You Are Not Your Feelings
Part Two of the 2021 Gathering
The second thing that people identify with . . . and in this age, people identify very strongly with the second part of our mechanisms that we use. And what’s the second part?
Asaph: Emotions.
JJ: Right, emotion. Your feelings. People really identify with their feelings, even people that realize they are not their body, that it’s just a vehicle. They still identify strongly with their feelings.
I’ve had interplay with a lot of people who think they are really evolved, and if you say anything that crosses them in the wrong way, they’ll still have their feelings hurt because they will identify too strongly with their feelings.
Even people who are into esoteric teachings, thinking they are way beyond the astral and way beyond the feeling nature, but just step on their toes a little and all of the sudden you will see a reaction that tells you that this person isn’t beyond identifying with his feelings after all.
And so we tend to think we are our feelings. And some people have had teachings where they are told that they are not their feelings. And like I said, some of these people still are somewhat in denial, and they haven’t really been able to leave their feelings behind, as far as identification.
Then there are others that do identify strongly with their feelings, and a lot of standard religious people do this. They connect their feelings to their spirit, and they think that’s all part of their eternal nature. But their feelings are temporary. And it’s part of what they call the astral body.
The astral body is a vehicle, just like the physical body, and this is an important thing to realize. The astral body is a vehicle.
After death, when you go to the world of the soul, you will leave behind a lot of the feelings associated with the astral body. Your feeling nature will be quite different because there are lower feelings and higher feelings. And in the spiritual spheres, there are just the higher feelings. And so we leave the lower feelings behind.
But in this physical existence, we have these lower feelings that are very powerful. And we identify with them.
So let’s go through all these lower feelings that people identify with. What’s the most common one?
Asaph: Desire.
JJ: Desire. Okay, that’s kind of a summary of all of them put together.
Audience: Fear.
JJ: Fear. That’s a lower one. What’s one of the main things that causes fear?
Joshua: Uncertainty.
JJ: Yeah. Have you ever thought of this? If your body was completely invulnerable so no one could do any harm to it, would you have anything to fear? What else is there to fear?
Audience: Inaudible.
JJ: Now we fear, for instance, breaking the law because authorities can put us in jail. But if you had complete mastery, like say Jesus after the resurrection, where they couldn’t put you in jail because you could disappear and appear wherever you wanted. Nobody could do anything to your body that you didn’t want done to your body. Would there be anything to fear?
Some people might fear God throwing them into hell or something like that, but concerning the things we know for sure, that cause us fear, what are they?
Like, right now everyone’s afraid of getting Covid, aren’t they? That’s about half the fear that’s generated around the world right now. And it’s all associated with the body. If the body were invulnerable, we wouldn’t have any fear about the virus or any disease or anything like that. So, think of all the fear that is associated with physical health.
Also associated with the body is the threat of people attacking it. Say, going through a rough part of New York right now or Los Angeles. People are afraid of getting attacked, stabbed, or shot. Okay, and that’s all centered around the body.
So think, if you were able to overcome death and become a master of your physical body, your physical vehicle, what would there be to fear?
Susan: Ridicule.
JJ: Yeah.
Michael: There’s fear of loss if you’re really attached to something.
JJ: Right. That’s a good point. Okay, that’s connected with the emotional body, isn’t it? So with the physical body, if we could neutralize all harm done to the physical body it would be amazing. Almost everything that average people fear would be neutralized.
Then Susan made a good point. There are fears connected with the emotions. People are afraid of failure. They’re afraid of ridicule, of emotional attack. Now some people aren’t afraid at all on the emotional level. But others are.
My friend Wayne, who’s passed on, God bless his soul . . . he was a funny one about fears. He had no fear at all on the physical plane. But he was terrified about an emotional attack. And that’s the opposite of a lot of people.
A policeman would stop him, and he often drove with no driver license because he believed in being his own guy. (laughter) He was a funny guy that way, and when a policeman stopped him, he’d say, “why don’t you go out and get a real job? Don’t you have anything better to do than go around persecuting innocent citizens?” (laughter)
And then when he was hauled into court, he would refuse to stand for the judge. And he was just completely fearless on the physical level. I’ve never met anybody like him.
One time we were in a restaurant, and somebody was talking pretty loud a couple of booths down. And I said, “boy those guys are loud.” And Wayne said, “yeah, they are. I’m going to go do something about it.” (laughter)
And so he was gone for about five minutes and comes back and they were really quiet afterwards. And I asked what happened. And he said, “well I gave them a piece of my mind and they said they’d quiet down.”
