Freedom from Negative Emotions

01-01 General information about negative emotions (NEs) and freedom from them

Day after day, minute after minute people experience negative emotions (“negative emotions”): jealousy, self-pity, fear, irritation, discontent, resentment, fury, perplexity, affront, malice, envy, apprehension, worry, contempt, repulsion, shame, revenge, apathy, idleness, depression, melancholy, disappointment, greediness and etc, etc.

The Selection of the Attractive States (SAS), as described in this book, consists of consecutive replacement of the unwelcome perceptions into the ones that you wish. It is necessary to experience the joyful wish (i.e. an anticipated wish) for such substitution of unwelcome perceptions and cultivate them persistently and firmly until a newly created habit overpowers the old ones which haw been created automatically. I call this path “Direct” precisely because the only significant condition necessary to travel this route is having a joyful wish to change the perception that has been revealed.

While practicing SAS the person achieves complete eradication of negative emotions that he has perceived, he discovers that along with the strong and easily identified negative emotions he regularly experiences a large number of minor negative emotions. Without exaggeration we can say that nearly every perception has a diminutive splash of negative emotions (most often it is discontent, negative attitude, anxiety), followed by a hardly observed “tail” feeding an already strong and concentrated negative background. All this altogether creates an overwhelmingly poisoned atmosphere. The consequences are terrible and catastrophic.

First of all it leads to what is called “ageing” and it starts not at 40 years, but at 22 to 25, and it is very rapid. The skin not only loses its elasticity but is unpleasant to touch and to look at, bodies and faces become flabby, ugly, drawn, fat and are affected by unpleasant thinness. Odours become strong and displeasing. The health deteriorates continuously but this is a long and slow process the person is unaware of these subtle and very unpleasant changes, in the mornings he wakes up jaded and in the evenings goes to bed as if in a disturbed state of mind. He feels fatigued and needs more and more stimulants like coffee, mechanical sex or primitive impressions. Look at our old men and women around you, forget all the political correctness and be honest as much as you are capable. Their bodies and faces are a material embodiment of the negative emotions that they have experienced during their lifetime and continue to experience. This is so prevalent that people find it natural. They accept old age is an unavoidable loss of common sense, it is unattractive, dull, aggressive and full of suffering. But in India, Nepal, Tibet and Sri Lanka you can see very old people and how much they differ from ours! Their faces, voices and manners are attractive, their old bodies do not look ugly and their eyes sometimes literally charm.

Secondly, I am totally sure that most diseases or even all of them are caused only by negative emotions. According to the contemporary religion viruses and microbes cause people’s illnesses, but I know for sure that those viruses and microbes ruin bodies of only those people who especially are subjected to negative emotions. More than that, it’s not hard to track the behaviour between certain illnesses and the type of dominant negative emotion. Those who practice SAS and achieve greater and greater degrees of freedom from negative emotions sometimes have reoccurring splashes of the old habit to experience negative emotions and they notice surprisingly that something unimaginable happens to the body. It aches a little on and off and is even definitely sore in some places, feels heavy, inert, tired, uneasy and all this is resulting from just some half an hour to an hour of feeling negative and only after few remaining negative emotions! These are the moments when it is especially clear that if you do not eradicate negative emotions you are continually unwell. People regularly experience these negative emotions either as bright splashes or “weak” negative background (NB) of uneasiness, anxiety, discontentment, self-pity, sadness, etc., and their bodies are continually and cruelly suppressed by this poison.

Thirdly, it’s not only the body that negative emotions are ruining, they also fully destroy the capability to have joyful wishes, clarity of mind, enlightened perceptions (EPs), affection, sense of beauty, aspiration, serenity, joyfulness of creativity, fondness, admiration, anticipation… negative emotions transform a person into the living dead. For many long years he can wander the world, decomposing little by little, being alive on the outside and having nothing alive on the inside. It also means that the door for the journey of the mind is implacably shut, the door to new discoveries and enlightened perceptions is closed.

I emphasize that no spiritual practice, no yoga or meditations, no prayers or prostrations lead you anywhere if you do not try in the first instance to achieve full elimination from negative emotions and continuous experience of enlightened perceptions. Nothing is possible while you have negative emotions. Eradication of negative emotions and the discovery of the world of enlightened perceptions in yourself is the path to an incredible journey no matter what spiritual practice you have chosen.

I find that any sincere aspiration to enlightened perceptions leads you quickly to a bright or a brighter result whether you are a buddhist, krishnia, orthodox or whatever. You may worship god in any form or believe some formless god; you may be an atheist, Darwinist, esoteric, tantric, some ancient temple follower or the follower of a newly created sect. But if you sincerely aspire to enlightened perceptions and the uncompromising elimination of negative emotions and dogmas, if you do not accept in any way negative emotions or dogmatism, if you indulge in any practice aimed at experiencing enlightened perceptions and work to stop negative emotions the results will appear and your life will become more interesting and full. But if you encourage or justify negative emotions, lie to yourself or pretend that you do not have negative emotions then this way is a dead end, advancing to old age with a dull mind and intense suffering.

If society does not have an uncompromising policy regarding negative emotions it will never live peacefully no matter how complicated the law is and how stringent the punishment, whatever devices and mechanisms are invented. The Community of PDP practitioners, “snouts”, is a unique example of a new type of community, it is very stable, as long as there are simply no inner forces capable of destroying it, as any impulse of aggression, resentment, self-pity, greediness, arrogance or inferiority and so on, are immediately subjected to eradication, or, as minimum an attempt at immediate elimination. Consequently, fondness, a wish of enlightened perceptions both in yourself and others, devotion, affection, compassion and so on are rapidly evolving. Some communities, even though they do not set a task of eliminating negative emotions and dogmatism, but still approve of PDP and support the snouts aspirations, are remarkably peace loving (please do not confuse with defenseless and infantile) and stable.

The Earth you live on is above all the world of negative emotions and this is not an exaggeration. They are revealed in so many instances and are so tightly intertwined in our lives that sometimes negative emotions seem to be the only existing emotions and all you are able to do is to refine, complicate or vary them, they connect and entwine with each other, thus making them multi-layered and intensive. Negative emotions surround you from everywhere, they are imposed and cultivated. I do not even speak about such obvious phenomena like the cult of violence in movies and the news or open any “feature” book considered to be profound and good reading, there you will find “refined” negative emotions, strong negative emotions, complicated negative emotions and if the reader acquires a complex of negative emotions shuffled with positive emotions (PEs), then this is the reason to find the book “great”. Well, where can the books about enlightened perceptions come from? To describe the enlightened perceptions one must have this experience and strive to strengthen it by any means. It is impossible just to create them in your mind, this is why there are only a few books of this kind, like all works of Castaneda, Taisha Abelar, Florinda Donner, Christopher Isherwood’s “Ramakrishna and his Disciples”, Satprem’s “Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness”, “Mahamudra” of Takpo Tashi Namgyal and Dalai Lama, Je Tsong Khapa’s “Lam rim”, “Krishnamurti’s notebook», “Yoga Sutras” Patanjali, Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche’s “Rainbow Painting”, Tensin Wangyal’s “Wonders of the Natural Mind”, Evans-Wentz’s “Tibet’s Great Yogi Milarepa”.

One of the worst mistakes is people think that it’s not them who are choosing negative emotions, they think that are “forced” to experience them by other people and circumstances. This is one hundred percent wrong and people believing in this concept are totally helpless, even those that want to get rid of negative emotions or at least some of them. I affirm on the basis of my own experience and the experience of other DP practitioners, that whether you have negative emotions or not depends only on you and on your efforts to get over this terrible habit.

The joyful wish accompanied with anticipation to change the circumstances is totally compatible with the practice of negative emotions eradication with clear understanding that it is not the environment that causes negative emotions but that people are just used to such an experiences of negative emotions within their given circumstances. This is why it is possible to eradicate completely negative emotions associated with the given situation and experience enlightened perceptions and at the same time joyfully wish to change the situation and make every effort to do so.

There are no circumstances that can create obstructions for practicing. The less you welcome the situation, the easier negative emotions show up and it gives the chance to practice especially intensive elimination and achieve a brighter result. As a result a practitioner encounters even the least welcome situations with appreciation, determination and anticipation (see chapter “Stalking” for details). If you are in an aggressive environment you can perfect the elimination of negative emotions. If you are in a comfortable environment you can train your effort for elimination of complacency and dullness. You have ideal conditions for practicing in any circumstances as long as you live. At the same time there comes a new attitude to the circumstances, unlike the chaotic accumulation of events, but there will be something lively and responsive.

Is it possible to be free of negative emotions? People are so hopelessly stuck in them that even the idea itself of getting rid of negative emotions causes irritation. They imagine themselves without negative emotions and feel perplexed of how can they live; are they to turn into a senseless block of wood? They are so addicted to negative emotions that they cannot even think of anything outside these emotions though many of them have had short splashes of weak reverberations of enlightened perceptions, especially in early childhood.

Ask any person whether he feels negative. He will reply “certainly” I do sometimes. The word “certainly” reflects his firm conviction that anything to the contrary is impossible. And the word “sometimes” is self-cheating, because people have negative emotions or negative background continually, not from time to time. The stronger the habit of experiencing negative emotions the less a person is aware of them and soon the moment arrives when he has a wild splash of aggression with a heart attack, which is recognised as a negative emotion, but all other times this person thinks he does not have negative emotions. The degree of how deep people are in negative emotions is enormous and inexpressible. 99.99% of time people experience more or less strong negative emotions or negative background, from time to time these are interrupted by PEs – nothing can survive in this toxic environment. But even PEs are a poor consolation as they are the opposite side of negative emotions and they intoxicate just as much, because they include pleasure over possession (whether it is attention or objects or power), mischievous gloating, self-complacency, complacency, narcissism, feeling of self-importance (FSI), contempt, pride and others. Besides that PEs are not compatible with enlightened perceptions as they also provoke stronger negative emotions because, for example, the stronger FSI of a person the easier it is to hurt him, the more threats to his self-conceitedness that he is aware of the more often he is displeased, angry, hurt and aggressive. Sometimes enlightened perceptions add to PEs and sometimes PEs compensate the effect of negative emotions (e.g. complacency compensates self-complacency), and then there comes a moment of relative freedom from negative emotions allowing some reverberations of enlightened perceptions to get through, but they are too weak and can disappear with time completely.

