In the secret cave of the heart, two are seated by life’s fountain.

The separate ego drinks of the sweet and bitter stuff,
liking the sweet, disliking the bitter,
while the supreme Self drinks sweet and bitter,
neither liking this nor disliking that.

The ego gropes in darkness, while the Self lives in light.
So declare the illumined sages.

Katha Upanishad - Part 3, Verse 1
(Translated by Eknath Easwaran)
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When my bag was “stolen” (story in prior post), my immediate emotion was anger. Oftentimes when my emotions are triggered I can revert to journaling as a way to let them loose. Once they’re off my chest and down on paper it gives me a chance to view them objectively from a bird’s eye view and reflect upon the situation. I find that often the first step to moving past an emotion is to look it square in the eye, and writing things down over the years has helped me do just that.

Here, after the blah, blah, blah, complain, complain, complain, I was able to process what happened from a more centered state of being and see that, “I still have my health, a bed to sleep in tonight, and the means to replace the items I lost. Tomorrow I’ll begin that process and life will go on.”

Today I happened to read one of Robert Greene’s meditations in his book “The Daily Laws” where he described this process perfectly: “It might be wise to use a journal in which you record your self-assessments with ruthless objectivity.” I loved that, ruthless objectivity. He goes on to suggest finding “a neutral position from which you can observe your actions, with a bit of detachment and even humor. Soon all of this will become second nature, and when the Emotional Self suddenly rears its head in some situation, you will see it as it happens and be able to step back and find that neutral position.”

He also mentions your greatest danger being your ego, and how it makes you unconsciously maintain illusions, which I thought tied into the above quote perfectly, in reference to disliking the bitter aspects of life in preference of the sweet. But the supreme Self drinks in the bitter and sweet of life all the same, to avoid groping in the darkness of angry emotions and living in the light of observing life for what it is.

This line of thinking parallels the Taoist philosophy of wei-wu-wei, going with the flow of life, and I love to see the similarities between religions.