The Nesting of Emotions
& The Black Hole
Eli Jaxon-Bear

Nesting Pattern of Emotions: Anger, Hurt and Sadness, Fear, Despair, The Black Hole, Essence, and finally True Self.

If you are willing to take the plunge into and through what has most been avoided, That which has been truly longed for is discovered: True Self, love, peace, joy. The possibility is discovering the depths. Most people live on the surface. By the surface, I mean thoughts of me and my story and the feelings of anger and hurt about who did what to whom. This is all a way of avoiding the terror and despair that lies waiting beneath it. But, I have discovered that the trap door which leads into the depths is underneath the despair and the terror.

For most fixations, the most surface, most easily experienced emotion is anger. If you add in a story, you get the variations of anger such as irritation, frustration, vengeance and jealousy. Most people can feel irritated a dozen times in a day and don’t think anything of it. Anger is socially acceptable. I can either be angry at myself because I did it, or I can be angry at you because you did it. That is living in the story of the surface emotion.

In going deeper, you will almost always find hurt and sadness. This is where most of the population lives most of the time. If they are in their emotions they are either hurt about something or they are angry about something. For some people it is easier to express the anger, and for some it is easier to express the hurt, but they bounce back and forth between these two.
The tendency then is to stop there, to say, “ I am hurt and I am sad and it is because of you... it is because of my parents... if only I had a different childhood...” Now, in making this mental story you have dissociated yourself from the emotion. Now you are not even feeling the anger and the sadness. Instead, you are in your ideas. That is a way of dissociating.

But, if you don’t go into the story - which is the [personality] fixation—and you don’t repress it, and you don’t act it out, you go deeper. Underneath you will almost always find fear. Most people don’t want to feel fear. Fear is undesirable. Fear means there is something wrong with me. Fear means I’m not adequate. Fear means I am a coward. Fear means I don’t know the right thing to do. All these are trance inductions about what fear means. So as soon as most people get even close to feeling fear, they pop back out and start to feel anger and sadness or tell themselves a story.

The possibility is to cut the story, to cut the trance induction of the past and the future, and to allow yourself to drown in fear. This is very rare. No one may have ever told you to do this before. The therapists usually tell you how to move away from fear - how to suppress it or how to change it into courage. But if you actually sink in and you really experience it, you will find that under fear is despair - and that is the good news!

All the ego structures are set up to never feel despair. All therapy is set up to move you away from despair. All the workshops are set up so you feel empowered and you can create your reality and you don’t have to feel despair. However, despair is at the root of every ego fixation. The truth of the situation is the ego isn’t good enough! It isn’t going to make it. It doesn’t exist!
The possibility is to actually head towards what you are most afraid of - to head towards what all the conditioning says move away from. This is the trap door. It is the escape hatch. The way out of the fixation and the story is to invite despair. To be willing to face the unbearableness of despair—that you are hopeless, helpless, not good enough. That you don’t know, you are never going to get it, and you are going to be left alone. So you call it out and you experience it. Without suppressing it. Without acting it out. Then you sink in and you find what is deeper.

And what is deeper? Most people report that there is nothing there. But this “nothing there” is not true emptiness, it is a mental emptiness. It is a dead flat emptiness, which I call a black hole. This is what gets avoided at all costs. “I don’t want to fall into a black hole, I won’t exist! I won’t come out alive.” This is true. The ego can’t exist there, it won’t come out alive from there. But you are not an ego, you are immortal Intelligence which has gone into an imaginary sleep, pretending to be an ego.

This inner black hole is remarkably similar to the black hole in outer space, which scientists believe, literally sucks the event horizon of time and space into itself. Some people try to avoid the black hole through emotions, “If I have enough emotions, that will fill it.” Others try to avoid it with information. “If I just know enough, it will save me from the black hole.” Many are asleep to the black hole. Most don’t even know it is there. But this is what is waiting under despair.

If you are willing to plunge into it. If you are willing to say, “OK, it is a good day to die, come and get me,” and then dive in... Under the black hole, you discover the truth of your Self. You discover Essence. Sometimes you will find that a Four who is living in melancholy and sadness, drops into the despair of the black hole and beyond, and Joy is discovered waiting. Joy, which had been searched for in relationships, searched for in the other. This is the great joke. This is what is possible.

You will also find that it is possible to drop from anger directly into essence. It is possible to drop from sadness and hurt directly into essence. Or from fear into essence. There is no problem with this. You can fall directly from anger into bliss. Then if you stay in bliss long enough, expect sadness and fear and despair to show up. They will. The tendency, then is to say, “ I lost bliss, something is wrong with me, I lost it.” You didn’t lose it. Bliss did not go anywhere, sadness and despair have shown up in bliss to be burned, to be thrown on the funeral pyre. If you don’t touch it, if you don’t identify with it, it will be burned.

The key is don’t act on it and don’t suppress it. This is really the revolutionary news. Because, basically, all of our lives, we have been taught to either act it out or suppress it. Either it is not appropriate to feel this, or “I shouldn’t feel this so I will make believe it’s not here”, or, “This is my truth and I’ve got to let you know what my truth is, so you’re a jerk and I’ve got to tell you that.” The possibility is that, as everything arises, to not move. In order to not move, you can’t have a story. If you don’t have a story, you will discover you have a quiet mind.

This is the giving up of the character fixation, the surrender of the doer. When you are willing to give up the doer, there is enormous relaxation. It is giving up all effort. When you give up all effort, then whatever arises can be experienced directly. Without judging it, without suppressing it, without acting it out, and without creating a story about it. This is the simplest and easiest. This is the end of suffering inherent as a character fixation (personality), and the beginning of endless revelation as the Truth of Self.

For more information about Eli Jaxon-Bear, call the Leela Foundation at 1-800-879-4221. Eli can be seen on Channel 12, HCMC, Arcata, Tuesday evenings at 6 PM. Eli’s writings, events and retreats are listed at his website, www.leela.org.