Negative emotions are toxic, they are a narcotic addiction and people die from them but yet they receive some “pleasure” from them and if they try to get off the addiction withdrawal symptoms come immediately along with the fear of freedom. People get “impressions” and think that this is life. “Impressions” are PE. Anger towards the enemy is accompanied by gloating when a person thinks of revenge. Grief over a loss goes hand in hand with the satisfaction that others will feel sorry for you and pay attention to you, this is why negative emotions are seen as having some value as the way to receive PEs. The very idea of elimination causes fear of losing those PEs, hence self-pity, skepticism and even aggression accompany the idea. How far gone should a person be to clutch for negative emotions as means to feel “alive”! A pleasure from negative emotions is the “pleasure” from eating toxins followed by a very bad feeling, then later relief. The stronger the poison the higher the contrast with the following relief, this is why people intentionally cultivate negative emotions as they cannot have enlightened perceptions and don’t even dream of them because they are used to the idea that life is dull and monotonous. At the age from 25 to 30 people already start waiting for the death as a rescue from complete boredom, negative emotions and illnesses, thus they program their ageing and disintegration.

But still freedom is possible and I offer a practice that leads to this freedom. Overpowering negative emotions is the very first step which opens a limitless expanse of conditions. There are people admitting that it is possible to decrease the power of negative emotions, but they do not believe it is possible to do so by applying their own efforts. They try to find a “big red button” (BRB) – they push it and sufferings disappear. In their quests for the button they practice yoga, breathing exercises, sit in different postures, hum mantras, march, sing hymns and so on, they make whatever possible but not the efforts to stop negative emotions and “jump” into enlightened perceptions. Certain negative emotions can be indeed decreased but only for a short period and with little or no effect, sooner or later the attention sneaks off and the same negative emotions come back. It is impossible to sit and hum mantras continuously for twenty four hours, seven days a week, you have to get up and buy food, go to work, socialise, sleep and this is when negative emotions attack you again. Tibetan monks believe that in the distant future after hundreds of reincarnations they will stop negative emotions but they will never believe it’s possible to do it right after a few years of persistent work and not five hundred years of humming mantras.

To avoid any misunderstanding I will identify that the “effort” is a very intensive, concentrated and joyful wish. “Concentrated” means your attention is not scattered to a chaos of distractions. “Joyful” means being accompanied by expectation, freshness and anticipation. To “make an effort to eliminate negative emotions” does not mean you strain every last muscle, clench your teeth or breathe in some special way, it means you wish strongly to stop negative emotions and be very keen to experience enlightened perceptions. A concentrated, intensive and joyful wish leads to changing perceptions in conformity for this to be granted. The more persistent and determined you are in this practice the better skilled you become and the more efficient your efforts become. It is a mystery how it happens that these efforts lead to changes but as long as it happens I use it and achieve what I wish. People do not know about this distinguishing feature of their efforts as their wishes are either weak and scattered or their drive does not include aspiration to enlightened perceptions.

A couple more words that give a precise description of the effort, they are to “Remember” and to “Jump In”. “To make an effort of negative emotion elimination” is identical to “Remember yourself in a free state from negative emotions” or “Jump In the free state from negative emotions”. I draw your attention that it is required not just to think of the moment that you once experienced enlightened perceptions, but to remember exactly your state when this occurred. As far as all perceptions exist only in the here and now, “Remember yourself in enlightened perceptions” means “experience enlightened perceptions immediately”.

You make a super effort when you do what you think is impossible, but go on increasing your efforts regardless of your skeptical thoughts or whatever.

It is impossible to imagine the contemporary world without science. Scientists study characteristics of materials, investigate the rules and ways to obtain the characteristics they need and apply this knowledge to replace perceptions. Feeling cold is changed onto feeling warm when you put on trekking sneakers and a modern jacket made of polyartek instead of a punched wet skin and wooden clogs, toothache is eliminated when treated with modern technologies. But there was a time with no science, more than that those who studied materials and creatures were persecuted and blamed for disrespecting the gods and so on. Let us admit that Humanity is now on a new coil of civilised development. Modern people are certain that it is impossible just to replace irritation with fondness, depression with faith and sense of beauty etc. Nobody studies the nature of perceptions or practices their replacement guided by joyful wishes, anticipation and common sense. Even more, critics promise God’s severe punishment to those people who practice replacement of negative emotions as they “upset the harmony of human nature” because if negative emotions exist they exist for a reason or “for something”. In this case it is not clear why the critics do not stop treating toothache, use warm clothes and condoms; if toothache, colds and AIDS exist, then according to their dogmas, it is needed “for something”? For those that accept a man is “created” with negative emotions and that the interference with the “natural order of things” is going to lead to a “misbalance”, I remind them that if a man is created by somebody complete with an already a full set of perceptions, then these perceptions include a joyful wish to change and a wish to make the effort to experience enlightened perceptions and stop suffering. There is one more point I’d like to attract your attention to. If a person makes a change in his life under the influence of some misconception or the fear or respect of some authority then sometime later he might feel sorry or guilty for making the change and will have a desire to return to his previous condition or seek something else because he is not happy with the life he has created. He had bright expectations but reality turned up different. If a person was successful in eliminating at least one negative emotion and straight away experienced a splash of enlightened perceptions then just the idea of returning to the previous condition of negative emotions will make him shudder, it will be associated with death or even something worse. The more often the practitioner experiences the enlightened perceptions, the more determined he is to consolidate this condition and try to stop negative emotions and this new reality proves to be extremely more attractive.

As a new epoch begins in the life of Humanity, people start investigating enlightened perceptions and their components, characteristics and laws, bring into the light the joyful wishes aimed to change constituents of perceptions and create optimum technologies for these changes. In the process of investigating materials the scientists of the past discovered new substances with unique and incomprehensible characteristics. Likewise in this process, while practicing replacement of negative emotions with enlightened perceptions, the new enlightened perceptions appear with such striking qualities that are impossible to see even in the boldest of dreams. The era of enlightened perceptions engineering begins forming a conglomerate called the “man”. A man starts a new and unique journey, the peculiarity of this journey consists of in the fact, that it’s not a notorious “journey of the mind” usually implying a certain emotional or intellectual process severed from the physical reality and senses, which means the physical body and common chores. A man goes on a journey as a whole entirety. He is not a dreamer that turns over philosophical terms in his mind and experiences a huge number of negative emotions and he has no enlightened perceptions, feels sick and gets worse and worse. His physical body is also a unity of perceptions, we call them “feelings”, and these perceptions can also be replaced directly by effort (e.g. apathy to activeness, from “feeling not well” to “feeling great”), his physical body begins to transform and improve as negative emotions are disappearing from the set of perceptions and enlightened perceptions taking their place.

At this moment (year 2005) there are very few of such travellers, only about 20 (I mean “snouts”), but in the year 2000, when I started my activity, there were no snouts at all. It makes me feel sure there will be more and more of them as money, cars, education, relations or inheritance are not needed to make the journey. It is enough to know that this journey is possible (the task is solved by this book) as well as the fact that you are alive and have the aspiration to be happy, to experience enlightened perceptions and overpower distresses. This is why I am confident the number of snouts will grow every year and the time will come when there will be snouts by the hundreds and thousands. Therefore I have had the most intensive anticipation while realizing my joyful wishes of accomplishing “snout-projects”, when I develop the infrastructure for the snout-culture, get books translated into other languages, be supportive with the “snouts” practices and help them become with time the experts in this field and be enlightened perceptions educators who can assist the beginners independently. All my time and finances are aimed for this and I enjoy it.

The minimum task for “snouts” consists of first mastering the art of lucid dreaming and out-of-body experiences and then of learning to keep the conscious clear throughout the process of passing away (when the body is going to die), in between the physical death of the body and the birth of the new and after the reincarnation to recall your practice in the “new life” and to continue from the level you have gone through in your past life. I am sure that to gain this experience it is necessary to get rid of distresses and achieve continuous enlightened perceptions of preferably ecstatic quality. Mankind has already had some similar limited experience (e.g. Dalai-Lama the 14th, Karmapa the 17th, and hundreds of other less famous Tibetan monks, “tulku”, known as people who transferred their consciousness to the new body with some larger or smaller gaps in their self-consciousness and capability to recall their past lives and past experiences).

Negative emotions are characterised by a number of distinguishing features:

1) Realising the process of negative emotions causes a certain amount of dullness (which means a high decrease in the capability and the wish to discern perceptions)

2) After negative emotions you feel much worse

3) After negative emotions you lose anticipation, enthusiasm, interest, other enlightened perceptions and joyful wishes

4) Negative emotions are incompatible with clear conscience

5) Negative emotions are incompatible with enlightened perceptions

6) While you are in the power of negative emotions you are similar to a programmed robot, your behaviour and reactions are predictable and most ineffective

7) It is practically impossible to escape from the flow of negative emotions without a persistent and determined training, even if in some situations you want to stop negative emotions, they still do not cease due to the power of the lifelong habit.

Positive Emotions distinguishing features:

1) They are mirror opposites to negative emotions: envy – gloating, displeasure – pleasure, feeling of inferiority (FOI) – FSI, anxiety – inert calmness and dullness, bitterness of defeat –“joy” of victory, loneliness – unhealthy friendliness, ingratiating and so on

2) They are followed by fatigue, prostration and indifference

3) They are followed by poisoning, feeling unwell, though it is not as strong as after negative emotions

4) While you have PEs there is still a fear they are going to wane sooner or later and negative emotions will appear

5) PEs are nearly hundred percent incompatible with enlightened perceptions but with the exception of the situations, when PEs compensate the respective negative emotions and then a weak reverberation of enlightened perceptions can appear as a small flash

6) In the process of the release of PEs dullness will appear afterwards

7) PEs are incompatible with a clear mind, although it is not as apparent as when somebody is in the power of negative emotions

8) A “robot-like” resemblance, predictable behaviour and reactions for a person experiencing PEs; actions are ineffective as in a case with negative emotions

9) A wish to experience PEs is mostly similar to an addiction to drugs, the lack of PEs can cause “withdrawal symptoms” that can be exceptionally painful and can be accompanied with very strong negative emotions

While a person is submerged in negative emotions, he hardly can find a clear border between PEs and enlightened perceptions, because it’s very rare he experiences enlightened perceptions. Therefore the main direction of PDP is applied to eradicating negative emotions as they cause agony, poisoning and are most unwelcome. As freedom from negative emotions expands, PEs start to form layer upon layer, some layers become obviously unwelcome, the opposing companions of negative emotions, others will be quite desirable to experience while removing them and as a result of this process you will find the grains, the seeds of enlightened perceptions. Some PEs will disappear on their own providing the opposing negative emotions are eliminated, like when envy dies then gloating vanishes.

