When I woke up, I stopped experiencing emotions. My heart was empty.

That might not be what you were expecting to hear. We’ve been told that enlightenment is the pinnacle of self improvement, so that should mean that all the good and noble feelings are amplified while the base and negative feelings disappear. That sounds great! Only, that’s not what happened. All personal emotions disappeared, leaving me with an empty heart.

When the mind is silent, truly still…not for a moment but always, feelings, emotions, as such, don’t arise. There is raw energy that will rip through your body/energy field. It happens rarely, and happens in one flash, and is gone. If your mind gives no name at all to it, you don’t experience it as love or sorrow or anger. You just feel a surge of energy, which flows through you and is gone, sort of like a sneeze.

This happened when my cat was put to sleep, and it went very, very badly. She suffered in terror, and we had done all we could to ensure that would not be the case. Once the vet had left our home, and it was done, I felt a rush of energy blow through me and I cried. But I did not feel it as any kind of emotion, just energy moving powerfully through my body in a flash. The same happened when my husband died. It was a great, cold starburst. Over in a flash, and never christened. It is energy in motion. Only, when we start fondling it with our minds it turns into something else. And all kinds of industries and mythologies and beliefs are built around that.

I’m not in any way saying you should ignore how you feel. I’m not actually telling you what to do at all with your feelings. I’m telling you what my experience has been.

Before enlightenment

I had some unusual experiences prior to waking up. When I was 12 I realized that I was beginning to care about how people perceived me. It’s common for kids that age to become self conscious, and I did not want to lose my freedom and independence. So I conducted a series of experiments to demonstrate to myself that it did not matter at all what others thought of me.

Once a week, I would raid my mother’s closet to find the most hideous left overs from an unfortunate prior decade, and I would wear them in public. I was acutely aware of how people were looking at me. Then, I would come home and dress in something stylish and go out in public. I was the same person, on the same day. People reacted very differently to me. I demonstrated to myself that people were going to have all kinds of opinions about me, and that those opinions clearly had nothing to do with who I was.

The following year, I, an introvert, purposely signed up for “try outs” of every imaginable kind. I tried out for all kinds of school sports teams, chess and even, god help me, cheerleading squad. Junior high school is designed to be totally humiliating to introverts who really would rather sit under a tree and read. I knew I would fail, and quite publicly. I decided to try my very best, not just go through the motions, but really try, and fail. I wanted to show myself that I could fail in front of all my peers, and I’d still be the same person, still feel no differently about myself.

Cheerleading tryouts were rigorous and completely humiliating. It was great! I unexpectedly made the girl’s volleyball team, as well as tennis. In any case, it was another self induced demonstration: I could fail and not feel bad about it; I could look totally foolish and not feel in any way diminished. This is not to say I defended myself against feeling inadequate. It was more like showing myself that feeling bad or embarrassed was simply not relevant.

So, obviously I was a weird teenager, to say the least. But what I wanted to show myself is that feelings do not follow circumstances. Feeling a certain way in a given circumstance may be normal, but it isn’t necessary. Circumstances do not cause feelings, they set the stage for you to react in the common way, with anger, sadness or mortification. Or not.

Society, and by that, I am including the people close to you who love you, will feel very uneasy if you don’t feel the correct feelings at the designated times. If you don’t feel sad or angry or hurt when you experience the sanctioned triggers, you are labelled in all manner of unfavorable ways. You might be a sociopath, or more colloquially, perhaps you weren’t breast fed or maybe someone dropped you on your head as a baby. A very close friend sincerely suggested that my lack of appropriate emotions was surely due to being adopted as a baby. In other words, you’re broken.

So even before awakening, I had many experiences, too numerous to describe here, where it seemed very clear that emotions are not the obvious or mandatory outcome of certain events. After awakening, even the emotions we normally treasure, such as personal love and what we think is compassion, were gone. There was no one left to narrate and interpret my experiences, and emotions did not arise.

It might seem the world would become so flat and wretched without our colorful, bouncy emotions to punctuate our experiences. But life has taken on a vivid immediacy and richness. But it has nothing to do with me, it’s not personal. And we take our emotions so personally, so seriously and revere them with a kind of religiosity.

For a long time after awakening I could not listen to music, even classical music, which I always had loved. I couldn’t watch movies, except for action movies, I couldn’t look at art. It was all just these intense personal emotions, but instead of just being in motion, they were forced into something solid, dense, physical…unmovable. I couldn’t relate to it, and it looked sticky and unhealthy.

What would it be like if our emotional energy remained pure, moving through our emotional body in one swift burst, staying not even a moment, not even long enough to receive a name, a story, a legend?