Emotional Being

Read more about Freedom from the works of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

What are Emotions?

Our emotions are the waves of reaction and response which rise up from the basic consciousness. Their action too is largely regulated by habit and an emotive memory.

What are the Different Parts of Our Emotional Nature?

The one that has no feelings against anyone is either the psychic being or the emotional being in the heart, the one that feels anger and is severe is a part of the external vital nature on the surface.

What is Emotional Being and Higher Vital?

The term higher vital is confined to that larger movement of the conscious life-force which is concerned with creation, with power and force and conquest, with giving and self-giving and gathering from the world for farther action and expenditure of power, throwing itself out in the wider movements of life, responsive to the greater objects of Nature. In the second arrangement, the emotional being stands at the top of the vital nature and the two together make the higher vital.

Higher vital usually refers to the vital mind and emotive being.

Where is the Higher Vital and All Its Parts Located?

This higher vital with all its parts is situated in the chest and has the cardiac centre as its main stronghold governing all this part down to the navel… The heart is the centre of the emotional being, the highest part of the vital.

What Is the Role of The Lower Vital Nature in Higher Vital?

There is only one way to deal with it,—to cast the whole thing away—depression, demands, doubts, sex-thoughts, the whole undesirable baggage,—and have in its place the one true movement, the call for the true consciousness and the presence of the Divine.

The Role of Emotional Being in Yoga

In the ascetic Yoga all human feelings are regarded as illusory and have to disappear—"the knots of the heart are cut"—so as to leave only the one supreme aspiration. In this Yoga the emotional being has not to be got rid of, but to undergo a transformation; the shortest way of transformation is to turn all the being to the Divine.

Why is Emotion Necessary?

Emotion is necessary in the Yoga and it is only the excessive emotional sensitiveness which makes one enter into despondency over small things that has to be overcome. The very basis of this Yoga is bhakti and if one kills one's emotional being there can be no bhakti. So there can be no possibility of emotion being excluded from the Yoga.

For Collaborating and Surrendering of Lower Vital

Yes, the higher vital is usually much less difficult to surrender, for it is under the influence of the mind and at times even of the psychic; so it understands more easily. It is much easier to convert this than the lower vital which is essentially the vital of desires and impulses. So, you see, what he means is that the lower vital can submit, it agrees to obey, to do what it is asked, but it is not at all satisfied. It is not happy; sometimes it even suffers; it pushes its revolt down into itself through obedience, but it does not collaborate. And unless the vital collaborates with joy and true love, nothing can be done; the transformations cannot come.

For Peace, Strength and Quiet to Bring the Higher Vital Alive

When you are in connection with the higher worlds above the mental, with the mental and the psychic or even with some of the higher vital planes, then there is the peace and Ananda—but connection with the lower vital worlds can easily bring disturbance and unrest, so long as your vital itself is not changed and made full of peace and strength and quiet.

How to Bring Forward the Emotional Being and Higher Vital?

Methods of Strengthening the Emotional Being

The Perfection of Equality

…it(Equality) means self-mastery over the vital movements, anger and sensitiveness and pride as well as desire and the rest, not to let them get hold of the emotional being and disturb the inner peace, not to speak and act in the rush and impulsion of these things, always to act and speak out of a calm inner poise of the spirit..

Quiet & Calm

Always get back to quietude. It is through the quietude that the right attitude and understanding and movements come back.

Concentration & Aspiration in the Heart

Another method is concentration and aspiration in the heart which opens the inner emotional being…

Purification

Each time there is a purification of the outer nature, it becomes more possible for the inner being to reveal itself, to become free and to open to the higher consciousness above.

Role of Psychic Guide in Sadhana

The more love and bhakti and surrender grow in the heart, the more rapid and perfect becomes the evolution of the sadhana. For the descent and transformation imply at the same time an increasing contact and union with the Divine.

Signs of the Vital Opening

This opening of the chest into the void (not really the void, but the infinite Akash of the Chit universal and illimitable) is always the sign of an opening of the emotional being into the wideness of the Universal Divine.

The True Psychic

And yet the true emotive soul, the real psyche in us, is not a desire-soul, but a soul of pure love and delight; but that, like the rest of our true being, can only emerge when the deformation created by the life of desire is removed from the surface and is no longer the characteristic action of our being. To get that done is a necessary part of our purification, liberation, perfection.

Read more about Freedom from the works of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.