While negative emotions are being eliminated, enlightened perceptions will not disappear but their qualities will intensify in:

1) frequency

2) intensity

3) profoundness (number of nuances)

4) transparency (the degree of differentiation from the adjacent perceptions, “pureness”)

5) resonating (a release of just one enlightened perception leads to the rush of a whole “bouquet” of others)

Another significant difference of enlightened perceptions from PEs is the fact that no matter how intensive PEs are they always orientate to some object. Even the strong feeling of gloating is the emotion aimed at some person for some special reason. Even the strong feeling of pity is the emotion directed at some special person for some special situation. As for the enlightened perceptions, they have the ability to be objectless when the intensity is increasing, especially when they become ecstatic.

Bobcat: “When PEs appear, I have no wish to differentiate perceptions or ask myself “what do I experience”. There is only a desire to realize the coming wishes without any attempts to see if they are mechanical or joyful, whether they are accompanied with poisoning and increasing fatigue or vice versa. As a result the situations involving negative emotions are unavoidable as there is no differentiation of the perceptions and it’s not clear what wishes they are and why, consequently you do not have a chance to release a desire to eliminate mechanical wishes and start realizing joyful wishes.

When enlightened perceptions are released, the desire to separate the perceptions becomes stronger and every effort to differentiate resonates with enlightened perceptions.

PEs block the intellect’s activity and suppress the ability to rationalise, to compare possible interpretations and to reach clarity regarding interpretations. When a person is seized by these PEs he is choosing only one of the many possible interpretations not because it is rational, but because it is mostly comfortable for continuing to experience PEs. In this process even the most incredible displacements and additions may take place. Sometimes it can even lead to dangerous situations which could be instantly envisaged and avoided.

There exists a term “mental disorder”. It denotes everything unusual. You walk naked means you are unwell. You bathe in an ice-hole means you are unwell. You eliminate negative emotions means you are unwell. You do not want to get married means you are unwell. You do not love your parents also means you are unwell! I offer another definition: mentally unwell are those who do not want to experience certain emotions, wishes and thoughts but continue to do so. If you do not want to have negative emotions but you experience them, then mentally you are unwell and if you are aware of that, it makes you seek the road to recovery which means the elimination of negative emotions.

One of the main difficulties for negative emotions eradication is the false interpretation of negative emotions as an “integral part of yourself”, as your possession. The more a person is craving for possessing the negative emotions the more difficult it is for him to have a wish to eradicate even the strongest sufferings, especially because he hopes to have PEs after the bout of negative emotions. However if you start eliminating negative emotions, then all fears and sorrows gradually disappear and their absurdity becomes transparent, because as a result enlightened perceptions flash brighter bringing into the light a dilemma of either this or that. One cup on the scales contains negative emotions, the other cup has the delight of the touch of enlightened perceptions.

Negative emotions are not an integral part of a person, they are just tumours. Quite often people talk about so called “personal qualities” meaning that these qualities are inherent, given at the moment of birth or instilled forever by their upbringing and if it is at all possible to correct them, there won’t be much correction. When they say “I am short-tempered”, with these words they display a “personal quality”, a “feature of character”. By saying this the negative emotion of irritation is unavoidable in certain circumstances. Which means there is a definite steady and fixed “connection” between circumstances and negative emotions. Also some special “nature” of this “quality” is imagined, without realising that these tumours that can be either cultivated or eradicated. All similar “qualities” are nothing else but deep-seated patterns of experiencing negative emotions. There are “no connections” it is simply a habit and habits can be changed.

If you notice that all negative emotions are being eliminated and you do not have negative emotions at this moment, but at the same time you do not experience bright enlightened perceptions as well, it means that right now you experience a negative background (NB). Negative background is the same as negative emotions only of poor intensity, as if they blur and spread like a “pre-bottom” layer. They do not have obvious splashes but when they do spill, there are usual negative emotions and quite often you might not guess that the negative background you are experiencing is nourishing a layer for negative emotions and negative emotions do not come from a vacuum. Negative background lasts a long time, it can drag for hours, days, months, a lifetime. It is not easy to reveal this deeply rooted negative background. It is worthwhile seeking advice from a practicing partner or practitioner who has good experience of eliminating negative emotions, backgrounds & NEC and he can see the signs of your negative background. If there is no such option, it is necessary to intensify your attention and apply various techniques of the practice to reveal the negative background. Emotions polishing practice is especially effective (see below). Another option is to sort out your thoughts and watch which one of them causes more obvious resonation and this will allow you to uncover negative background. It may be anxiety triggered by insecurities for the future, fear for a child, fear of the parents, fear of people’s judgments, shyness, continual dull state, each will have his own.

Enlightened background (EB) is revealed analogically to the negative background.

Let’s introduce the term “Negative dominant”. Often people say that they are nearly free from negative emotions; a few claim they do not experience negative emotions and negative background for hours or even days. At the same time it is very obvious that this person is packed to the limit with negative emotions and negative background, his face is distorted, body is tense so much so that you just can’t help wondering: why he doesn’t realize it. Negative dominant is the negative emotion or negative background which you are so much used to that you cannot imagine your life without these and do not notice that you are experiencing them continually all the time! I say again, that if you were free from all negative emotions, you would experience some bright and steady enlightened perceptions at this very moment, but if you do not have them it means right now you have negative emotion or negative background or NEC, which is a negative dominant.

Do not stop at this stage of discussing the practice, start your real fight for liberation from this moment. Fight! How long can you live with it? Yes, it is not easy to eradicate negative emotions, but is it easier to live with them? Beginning to eradicate negative emotions is the first step. If you do not make this first step, you do not achieve anything at all and everything is closed for you. How long will it take you to make this first step? There are huge spaces of enlightened perceptions in front of you, but you are very delicate with this poison… Imagine that you are a mountaineer conquering a peak. It is very hard to reach the pinnacle. There are many people calling themselves teachers, enlightened and masters, but have you met at least one person free from negative emotions? This pinnacle is not conquered by many and the reason is not because of its inaccessibility but in the fact that nobody attempts to reach it. Nobody makes a direct effort of negative emotions eradication, but all are seeking roundabouts, BRBs – postures, mantras. Get your act together, your persistence, the love of life, because if you do not solve your task, you will share the fate of all surrounding you. Look at the old women who became a physical embodiment of negative emotions, will you be happy with such a life? Look at the young people with vacant stares, who have spasmodic journeys from negative emotions and dullness of PEs to deeper negative emotions and most utterly boring dullness. Look at people of the age of 30 to 40 years old, who long ago lost any hope for betterment. Do you want to be like them? If no, fight. Imagine yourself an Amazon woman, a terminator, a witch, because you will need the highest intensity of all your strength, and not for some illusive “bright future”, but for experiencing enlightened perceptions now, following the eradication of negative emotions. Every step you make is a new level of liberation, every day new splashes of enlightened perceptions are falling for you, your life changes into a continuous creativity and you will enjoy this venture.

There are benches at the entrance to your block of apartments and sitting there are old men and women. Also here are kids and teenagers. And all these puppets are inevitably going to change into SOMETHING, to denote what there are no words. Look into their eyes. Do you want to become this SOMETHING?

As soon as negative emotions are eradicated, flashes of enlightened perceptions will appear. If you can clear yourself from negative emotions at least a little bit, you’ll see that the path to freedom is incredibly simple! Just get rid of a few of distresses and that is that! You will start this amazing journey in deep penetrating feelings which are opening a new world within you. It is not that you are looking from afar at something attractive, but you yourself become a pleasure, a discovery and a journey.

Enlightened perceptions are impossible to experience behind the curtain of negative emotions. You cannot create or contrive enlightened perceptions, they are either revealed or concealed, but you might wish to experience them. The wish to experience enlightened perceptions becomes stronger with further liberation from “distresses” (see below), and it mysteriously brings enlightened perceptions closer. If this wish is very strong, its quality changes, I call it an “effort”, and then it leads to spontaneous enlightened perceptions. At first these are short splashes, which seem to appear without any connection with the practice. The strength and the depth of enlightened perceptions depends on the intensity and sincerity of the efforts and this later becomes very clear. When a puff of smoke becomes thinner, it allows sun rays to get through. enlightened perceptions are not in static states. When you experience them, you will become a journey into the amazing worlds.

Society’s reaction is a very serious obstruction to the eradication of negative emotions and in starting persistent practice. This reaction is negative, aggressive-negative. People surrounding you, your relatives, your acquaintances, the esoteric followers from forums and the internet, all of them will probably show aggression to the idea of eradicating negative emotions and explain in lots of words that it is impossible and unnatural and will lead to terrible mental problems and so on. There are exceptions to this rule, but not many. At first relatives and friends can agree with you about everything out of fear of losing your attention, but the sooner your practice of eradicating negative emotions and dogmatic concepts becomes consistent, the clearer is their real attitude towards it. Such unanimous aggressive-negative attitude towards eradicating negative emotions, which quite often is accompanied with threats and physical violence, can seriously threaten or disrupt your determination. Many practicing beginners give up when they feel that they are in a vacuum and join those vegetating with negative emotions all their life. It’s your choice and up to you to decide.

