Emotions are obviously not a mistake, but emotionality is. Emotions are neither good, nor bad. Emotions depend on the center that they are coming from. If the emotions come from a center of fear, of grief, of insecurity, then because they are arising from insecurity, you will be attached to the emotions themselves. Watching the emotions is not the same as being emotional.

Emotionality means being identified with the emotion; and being identified with emotion you cannot know it. You cannot watch the emotion. Then you cannot really see what is going on; then you are carried away by the emotion.

It’s like being money minded versus having money. Having money is not a mistake, but being money minded is a mistake. Having thoughts is not a mistake, but becoming a thinker or identifying with the thoughts is a mistake. And whether or not something is a mistake, the final test is suffering. Whether or not something is a mistake is proven only by whether or not it leads to suffering. Greed is an emotion, jealousy is an emotion, and all these make you burn from within.

What do you mean by emotion? All the thoughts that you have, they gain energy, they get connected to the forces, the condensed conditioning of your subconscious, and they start impacting you even more heavily than thought — that is emotion. So this is the second hand — the neo spiritual culture that has recently crept in. Emotions are neither to be suppressed nor glorified. In fact, emotions are not at all the matter. The matter is the heart from where the emotions are coming from.

So, must we control emotions? Let’s understand this with an example. Let’s say you are driving your car. Do you drive your car in a controlled way or in an uncontrolled way? Obviously in a controlled way. Now, what is all control about? You are taking your car to the right, and because you control it, you decide that you will not take it to the left. What is all control about?

When you say that your emotions are running amok, uncontrolled, then that is movement, right? Something is happening. And when you say that you the emotional one is now controlling emotions, what is really happening? In the name of control, you are continuing. The driver controls the car; does the car, or the control change the driver? You are the controller; you will change the direction of the car. But, changing the direction of the car is not going to change you.

Please understand something about duality and non-duality. The dissolution of something does not lie in its opposite. Something appears uncontrolled, you control it, you have just taken a phenomenon to its opposite, to its mirror image. You are going left, now you are going right. That is not dissolution. That is a continuation in duality. And, that is the mistake we make so often. We go for the opposite of something when we are tired of that thing.

Tired of left, you go to the right. Tired of the first floor, you go to the basement or to the second floor, or sometimes to the 50th floor. Tired of the metro, you go to the hill station. Tired of the car, you take the bike. Tired of animals in the office, you go and visit a zoo. Is that not how we live? And, we think this is change. Hopping from one pole of duality to the other pole, we think this is change. Traveling from the North Pole to the South Pole, we feel that we’ve overcome the gravitation of the earth. How does it matter that you have swapped poles?

Firing energizing emotions is one thing, and letting that same energy direct and control emotions, is just the same thing. You are just naming it differently, you are just naming it as the opposite. And the change in name will not help here; you need a change in the whole game.

You’ve been taught that being emotional is a virtue. Parallelly you have been taught that if you’re too emotional, it’s a weakness. It’s not at all about being emotional, or not being emotional. In furtherance of emotion, or in cessation of emotion, you are searching for that which is not contained in emotions. You are searching at the wrong place.

If you are too emotional, you have lost it. And in trying to control the emotion, you lose it even more. The tragedy is, in both these acts, you’re losing that which cannot be lost. Let emotion be.

If the eyes have tear glands, they are not there without reason. Let them cry. If the mind can experience sadness or disappointment or attraction or anger, let it experience all that. But why must you burden any experience with the expectation of delivering you the ultimate.

Remaining in ultimate, we laugh, jump around, go through all the emotions. Emotions are one dimension. They are one plane of living. There must be complete freedom on that plane. You must be totally free to go through all emotion. And you must be totally free to let emotion come to an end when it has exhausted its energy. In trying to fuel emotion and in trying to control emotion, you are unnecessarily expecting something from emotion that emotion cannot provide you.

Don’t you see people crying in front of their lovers? They think that emotion can give them love. Don’t you see people trying to check emotions? They think checking emotions can give them stability or stillness. Emotions are on one plane. Love and stillness are on another plane. And these two planes are not connected through self-control. When laughter comes, laugh fully. Laugh freely. If you must smile, let the smile be like a blossoming flower. And there are times when you weep like heavy clouds too.

Let emotion be. Don’t interfere.