intelligent, who are born with brains that don’t function very well, or have good memory, or that good of ability take tests and so on. So intelligence is much more than just the brain.
Now getting back to the feelings, we identify very powerfully with our feelings, it’s amazing. And like I said, you meet anybody who’s enlightened, or go to group of people who are enlightened, or go to a convention or something where enlightened people are arguing with other enlightened people, and you’ll find that they identify just as much with their emotions as the man on the street. It’s amazing.
It’s amazing how difficult it is for people to really get control of their emotions to the point that they can be insulted and act as if the insult does not exist.
How about you, Tyler, can people insult you and can you overlook that? How would you grade yourself on that? Or do you get insulted? You’re such a nice guy, you may not get insulted.
Tyler: Usually my kids insult me. (laughter)
I’m getting better at not being insulted. I have to determine if it’s true or not. If they tell me something that’s true, you know, maybe I’ll take it one way. But if it’s not, then . . .
JJ: Yeah, that’s a good point. If people point out something that’s kind of hurtful that’s also true, there are different ways to approach that. If somebody’s overweight and you say, “boy, you’re fat as a pig. You ought to go on a diet.” Well, that’s a lot different than saying, “you know I’ve got this book here that tells you how to lose weight and get in shape.” The approach can be a lot different. (laughter)
Honesty is good, but it also has to be tempered with intelligence. Because you might be putting your life in danger if you tell the wrong female that her body is not perfect. (laughter)
Guys really enter a danger zone there. We’ve got to be really careful.
I made some jokes about that a while back where if you get the wrong question from your spouse, about her body, you may be putting your life in danger . . . (laughter) if you answer incorrectly. And sometimes there’s no correct answer. No way out.
So ideas of the difference of the sexes is a fascinating subject in itself. We definitely react different from each other, on the average, but here are always exceptions.
How do we escape this tie we have to our emotional body? It is so powerful that people do everything they can to escape, including denial.
And we were talking about denial and what produces the denial. We figured out that people want to pretend that they are better than that. And what does denial produce? Now suppression produces a blockage within the system. So you have a blockage of energy, and blockages of energy produce all kinds of physical problems.
But denial is a little different. It doesn’t block energy in the same way that suppression does. Suppression takes this energy, and it’s like a tea kettle. You turn on the tea kettle and the steam increases the pressure until the lid pops off. When you suppress again and again, then pretty soon, the energy becomes so strong you have to let it loose.
An example of this happening is the person that, say, you hurt your spouse’s feelings, and they say, “no, you didn’t hurt my feelings, everything is cool.” Then you hurt them a week or so later and everything is still cool. And they’re suppressing a little bit more each time. And maybe about the tenth time that you hurt their feelings, everything is so bottled up to the point that they can’t take it anymore, and you say some very small thing that hurts their feelings, but they blow up big time. Because it has accumulated over a period of time. And the guy will think, “wow, why is she reacting this strong over this small thing that I just said?” That’s because it builds up.
But denial is different. What denial does is, it’s a form of dishonesty. And the dishonesty creates a suppression of spiritual energy. So it creates like a cloud between the person and his own soul. He’s unable to achieve the soul contact that he needs because of the denial. Anything that you do that is dishonest, in any way, increases the barrier between you and the spirit. And so total honesty is always called for, and the easiest place to be dishonest is our own feelings.
Because we do not like to think of ourselves as a person who’s inferior in any way. All of us want to think of ourselves as being at the top of our game. And none of us want to think of ourselves as being too emotional or too controlled by emotions. So this causes many people to go into denial.
And if they’re denying an emotion that they actually feel, they will go into a mode where it’s almost hypnotic, where they’re hypnotizing themself saying, “no, I do not feel jealousy over this incident.” So they will be in denial to the extent that the jealousy will be there, but they will not acknowledge it to the extent that it’s almost like it’s not there. And so they’re deceiving themself into thinking that it’s not there. And this deception produces a dark cloud between them and their own soul.
So it’s important that we acknowledge our feelings, and deal with them in as harmless way as possible. And like I’ve said, dealing with them harmlessly takes a lot of ability and takes a lot of thought to be able to release these emotions in such a way that they will be as harmless as possible.
But as far as harmlessness goes, look at Jesus. Jesus was perhaps the greatest example of harmlessness, yet he still made people angry. And you can make people angry if you’re following the most harmless, honest path possible.
People just pick up things. Sometimes, if a person is very negative and you’re positive, they will pick up the difference. They will be more comfortable being around negative people. And if you’re a positive person, focused on spirit and honesty, they may pick up a difference and they may feel they want to bring you down because of it.
And sometimes there’s just no escape from dealing with some negativity in the world. Again, we look at the life of Jesus and the prophets and the great teachers and they all had negative things to deal with. And to deal with them in the most intelligent way possible is about all we can do.
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