When you reveal your usual perceptions, even though there is quite a big portion of negative emotions among them and you have a wish not to experience them, you still have this “feeling of comfort”. When you start practicing the SAS and replace your conceptions, then a “feeling of discomfort” will appear, in spite of the growing portion of enlightened perceptions. But from a certain level of saturation with enlightened perceptions and during the process of replacing the perceptions the feeling of discomfort will give way to the anticipation, delight and other enlightened perceptions. One hour outside the practice is recalled like more or less a smooth chain of impressions. One hour’s effort is like hacking through the jungle full of obstacles, overcoming them and making discoveries. Enlightened perceptions are rarely revealed, this is why a practitioner at an early stage of practice can use this feeling of comfort as a reason to think that he is “sleeping” in his usual distresses. Some people will find this life terrible, like a life of a traveller that seems to his old lady next door to be an awful nuisance and masochism.

Negative emotions are similar to a cancerous tumour. For example, a person who is used to feeling self-pity (SP) is destroying his life purposely and doing it without help, because he needs to have a reason to stand out with this special “suffering” in order to attract attention, to get compassion and to be comforted (this is what he wants so much). He needs more and more details to savour his misgivings, then he can consecrate you into the “mystery” of his “sufferings” with a good knowledge and with a sense of his superiority. The one who is successful in this race for the championship, is getting the aura of a martyr “distinguished by destiny” and thus strengthens his feeling of self importance.

The person prone to self-pity (pSP) cultivates a whole collection of wishes, which is similar to a cancerous tumour, he welcomes more and more the scenario leading to these “troubles” because the more negative emotions and sufferings he experiences the more he can support his pSP and FSI. It will enable him to occupy a higher ranking in the league of unhappy people, demanding (and receiving) the compassion from others, as well as consequential actions. His “troubles” (imagined and real) become his possessions, articles of trade to be exchanged for service and attention. As a result pSP destroys his life without anybody’s help, governed by weak directed actions (wda) and definite directed actions (dda). WDA are the actions accompanied by the thoughts “I am doing this”, “it is happening”, but if you ask this person or if he asks himself whether “he is doing this” or whether “it’s really happening», he will reply “no”, which means there is no clarity in his mind. With DDA the person admits he is doing it.

01-02 Eradication and suppression of negative emotions

It is easier to set a task of the negative emotions eradication than to start acting. Huge efforts are required and practicing has to be an integral part of life, otherwise dreams will not be realized. It’s not “devoting special times for practicing”, it is practicing directly in the day to day activities of your life. There are not many people, who shift from words to actions and persistently and positively continue to achieve the goals with anticipation and aspiration in spite of many ups and downs.

Negative emotions are eradicated through the effort, as if you extradite yourself from negative emotions like escaping from quicksand, you “recall” yourself in a state free from negative emotions and “jump into” enlightened perceptions. Lots of training is required to perfect this effort. See below the descriptions of different variants of thoughts and images which resonate with the effort. Negative emotion eradication is identified as an effort leading to the following:

1) there is no trace of negative emotions, even an insignificant trace,

2) maybe weak, but still clear enlightened perceptions appear.

Of course, getting this skill to “jump out” of negative emotions perfectly with enlightened perceptions following every time is not easy. In the beginning more often this state “nothing-is-happening” will appear but it is possible at least to recall the aspiration of enlightened perceptions after every effort of negative emotions eradication. “Perfect eradication” is the one which takes no longer than half a second. This period is not enough for negative emotions either to poison or to produce a tail of consequential negative emotions or to feed negative background.

In order to stay socially adequate quite often people just suppress negative emotions but it does not lead to the liberation from them but vice versa, negative emotions turn into a heavy negative background that masks enlightened perceptions with a very thick and solid toxic curtain. What’s the difference between negative emotions eradication and negative emotions suppression? The criteria is in the experiencing of enlightened perceptions at least for a brief moment while the usual pattern of negative emotions do not appear again. It is also possible to be orientated on the quality of your wish not to have negative emotions, if it’s accompanied with anticipation the probability of negative emotions eradication and not of suppression is quite high. If the wish is reasoned by fear, shame, FSI and other negative emotions, eradication will not take place.

If an attempt to eradicate negative emotions is followed by tiredness, fatigue, discontentment and enlightened perception flashes do not appear, it means that suppression took place and not eradication. By selecting suppression you choose not to refuse negative emotions. This could be caused by a fear of consequences or shame or other negative emotions, you do not show or feel your inner state of boiling anger and you just try to look calm. When this happens quite often negative emotions only get stronger, their centres multiply bringing you to stinking boiling anger, which sooner or later will lash out. One negative emotion can be forced out with another (e.g. irritation can be replaced with shame, fear or self-pity), but intoxication continues. Listed below are the acts that do not lead to the eradication of negative emotions but will only repeat in an infinite cycle:

1) Replacement of negative emotions with PEs. If you are irritated with your husband, you call your friend and she entertains you.

2) One negative emotion is forced out with another. Shame is replaced with aggression.

3) Self-cheating. You will still experience negative emotions, but you think that nobody can see them, persuading yourself, that negative emotions are gone. Thus you kill your own sincerity and lose the last chance to change.

4) An escape to boredom. Negative emotions are present, but you do not let yourself think about it, you read a book or watch a movie, you just force these negative thoughts out.

5) Adhesion. There is a thought “I experience negative emotions now”, there is also a weak wish to stop them but this wish is not strong enough to overcome your pattern to experience negative emotions and your mechanical wish to continue experiencing them.

6) Suppression. This is transforming negative emotions into negative background.

This list is of course not complete, if you like, you can add to it yourself.

One of the main obstacles of negative emotions eradication is self-cheating, when a person thinks he wants to eliminate negative emotions, but actually he doesn’t want to do it. This is exactly what makes it so complicated – it is your wish to have negative emotions without realizing it. When you have negative emotions you always wish to experience them and the stronger negative emotions the stronger is the wish to experience them. When you realize clearly that the negative emotion is as strong as you want it and not because it’s so hard to get rid of you will feel determination, anticipation and admiration. This clarity can also lead to a couple of new wishes, one being the wish to intensify the wish of enlightened perceptions and the other to make the negative emotions wish weaker. The wish to experience negative emotions is accompanied with the thoughts-excuses of the following type: “he provoked me”, “this is a fair negative emotion” and so on.

Eradication of negative emotions takes place as a result of such efforts that have reasons such as:

1) a wish to stop suffering

2) realising that it is impossible to live in this poisonous trash

3) aspiration to clarity and enlightened perceptions which are incompatible with negative emotions.

When you eradicate negative emotions you do not replace one with another because you will not be satisfied with a shallow effect as this task is not concluded by hiding negative emotions from people, but your goal is to stop negative emotions and experience enlightened perceptions. As a result of negative emotions eradication there will be some light but quite distinct feelings of being liberated, some feelings of joy, of peace, intensive calmness, anticipation and an interest for life. In the case of suppression it never happens.

If we examine the process of negative emotions eradication in detail, then the process is:

1) A very brief fixation of the thought that “there is a negative emotion”

2) A wish to stop a negative emotion

3) An effort of negative emotion eradication (that is a sharp and concentrated bolt of a wish)

4) A wish to experience enlightened perception

5) An effort to produce enlightened perception

6) Enlightened perception revealed

Only after the completion of item 6 it is possible to say that the eradication was successful. However a successful eradication does not mean the negative emotion will not appear again five seconds later, as it is a very strong pattern, but if you eliminate it persistently every time it happens, it’ll get weaker and weaker until disappears completely.

In the process of perfection the links of the chain become more and more usual and in the end they will happen automatically, as if on their own, like in the past negative emotions have been revealed. Thus the habit to experience unwelcome perceptions will be replaced with a pattern for welcome ones and in the end it’s possible to master the perfect eradication of negative emotions. After a while as you perfectly eradicate the negative emotion, it won’t appear anymore and this is how you achieve the complete eradication of this negative emotion. When you learn to ride a bicycle it’s really hard to keep your balance but once you’ve learnt you do not even think about it. The same is true for negative emotion eradication.

At an early stage of practicing negative emotions eradication it is good to support the practice with visual images and thoughts which resonate with this process of eradicating negative emotions. Every practitioner finds an image or images that works for them, it can be an image of a sunray which burns all negative emotions or an image of a strong torrent wiping out everything in its way or a blast blowing all obstructions to smithereens created by negative emotions or whatever. Here are some examples of images resonating with the effort of negative emotions eradication:

1) Intensifying efforts, like lifting a huge heavy stone from the bottom of a lake. First you brush off the silt, and then continually bring it towards the surface.

2) Every strong negative emotion is like a hurricane and in order to survive you have to furiously drive a post into the ground continuously. The wind cannot sway this post and with every gust the post gets more and more stable.

3) Establishing power in a rebellious country. Frenzy crowds of charlatans want to take this power away. If you relax just for a moment, the power will be lost. When stability is achieved new laws are announced; these are the laws of aspiration, peacefulness and joyfulness.

4. Uncompromising and gentle return of attention from negative emotions to recalling enlightened perceptions. It is as if I could not stare at something because of erratic and chaotic movement of my eyes and I had to shake myself all the time, slap my cheeks, settle my head, hide other things under the covers. But at some certain moment I learnt to look in one direction and delicately return my drifting glance.

5. Laser, like a thin but very powerful ray of light which rapidly and inevitably clears space.

6. Pounce of a tiger. With every exhalation I collect all my strength and throw myself into an enlightened perception, I leap into it and even if after one or two seconds of experiencing enlightened perception I am sucked out of it, I continue leaping in again. Soon the initial state changes and I am capable of staying in enlightened perception for 3 to 5 seconds.