And I said, “well, it’s a good thing that whoever you were talking to wasn’t a football player or something.” And he said, “well, one of them was a football player.” (laughter) Anyway, he was a funny guy that way.
But then, he had this big crew that he managed that was called (inaudible name), and they did yardwork, tree service, spraying, and all kinds of things. And his guys, when they needed help, they would ask him for extra money, and they would appeal to him on an emotional level, and he could not say no. He would grumble about it, but he just could not say no.
And if somebody told him about another person having their feelings hurt about something, he would really identify with the feeling nature of people. And he did not want to offend anyone’s feelings that he was close to.
Joshua: Except the judge . . . (laughter)
JJ: Yeah, except for the judge. That was more of a physical level of confrontation. He didn’t look on the judge like a person. But people that he was friends with, and who he saw as a friendly individual, he was amazing. He was very sensitive. And if I were to say to him, “we need to talk to so and so about this because he’s creating a problem.” And I would bring Wayne in, and he wouldn’t want to talk about it. He would just want to talk about positive stuff.
So he was a funny guy. Completely fearless on the physical level. I’ve never met anyone that was fearless on the physical level outside of him. But he was terrified about hurting somebody’s feelings, somebody that he was close to, somebody that he considered a friend.
He was very trusting too. He would leave his keys in his car all the time. And he would tell people where he stashed money. And they would steal it from him. I’ll tell just one little story about him. It’s kind of funny.
He had this big dump truck that a lot of people wanted to borrow because he was the only one in the area with one. And he always left the key in it. And I told him one day, “you shouldn’t do that. People could run off with your truck.”
He said, “well, I believe in trusting people.” And Curtis’s brother and my nephew, Bill, needed to borrow and he went there, and Wayne wasn’t in. And he noticed the key in the dump truck. So he thought Wayne wouldn’t mind if he borrowed it. So he took off with it, but one thing he didn’t know was that Wayne was changing the oil and he had all the oil drained out. And he drove it a few blocks and the engine blew up. And to Bill’s credit, he bought him a new engine. (laughter)
But after he finally got that new engine in there, I drove up to his place and saw that dump truck there and I wondered if he still had that key in there. And I looked in and there was the key still in there. (laughter) And I said, “Wayne, you still have the key in the dump truck. Somebody’s going to do that again.
And he said, “well, what good is life if you can’t trust people?”
And I said, “some people you just cannot trust, or you can trust them to do the wrong thing.”
And you know what he died of? He died of a big heart. An overgrown heart. So, I guess his soul was trying to straighten him out. Because the soul gives us messages to correct the mistakes we’re making in life. And his soul tried to tell him by giving him a big physical heart, and problems connected with it. But he just didn’t listen.
So he was an interesting character in the fact that faults were really overgrown virtues in a way.
But anyway, we are not our bodies. But the interesting thing is we are not our emotions. Now how is it that people identify so strongly with their emotions, because in a way we just about feel that we are.
I identified strongly with my emotions yesterday. And it takes a lot for me to get emotional. But yesterday, in the car . . . Artie was driving, and I took a nap and after I took my nap, my glasses were gone. And my glasses weren’t in my pocket. We looked all over for my glasses. Couldn’t find them. And so I was somewhat irritated over that.
And then after we got here, Artie took another look and she finally found them under the seat. How they got there, I don’t know. But anyway, that solved that problem. And then after we got here . . . we have this key to our new car, and it costs five hundred dollars if you have to get a new one. And Artie wanted me to change my pants, and in between changing my pants from here to over there, the key disappeared. And I thought, what the devil! (laughter)
And thank goodness Artie had a second key, but that was somewhat annoying because I just couldn’t figure out how I lost the key within ten feet. And as it turns out, Artie found it under that couch. And how it got there I don’t know. (laughter) But it was almost like someone was trying to test me to see if they could get me irritated yesterday.
So all of us have emotions and the key is not to identify with them but become the observer. Not identify with the body but observe what is happening with the body. The more we detach ourselves from our vehicles, the more control we have over them. Because if we identify too strongly with our vehicles, then what happens? Then there is corruption. There’s disease. And there are all kinds of disease connected with the emotions.
One of the problems with the emotions is the suppression that comes, because people tend to want to feel like they’re in charge of their emotions. If you tell somebody they’re being too emotional . . . they don’t want to be called emotional. That’s like an insult. Even though they are being very emotional, they don’t want to recognize that they are being emotional.
But people tend to identify too strongly with their emotions. And many people realize that it’s not good to identify too strongly. So what they start doing when they realize that being too emotional is not the way to be, they will often deny or suppress their emotions.
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