01-03 Initial steps in investigation and eradication of negative emotions

One of the techniques to shatter the stability of the pattern to experience negative emotions in a certain situation is the practice of recurring replacement of interpretations. If at this moment you feel sad because of loneliness, try to concentrate on the following thoughts: “how good it is to stay alone for some time on your own, not to pretend to be somebody else, not having to prove anything to anybody, not to meet somebody’s expectations and rules and observe the morals; to have time to ponder, relax, to focus on my feelings and fantasies. All the time there are so many people around but now I can use this moment to enjoy being alone”. As a result you will notice that negative emotions are weakened. Now change your interpretation and think: “if there was a handsome guy next to me, I could attract his attention, it would be interesting to both of us, I could touch him and experience the erotic delight. Some people are happy together, but I am lonely, have nobody to talk to, have nobody to be in love with”. As a result there appears a painful feeling of loneliness and other negative emotions strengthen also. Thus after “swinging” between these two interpretations you will get an interesting experience that a negative emotion depends on the interpretation of the situation, not on the situation itself. Replacement of interpretations is not the way of liberation from negative emotions, it only the first step. Firstly, the strength of the pattern to experience negative emotions, which has been repeated thousand times before, is deeper than any interpretations and secondly, while you replace the interpretations, negative emotion is living, developing, poisoning and producing new negative emotions. Such recurring replacement of interpretations gives only a minimum experience of weakening negative emotions, but still it strengthens the understanding that it is possible to influence negative emotions independently of the situation. The false concept that emotions are entirely determined by the situation makes you helpless, because it is not often you can change the situation and as a result you do not see any way out. In one case you will be a pessimist buried in negative emotions, in the other you are a revolutionary trying to change the circumstances to those that do not lead to negative emotions, which is impossible as negative emotions will be replaced by others.

If both interpretations are equally possible, why not to choose and strengthen the one that weakens negative emotions and allows you to be in a more attractive state? The replacement of unwelcome interpretations with pleasant ones is a minimum task which enables you to shatter in a small degree the pattern of immediate falling into the strong negative emotions.

It is very significant that while practicing you accumulate the experience when enlightened perceptions revealing themselves. Those moments that you actually lived in enlightened perceptions accumulate and this happens not “figuratively” but in the direct reality and sooner (or alas, later) it leads to a break-through and you feel a spontaneous relief from eradicating negative emotions. The enlightened perceptions that you are familiar with become brighter and more stable and new enlightened perceptions are revealed. If there are such negative emotions that you feel sorry to part with (usually this is sadness, self-pity, pity to the others, jealousy, but sometimes it can be an aggression, negative attitude), then you can get rid of those that you feel obviously unwelcome and causing illness.

This pattern of experiencing the negative emotions is intensified by hundred thousand repetitions, this is why they can come back a few seconds later after their eradication. Strengthen your firm determination and aspiration to achieve your goal no matter what and to overpower this habit that is killing you. You will need lots of effort for a complete eradication from negative emotions but you immediately get results in the form of enlightened perception flashes following each successful effort. This experience accumulates and intensifies the effectiveness of your practice and your fullness of life.

Attacking one separate negative emotion is a very effective technique. You choose the most frequently revealing negative emotion, for example dissatisfaction, and take a decision not to allow it to exist in you for longer than a second or two during the nearest three days (three hours, an hour). Mixed with other negative emotions, dissatisfaction is revealed every time and sometimes it’s not easy to identify it, to say nothing of eradicating it for only a second. This is why you have to watch yourself every (!) second and eradication from one exact negative emotion becomes a massive attack of many others. Even one hour of such practice is very hard, as if you are running in a marathon, and if you do not have this feeling, it means you are self-cheating, wishing is what you are thinking is really happening, but in reality there is no total eradication of dissatisfaction (you also watch that you have enlightened perception flashes as they are a sign of successful negative emotion eradication). During these attacks you will form and intensify the pattern of immediate negative emotion eradication and achieve a significant progress in the speed and clarity of such eradication. The eradication from the next negative emotion will be much easier compared to your first experience.

Another significant result is achieved through a thorough control of perceptions in order to discover and eradicate all negative emotions that are due for elimination. Such control is possible only if I am aware (that is I fix in my Inner Dialogue) of everything what is happening to me. This way I create a pattern of being attentive to perceptions and get an experience of joyfulness from attention. There is a massive difference between a simple life when you just do something and a life when you are aware of revealing perceptions. The thorough control leads to a beginning of a rapid process of perceptions segregation, which also leads to a state of creativity. There will appear new and captivating ideas, discoveries, unexpected aspects of enlightened perceptions and a sensation of special profoundness in your life is revealed, as if a valve opens and lets the feeling of fullness pour in. Written record becomes joyful as well.

Negative emotions always have visual expression (either brightly evident or hardly noticeable to an inexperienced person), like a weak sigh, a light grimace, an unnoticeable gesture, a specific change in the voice – let us call these “bodily signs of negative emotions”. Nearly all facial expressions, gestures and intonations are merged completely with bodily signs of negative emotion. Control of your bodily signs of negative emotion enables you to identify slipping negative emotions better and to re-live the situation while eradicating negative emotions and clearing the incidental negative emotions. Controlling facial expressions, voice and gestures is much easier than controlling negative emotions, this is why identifying and eradicating bodily signs of negative emotion is helpful to practice. If you missed a negative emotion and “woke up” when it already matured and blended with others then you must immediately get rid of the bodily sign negative emotion and after that the negative emotion. Purge yourself, do not stop half way, eradicate even the smallest flash of negative emotions until you achieve the state of “nothing-is-happening” as the minimum or of enlightened perceptions as the maximum.

The freedom from negative emotions leads to clarity and liberation from false concepts. If you were raped, it can be painful and unpleasant (not necessarily quite right, because if you give the rapist a condom and remember, that it’s not so easy to find an erect and well moving penis to be just “shagged” without being in a “relationship”, then you can get pleasure as intensive as you like), but there is NOTHING “psychologically traumatic” in it, as it depends only on you whether you experience negative emotions or not. When you break your arm, the pain is incomparably stronger, than the unpleasant feelings when raped. Then why is the broken arm not a reason to commit a suicide? Why are there no clubs for psychological help for those that have broken an arm? Because it is not common to experience strong negative emotions from broken arms as it is not considered to be “terrible” and “shameful” while it is accepted to be for rapes. The penis was forced against the will into the vagina and this is what happened but very significant and enormous importance is attributed to it which is elementary hypocrisy and stupidity. After you have broken your arm you’ll have to have you arm in a plaster cast for two months then exercise your joints, have injections to prevent tetanus and so on, whereas after a vicious rape all you have to do is to apply miramistin or silverized colloidal solution for disinfection, take measures against pregnancy, and as for bruises they will disappear ten times sooner than a broken finger recovers. Besides, if you are not captured by paralyzing negative emotions, it is possible to avoid rape or bring to the minimum the unwelcome effects (see “questions and answers” – 0059).

Having realized that negative emotions eat you away in the most direct meaning of the word, you can use the practice of “remembering that negative emotions are toxic”. The moment when negative emotion appears you say either loudly or under your breath “Poison!” “I do not want to experience that!” It allows you to shudder and mobilize, to remember your attitude towards negative emotions, to weaken the mechanical wish to feel negative. Along with that it slows down the inner parasitic dialogue which supports negative emotions and produces their multiple flashes. There are no small things in eradicating negative emotions! Even the most “insignificant” negative emotion is strongly toxic and when you experience enlightened perception you can see that clearly but there is no clarity when you do not have enlightened perceptions. The smallest shade of negative emotion instantly and greatly weakens enlightened perception. Besides, a weak negative emotion, for example a brief negative attitude (“NA”) or negative energy state (“NES”) (or in other words “poor physical state of health”, inertia, apathy, “nothing-is-happening”) can be an above-the-water part of a giant iceberg of negative background. Eliminate this part and the submerged part will ascend and become accessible for investigation and then eradication.

“Negative attitudes” are weak negative emotions, sometimes they are very faint, short and not always followed by definitely clear negative emotions. For example, there may be enough of a brief glance at an unpleasant face or at just any face and in an instant you feel hostility, disapproval or rejection. While practicing attentiveness you will discover that you are penetrated every day by flocks of NAs, thousands of them. The most effective technique to eliminate these flocks is emotional polish and by concentrating on enlightened perceptions.

Further I will sometimes call this ensemble of negative emotion, negative energy state, negative background and negative attitude as “four Ns” or “4Ns”, they are nothing but varieties of negative emotions, this is why more often I label them with a generalized term “negative emotions”.

It usually doesn’t even come into people’s minds that negative energy state can be eliminated. This idea is interpreted as revolutionary. It is thought that dullness and inertia are an integral part of a personality, they are caused by “objective” reasons and all we can do is interrupt them by entertainment, orgasms, food and sleep. But negative energy state can be eliminated like any other unwelcome state. The first step is to identify the negative energy state as a separate perception and realize: “there is inertia” or “there is a “nothing-is-happening”. Then it becomes possible to investigate this state, have a precisely directed wish “not to experience this state” and make the effort to eradicate it.

Let me introduce the term “distress” and use it to denote any group of negative emotions, negative background, negative energy state, negative attitude, of false concepts and mechanical wishes (see corresponding chapters).

Position of an unbiased judge: imagine you are judging the conflict of two people (you are one of them) and you say: “stop talking immediately, make neutral faces, and after that we will sort it out”. Get rid of the confidence in negative emotions “justice”, stop boiling over nothing, because very often you assess your negative emotions as “fair” and negative emotions eradication as an agreement with “unfairness”. This is what you tell yourself: “I will analyze the situation and make a decision, but I want to consider and resolve this when sober and not intoxicated by negative emotions which block the capability to think clearly”. Remember that any negative emotions are intoxicating your body with poison and obstruct the capability to react effectively, think logically, be exquisite, experience joyful wishes. This is why they should be eradicated unconditionally and unquestionably.

To intensify the wish of liberation from negative emotions it is good to list all unwelcome consequences of experiencing negative emotions, that is the consequences you do not want to have. It is also worthwhile to list the actions decreasing the wish of negative emotions eradication. These are the following:

1) suppression of joyful wishes

2) complying with mechanical concepts: various “must”, “should”, “it is important”…

3) over eating

4) sleeping in or chronic lack of sleep

5) frequent orgasms (in average it is more than one series of orgasms in 2 to 3 weeks)

6) contentment and self-contentment

Periods of determined and persistent efforts of negative emotions eradication can be replaced by periods of apathy and impotence, but when you again return to practicing, you discover that you it is easier in some aspects and this is the result of your earlier efforts. What has to be done in these periods of “kickback” and depression? (depression we identify as a state, when the wish to feel distress is much stronger that the wish to experience enlightened perceptions).

1) Minimum that you can do is to investigate your distress: watch, record in writing, analyze, experiment, look for patterns). Investigation intrudes into the process of kickback and changes its colours and now you are not the one which gave up, but the one who investigates and watches. It is a significant difference in how you will feel.

2) You can change other habits. I call it “conservative practices». The habit of smoking, drinking alcohol, using words-parasites, dangling you leg, frowning, cutting bread with the left hand… there are lots of habits, both unwelcome and indifferent to you. Though the change of habits does not require a high degree of concentration and persistency as for the negative emotions eradication, it still increases the effectiveness of negative emotions elimination.

An extract from Skvo’s records about quitting smoking: “the meaning of quitting smoking is not the beginning of a healthy life style, at this stage I do not think of this as a “bonus”. Smoking presents a very strong mechanical habit. Unrealized, the wish to smoke drags a whole pile of negative emotions and the degree of this distress is so high that it encourages the maximum effectiveness of practising. It is not worthwhile to mitigate the conditions of practicing because the result will be uncertain and you will not be able to perfect your effort and use it in the “battle”. Of course I can go to the woods, do my running exercises there, read, have sex and “stop” smoking, but as soon as I see a kiosk selling tobacco or a friend who is enjoying a fragrant cigarette and I will give up again, which means that the effort of the habit eradication is not practiced right. My task is not concluded in escaping the conditions favourable for my habit to “sleep”, my goal is courageously to face it and eradicate it every time it is revealed. In this struggle I can “hardface” my effort, “sharpen” it to the perfection and use it in the battle with negative emotions.

A powerful effort is required in order to eradicate a negative emotion. It is not an easy task to exercise it but it is very interesting because I eliminate what I do not want to experience and I generate what I wish. It changes me radically.

01-04 The practice of recurring perception of negative emotions

The practice of “recurring perceptions” (RP) is especially effective. This is a multiple re-experiencing and eradication of negative emotions. Again and again you can create or recall (e.g. with the help of a thought which plays a role as a trigger) a situation where you usually experience a negative emotion. As soon as this negative emotion appears you immediately eliminate it, after that you generate it again and again get rid of it and carry on until you have the power to do it and when you have no more strength for this exercise, learn how to make super efforts while experiencing enthusiasm, anticipation and aspiration. If, for example, after 50 cycles no more negative emotions appear, it means that the situation is 100% complete. Next time the automatic appearing of negative emotion will be weaker and much easier for eradication. Due to this practice the pattern of negative emotion appearing is quickly burnt and becomes clear that the alternative whether to experience the negative emotions or not depends totally on your wish and persistence.

Recurring perception of negative emotions that are triggered by memories present a wonderful opportunity for eradicating flat and dense negative background because many ingredients of this negative background take their roots in the events of either recent or distant past. For example, you were raped or there was an attempt to rape you or your “loving and caring” parents beat and abused you or you experienced a very strong sense of guilt or shame and so on. The negative emotions suppressed at that time formed a dense negative background which exists now. There is a practice of emotional polish (see below) to eradicate negative background but recurring perception of those memories can change and remedy much. Those memories can be fuzzy and fragmented because you tried to forget them, this is why you first have to recall all the details. Record every small detail you can remember. If re-experiencing leads to new small fragmented memories add them to your records. Re-play the event in your memory from the beginning to the end, try intensively to feel what you were feeling at that time no matter what it was: fear, terror, disgrace, shame, re-experience what had happened to you. All these years you have been suppressing the memories of the event trying to protect yourself from the negative emotions but now you have to reverse the task to re-experience them to their maximum and completely eradicate them. Imagine that you experience it as a person you are today, you yourself have chosen to do it in order to achieve the highest quality of eradicating negative emotion. When you are sure that the memory of the situation does not trigger the negative emotions any more or you are capable of eradicating them completely, you will realize that the situation itself does not “cause” negative emotions, the cause is a pattern of feelings and sometimes the wish to experience negative emotions. But it is your choice whether to feel negative or not.

If right now you have this joyful wish to exercise negative emotions eradication but your situation does not involve any negative emotions at the moment you can use your imagination. The mechanism that reveals negative emotions can be triggered by not only real but also fictitious or recalled situations. For example, if you want to work with jealousy, imagine your boy-friend hugging another girl and support this fantasy with a thought: “I do not know who he is with and where. I think that he is at work, but if he wants to have sex with some other girl, he can do it at the time, when I am thinking that he is working.” There is no difference between the negative emotions appearing as a result of an actual or an imaginary situation and this allows use of imagination for the practice of recurring perception.

01-05 Other practices of the negative emotions eradication

Practice of limited total control (LTC): During five or ten minutes you control every (!) second for even a smidgen of a negative emotion could not slip in without immediate eradication. LTC enables to acquire the following experience:

1) your efforts are directed to the total eradication of all negative emotions regardless of what they are;

2) finding and eradicating even of the weakest negative emotions;

3) you are in a higher quality state of freedom from negative emotions than usual;

4) consolidation, stretching time, more intensive and interesting life;

Limited Total Control is the concentration of all your power, overexcitement and complete mobilization. Start with a short period of one minute. If I plan to live free from negative emotions for a whole hour but experience them again and again without immediate eradication, I will be defeated, my aspiration will decrease and my skepticism will grow. If I am going to practice only one minute and achieve success, it is already a victory and I will obtain the experience of higher than usual freedom from negative emotions and the wish to carry on with my practice.

During the Limited Total Control exercise eliminate negative emotions as if this is your last battle and you have no right to be defeated. If you like you can scream under your breath or strain your muscles or bite hard on your finger or do whatever you like but do not give up and do not stop eradicating negative emotions. Turn yourself inside out as soon as you feel a negative emotion is approaching. The pattern should be broken at any price and later you will learn to eradicate negative emotions without these strange gestures, screams and so on.

The Practice of situation control (SC) is concluded in splitting your day into typical situations that trigger corresponding negative emotions and negative background. When you are entering the doorway of your apartment block you feel an aversion due to the smell of rats, when you are going to work, you are worried by the management’s opinions, etc. Achieve at least one particular success; occupy at least one springboard that you are going to keep unavailable for negative emotions. You will have ups and downs, disappointments and discoveries, but your purges from negative emotions in other situations will be a bit easier. You are different from what you have been, you have changed because now “you” are nothing else but an ensemble of perceptions in this particular place. You do not live your previous life because you replaced the perceptions and if you wish you can advance in the change. This is a result of your joyful wish, persistence and determination in the realization of this change.

You have at your disposal a simple and effective technique of achieving perceptions that you welcome and in eliminating unwelcome ones. The smell of rats in the doorway turns into an “enlightened factor” (“EF”) which means that the perception of the doorway will resonate with an enlightened perception. And the higher the amount of enlightened perceptions among all other perceptions, the greater the EB.

EB is like a trigger or a switch that leads to the enlightened perceptions (especially if there is the wish to experience enlightened perceptions). It can be anything – the view of an angry sea, of enormous mountains, animals, plants, people, phrases, melodies, etc. For example, you are looking at the ocean and you experience enlightened perception. Or a big beetle is flying over you, bugging you and landing on you and suddenly it does not add to your enlightened perception, but as if a curtain of dullness breaks and a dam bursts, there appears an amazing resonating of two perceptions and you experience a bright affection towards this beetle, though you have always been indifferent to beetles or even did not like them. From this moment the sight of a flying beetle becomes an enlightened perception for you.

There is a mechanism of transferring enlightened perceptions, when one EB for one enlightened perception becomes an EB for another enlightened perception.

I recommend that a list of all EBs is written, such recording will reinforce their power.

Details are very significant for the description of EB, they have a quality of resonating, but it’s not easy to identify them in a mass of other memories, I advise to describe everything and later sort out what is important. For example, there is an enlightened perception, which is a memory of you sitting with snouts on a couch, experiencing an enlightened perception. While describing this situation you suddenly discover that there is one very significant detail: a picture of small brown elephants on a couch cover. You cannot explain it logically, this is why at first you even wanted to miss this element in your description as it’s not important.

Anything can be an EB: a stupid aggressive man, mud in the street, a crowded train, a billboard, a cigarette butt in the toilet, whatever. The more perfect you are in eradicating distresses, the more perceptions enlarge your EB. Before you were bored of being idle on a train, now you are busy every minute with the recording in your mind, with emotional polish, with expressing your wishes, investigating concepts, eliminating negative emotion, etc. In a month you suddenly discover, that the perception of the uncomfortable and crowded train is intertwined so closely with the efforts and enlightened perceptions that it became an EB. If before, looking at the boring and grey faces you experienced NA, then after perfect eradicating NA those boring people became EB for you.

You always “know” what is happening outside the walls of your home or office, there are boring colleagues or neighbours that are busy with their boring work or other boring tasks. But you also know that somewhere outside your walls there is Hedgehoggie, Bodhi, Fyord and other practitioners and an ocean with a smooth surface and bright stunning mountain tops. But by the old pattern you support your imagination of what you are used to imagining, not what is EB.

I recommend that you keep detailed investigation-reports of your practice of replacing perceptions, which will be an explicit diary with the descriptions of your battle. It is necessary to blend with a note-pad and pen. What were you doing, what was the result, what was not successful, what discoveries and interesting observations have you made, what intensity of negative emotions and enlightened perceptions did you have in the process of your efforts, etc., see details in the chapter “Descriptions and recordings”. For example, you can mark negative emotions with different symbols to designate negative emotions, which were eradicated immediately or in 2 to 5 seconds, or were not eradicated (if the negative emotion was longer than five seconds).

Written recording of the experience will become a counter-balance to your skeptical thoughts and an undeniable proof of the fact that you are capable to solve these tasks. Your diary will contain your personal information unlikely to be read by anybody else (others can begin feeling aggressive towards you), this is why in order to be sincere and up to the maximum keep your records protected by passwords, e.g. in MS Word. Your password should meet the following requirements: not less than 10 characters, avoid simple words, use capital letters, digits and special symbols like @#$%^&*.

Investigation of specific negative emotions and their classification contributes to a more efficient differentiation and eradication of negative emotions.

Let us have a good look at irritation. Irritation and displeasure are very appropriate for the training ground to exercise efforts, because they reveal frequently, clearly and distinctly and do not have a strong conceptual support as for example jealousy or pity. (Negative attitude, displeasure, irritation, aggression and hatred are the same negative emotion of different intensity, that is why a person with “just” a negative attitude is a person who can reveal hatred at any moment).

Every particular kind of irritation can be related with a definite category and after that eradicated. With this it is impossible to achieve a perfect eradication (that is from half a second to a second), this is why it is worthwhile to classify negative emotions only during the initial period when there is no good clarity of their character. When the speed of a certain negative emotion eradication is increased and it takes from two to three seconds to get rid of it, the categorizing of the emotion will have no efficiency any more. This link of the chain can be now thrown away without any damage, but in the beginning this classification of negative emotions has an advantage because in order to identify the category and the quality of a negative emotion you have to study very attentively all its aspects. This way you learn to identify this negative emotion in your everyday life, which is a necessary condition of its eradication.

For example, you can classify all the aspects of irritation according to the situational patterns:

1) unwelcome behaviour from other people

2) you are not happy with your own behaviour

3) undesirable combination of circumstances

4) undesirable “behaviour” of everything

5) general irritation from “the world that surrounds you”

It’s not so important to be very precise in the description of a situation triggering irritation because elimination of it in one situation leads to developing the capability to notice and eliminate irritation in all other situations.

It is good to complete the act of negative emotion eradication with a firm decision to carry on the exercise of eliminating negative emotion to triumph and the confidence that enlightened perceptions will appear and fill your life.

One more method of dividing emotions into two categories is based on the difference of how they are revealed, recorded and investigated. One emotion is decreasing and vanishing, another is increasing, laminating and becomes deeper. We can conditionally call them “negative” or “positive” according to the first or second type. It is interesting that the emotions, which I identified earlier as “negative”, proved to be also negative in accordance with these categories. Positive emotions act with ambiguity. Some of them also clear away, especially opposites of negative emotions (e.g. “grieving over a loss – joy of possession”). Others start forming layers, which means, that earlier you could only see in the process only one PE, now you are capable to differentiate a number of them. Some of them vanish or there appears a wish to eradicate them, others on the contrary become stronger and there appears a wish to experience them more often and gradually enlightened perceptions start revealing as a result of such a purge. I want to attract your attention that it is impossible to use this quality of emotions for eradication of negative emotions, because the negative emotion will generate many new negative emotions and intensify the negative background during the period necessary for you to watch this negative emotion. As a result it will not be eradicated, but will be replaced by another perception, but the replacement of perceptions takes place in any case and as we can see, it does not lead to negative emotion eradication. Usually it is the practice of those who are self-cheating and actually do not want to refuse from the negative emotion.

It is very effective to match different trends of practices, though not in accordance with a schedule plucked from anywhere, but by your interests and a joyful wish. It’s wrong to think: “first I will eradicate negative emotion and after that I will deal with my wishes and concepts”. Distresses are very closely interweaved and you never know in advance when and where a rip is going to happen, when it does happen it looks like when you pull a thread, it affects not only the spot where you pull, but the material is affected over the whole width. When liberation is achieved in one aspect it affects the whole spectrum of perceptions and quite often during the progress in negative emotions eradication there is the realisation that some concepts are false. The book has a consistency and sequence of paragraphs, it cannot be written otherwise, but in practice your joyful wishes should be guiding you.

In the result of my investigation of practitioners I am of the opinion that people with an inclination to be aggressive have significantly less chances than those who usually feel self-pity (SP). An impudent, hot-tempered and aggressive person is much less capable of investigating his own perceptions than one with SP. The real battle with aggression starts only when you get rid of even its weakest forms like faint irritation and dissatisfaction. The only way to get a chance to eradicate aggression is to have total control of even a trace of dissatisfaction or of a negative attitude and every minute record your condition (every minute estimate from a scale of 1 to 10 for dissatisfaction intensity). Aggression in any form is a horrible infection and the worst form of a disease from negative emotions and you will have to fight desperately for every minute of your life if you want to defeat aggression. While you experience aggression nothing is possible for you – no development, no practice, no spiritual quest.

It is quite easy to achieve an eradication of negative emotions when you have a “couch practice”, that is the practice in comparatively comfortable conditions when there are no strong negative triggers and you are surrounded by nice people or you live in the countryside and do not interact with unhappy people, etc. But more often the lengthy couch practice leads to a crisis, it is especially possible to happen at the beginning of practice when you are not used to experiencing enlightened perceptions. This word “crisis” means a state that has no noticeable distresses, but on the other hand there are also no radiant enlightened perceptions. It is not clear what way to advance. The feeling that “nothing-is-happening” intensifies, the enthusiasm and anticipation decrease to a low critical level. In this situation it is necessary to resort to the “active quest” which enables you to reveal thick layers of negative emotions and negative background as they could not be revealed without corresponding triggers. It also permits to exercise eradication of negative emotions in complicated and very complicated situations, when the automatic mechanism of a reaction is especially difficult for eradication. For the realization of the active quest it’s worthwhile to make “social experiments” (SE). In these experiments you place yourself in the position of being attacked by other people.

But it is also good to think over retreat strategies, variants of self-defense, ways of manipulating by surrounding mechanisms (including people’s behavioral mechanisms) in order to avoid unwelcome consequences of people’s negative attitude. This is why it is particularly desirable to observe the law and have a chance to be protected by legal systems in difficult cases.

Following are examples of simple SE:

*) go to the shop and pay the purchase price with the smallest denomination of coins. By law the shop assistant has to accept any money as it is the legal tender. Possible negative emotion of the practitioner is the fear of aggression from the shop assistant and other customers.

*) on public transport do not offer your seat to less fortunate. Possible negative emotion of the practitioner is the fear of aggression and shame.

*) wear dirty clothes and go begging in the underground. Possible negative emotion is shame.

*) play the role of a fool in the company of people you do not know. Possible negative emotion is the feeling of inferiority, resentment and indignation.

Many readers of my book will react negatively to the idea of making such SE. They believe this way the practitioners, along with exercising in negative emotions elimination, “provoke” and add to other people’s negative emotions. But my assumptions are the following:

1) it is impossible to provoke negative emotions in anybody. People choose themselves to experience negative emotions and do not want to get rid of them. To receive proof in it I recommend that you tell any person (either the first you see or your good friend) you have a method to stop experiencing negative emotions and ask him whether he wants to achieve it. In 90% of the cases you will have a negative response and will be given a lecture, that “without negative emotions people become brain dead”. The other 10% will partially agree that they wouldn’t like to experience negative emotions. Tell them about the PDP and ask them in a couple of days what they have done. Let them tell you in detail what they were doing, what was successful and unsuccessful, what discoveries and observations they had, were there any joyful wishes, etc. Absolute silence will be the response, nobody will bother to lift a finger. This is the proof that nobody wants to be free from negative emotions, but with a very rare exception.

(Try to “provoke” negative emotions in a “snout”, in a person who wants to eradicate negative emotions perfectly, and persistently exercises it, and you will see that you cannot do anything to achieve this task, even if you insult him, cuss him, threaten him, fight with him, etc.)

2) people ALWAYS have constant negative emotions or negative background, if they did not experience them at a certain moment they would immediately have radiant enlightened perceptions. So what’s the difference whether you or another customer cause the shop assistant’s aggression? Whether the shop assistant feels bored or angry? More than that, many people prefer the irritation and aggression to the boredom.

3) in these experiments the practitioner does not have a wish to provoke negative emotions in other people. He is just using the knowledge of the mechanisms that people cultivate and he knows what behaviour triggers a negative reaction. But if suddenly some person smiles back at you instead of stereotype irritation, and is at least friendly, then the practitioner will definitely feel better and interested in this person (even in spite of a failed SE).

The practice of emotional polish (EmP) is extremely effective for eradication of negative background and small negative emotions. The unique peculiarity of this practice consists of helping to clear the background that you are not even aware of at a given moment. You know it is there only because at this given moment you do not experience any enlightened perceptions. EmP means you make the effort of negative emotions eradication even though you are not aware of any negative emotions. You already have the experience of negative emotions eradication and it’s not difficult for you to generate these efforts when you do not notice negative emotions. You can have a schedule of EmP (e.g. 10 minutes of continuous EmP) or link it to certain events (e.g. a glance of a passer-by, because it’s highly possible there will be a small splash of a NA) and so on.

I advise you to think of EmP as cleaning your teeth or as necessary precautions. Until you feel the continuous enlightened background, the EmP practice is effective and never too much.

In order to be fully concentrate on EmP it is good to support it with visual images and to have the practice of intensive emotional polish (IEP):

1) An image of a flood of light is created with every inhale. This light is rising from your lower part of stomach into the centre of your chest. The image of the flood should be “tangible” and “syrupy”, dense and radiant.

2) With every exhale the effort is generated to eliminate all perceptions without any differentiation. It is the image of a powerful explosion of light from the centre of your chest, which devastates everything in its path.

3) To ease the fixation, it is worthwhile dividing intensive emotional polish into acts, series and cycles. Act is one process of intensive emotional polish for inhale and exhale. The series includes a few acts without breaks (not less than 50 is recommended). Cycle includes a few series with breaks in between cycles (not less than 10 per day recommended). If you use beads of a certain length, it will help you to keep your concentration and not to count.

4) I recommend that every cycle is completed with a written record of your observations on the basis of what you wrote during intensive emotional polish.

5) You can have as many cycles a day as you like.

Eradication of negative emotion while you are sleeping is possible, it is not difficult and doesn’t require you to be able to have lucid dreams. It is enough to practice sincerely and persistently when you do not sleep, and this pattern of negative emotions eradication will develop and automatically work when you dream. The deeper this practice penetrates your automatic dreams, the higher the level of the dreams’ lucidity which leads to a higher probability that you will get the experience of lucid dreams (LD) and that they will be multiple and very interesting because:

1) you will have a chance to investigate an extensively broader and versatile world than the world of perceptions when you are not sleeping,

2) in lucid dreams it is much easier to experience radiant and various enlightened perceptions. See the corresponding chapter for details.

The side effect of negative emotions eradication is in your growing capability to see negative emotions in other people. It will be unusually clear and easy to see negative emotions as if they are screaming with all their lungs. You will see people as an open book describing all emotions. People will not be able to hide the fact that they experience negative emotions as they reveal themselves even in the smallest habits, in gestures, pitches of the voice, a grimace or words. What’s more surprising, they will strongly object that they experience negative emotions now and looking at them you will clearly realize what horrible mix of insincerity and dullness these people live with.

It is good to rid yourself of a fear of “unfavourable conditions”. “Unfavourable” is the situation when you still have not formed the pattern of removing the negative emotions and experiencing enlightened perceptions. If you are ready to eradicate negative emotions and fight to achieve enlightened perceptions in any situation then instead of spasmodic fears and frantic escapes you will happily wish to change the circumstances which lead, as experience proves, to a very interesting development.

Sliding into a dark state of the kind “nothing-is-happening” is already easier to compare than earlier, if you keep being determined and persistent in achieving your goal. I will call this state a “happiness from a nil result”. This is a happiness of persistence and clarity, that you will not give up even in spite of a temporary absence of enlightened perceptions.

There are three key moments in the process of perception eradication:

1) separate out the perception and identify it as unwelcome (in all the groups of perceptions) because you have a wish not to experience it;

2) stop associating the perception with “me” and “my” and start to consider it as a separate and unwelcome perception;

3) make an effort and eradicate the unwelcome perception.

The first moment is very simple. The third seems the most complicated at a first glance but actually you already have the experience of making efforts in the conflict of wishes. These efforts are joyful and anticipated when you are confident that “you” want it and this is in “your” interests, then the obstructing wish is removed from the conceptual identification of “mine” and is easily surmounted. Same in practicing, you shift the unwelcome perception out from the protective “me” concept shield, and the efforts of its eradication become more effective. When you achieve clarity in this, it will allow you to wish to investigate this process and seek for the new effective techniques to stop the association of the unwelcome perception with “me”.

01-06 The practice of returning attention (RA)

One more resonating description of an effort to eradicate negative emotions is the “recurring attention” (“RA”), and correspondingly the practice is called “the practice of recurring attention”. I find it right to use this phrase “recurring attention” for the beginning to describe the effort of negative emotions eradication because the word “attention” has been integrated in our language exceptionally well, the same with the notion of the “past”. Even a superficial analysis will be enough to realize that any perception, no matter what it is, always exists only now and the “past” is just a word, denoting a group of thoughts including the word “was”. It is the same with the word “attention”. When I say “I paid attention to the cow”, it means that the perception of the cow was especially strong and stable in that place.

Here I will also give the definition of the word “concentration”, which is often used together with the word “attention”. If there are ten different perceptions (visual perception of a few things, thoughts, emotions) during a certain period of time at a certain place and another same period of time – only five perceptions, then I say “I intensified my attention on a chosen object”, or in short “concentrated on it”. Thus the word “concentration” can be given a definite meaning good for use because quite often there appears a wish to grasp only a limited number of perceptions at a given moment. For example, perceive only enlightened perceptions or a discussion on some topic. If you try to concentrate on some perception, but instead you are more attracted to another (e.g. by mechanical habit), we say, that your attention “is captured”. But if there is a mixture of various perceptions instead of concentration on one you want, we then say, that your attention is “scattered”.

The practice of RA consists of “bringing back” your attention if it is captured by some chaotic diversions (either negative emotions or mechanical wishes or a mechanical inner dialogue or different visual perceptions, etc.). Your attention is “diverted from the object” and after that either “leave” it free or direct it to some welcome perception. If we talk about the language of perceptions the practice of RA consists of replacing one perception with another, but this replacement with the help of your imagination, that is the imaginative language of “seizures” and “returns”, can be very effective in exercising the pattern of perception replacements.

Mechanical thoughts steal your attention with a sharp and short strike, like a seagull catching a fish, this is why it is good to counteract with a swift and concentrated effort. Negative emotions hijack your attention in a violent act, like a shark rips apart a piece of meat, so it’s good to counteract with a powerful and fierce effort. Mechanical wishes steal your attention in a quiet manner, not always rapidly, but confidently, like Rome regiments laid siege to Carthage, this is why it is good to counteract with an tough and enduring effort equal to an elephant.

Here is an example of recording perceptions in the practice of RA.

*) I stop any activity, I sit and do not do anything, eradicate Inner Dialogue and negative emotions

*) a state of clarity appears

*) the state of clarity clouds over and disperses

*) the state of dullness ensues

*) crossroads: whether to get rid of dullness and return to the clarity or give up. Let us concede, that the mechanical wish of dullness outweighs the wish of enlightened perceptions

*) a spasmodic wish of impressions follows to suppress dullness

*) you start the quest of an object for your attention to adhere to

*) an object is found, your attention is adhered to it

*) dullness is suppressed, satisfaction and interest will come

*) in a certain period of time satiety ensues, tiredness, dissatisfaction, loss of interest. The state of dullness returns.

*) again the mechanical wish of dullness outweighs the wish of enlightened perceptions

*) the mechanical wish of new impressions follows to alleviate dullness

*) a new object for your attention is re-discovered

*) the wish to eradicate the enclosed circle “dullness – search of impressions – satisfaction – satiety – tiredness” overpowers the wish to maintain it, and the effort is made to return the attention. The attention is taken from the object and is either freed or directed to an enlightened factor (a perception-trigger, associated with enlightened perception).

*) regret for the loss of impressions will appear.

*) I eradicate regret

*) the usual pattern tries to reoccur and the dullness tries to strengthen

*) I eradicate dullness, let us concede that it is done with in and out success

*) the spasmodic thirst for impressions reoccurs again and again

*) I continue patiently to return my attention again and again in spite of the regret for the loss of my impressions, which is also eradicated

*) after a number of such cycles there comes a strong tiredness, but it is a good and healthy fatigue

*) an enlightened background comes and intensifies

*) there appears a feeling of overflowing expansion in your chest

*) states of dullness and clarity change kaleidoscopically, dullness can be replaced with a feeling of an amazing profoundness and freshness and vice versa

*) intensive and “swelling” feelings lead to the need to “rest”

*) I record that the “wish to have a rest” is a mechanical wish to return to the usual state of dispersed attention and dullness

*) there appears a persistency directed to overcome the wish “to have a rest” and so on.

Eradication of the mechanical wish of impressions (MWI) is more complicated when this urge is stronger and the stronger it is, the more intensive and the more usual the background of dullness and boredom builds. Being a negative dominant it is quite often not even realized. Redirecting your attention from MWI is extremely difficult. It extracts all your strength, sometimes you even have despicable “convulsions” and it only once again proves how much you are hooked on these impressions and try to use them to suppress the negative background. In the beginning of Recurring Attention practice even one or two hours of idleness (simply sitting or lying on the couch) is a real torture like colliding with the powerful negative background head on. I recommend that from time to time while practicing Recurring Attention you make records of perceptions as described above. That will allow you to achieve clarity in the activities and track results. When you compare your records and feelings, you will see, that every day your practice gets less and less torturous and more often it will be accompanied by enlightened perceptions splashes with anticipation and interest to the experience. Little by little your addiction will be overpowered.

While practicing Recurring Attention you can have attacks of depressing and boundless loneliness, anguish, despair, groundless aggression, etc. It means that earlier all these negative emotions were a part of your dominant negative background and you did not notice they were intoxicating you, but now when they are revealed you can eradicate them. When you refuse the Mechanical Wish of Impressions, you will deprive yourself from injecting the drug called “impressions”, then “withdrawals” appear and you want at least a little bit of impressions, but if you give up you will experience a miniscule death, because at first it is a bit easier, but then dullness and negative emotions overburden you twice as strong. If you admit that you are addicted, it will allow you to start very seriously with the eradication of this addiction which is obstructing to experience enlightened perceptions.

Time stretches extremely during the Recurring Attention practice. One hour of effort accommodates as many discoveries, observations, hypothesis, ideas, whereas usually it takes a few days.

01-07 Common mistakes

Among the mistakes which have not been yet browsed through, I will select the following:

1) Many people consider that it is impossible to eradicate negative emotions because they are the consequences of wrong interpretations and likewise. They believe fighting consequences is as useless as taking the pain relief and it’s expected that you treat a disease, while it is necessary to deal with the illness, not with pain, and take antibiotics, not Aspirin. Sometimes they also say that enough is enough, just change your point of view and negative emotions will not appear. Realize that everything is Atman and it will change. As a matter of fact:

а) The minimum experience of negative emotions eradication proves that the work with concepts does not replace the effort of negative emotions eradication because the well-established pattern of experiencing negative emotions works, no matter how strong the supporting concept is.

b) While you think of the reasons negative emotion lives on and grows all this time and attracts new negative emotions feeding the negative background. As a result you will lose, while perfect negative emotion eradication kills it instantly.

c) The minimum experience of negative emotions eradication also proves that it is possible and not at all difficult, gradually the old pattern of experiencing negative emotions dies and a new pattern of eradicating negative emotions and experiencing enlightened perceptions appears.

d) negative emotion is not a physical pain and the analogy made earlier is wrong because it transfers laws thoughtlessly from one area to another.

How do we differentiate between a “reason” and a “consequence”? If I have a toothache, I take a pain relief, but in an hour pain reappears and intensifies. In this case I call pain as a “consequence”, and dental decay as a “reason” and I treat dental decay thinking that I am dealing with a “reason” and indeed the pain stops. But in three months decay reoccurs and then I call it a “consequence” and find the reason is not brushing my teeth. A dietitian will discover even a deeper “reason” in my poorly balanced nutrition. Psychotherapist will call the unbalanced diet as a “consequence” of a child’s complex of inferiority or trauma, psychoanalyst will call it a “consequence” finding the “reason” in birth trauma. But a Buddhist will call the same birth trauma a “consequence” of wrong behaviour in a past life.

This is why depending on the frequency and the intensity of the toothache, as well as my interest in the matter, I deal with my pain at all levels. First of all I take pain relief, then I go to the dentist, then I purchase toothpaste and start brushing my teeth, keep to my diet, visit a psychoanalyst and begin singing mantras.

Let us have a look at another variant. I have cut my hand and I disinfect it (because I have the experience, or know of somebody’s experience, that if you do not disinfect you can get an infection), apply some healing ointment and if it is healed I forget about it. Now imagine a person who has a cut and it is healing but he is thinking: “no, the cut is only the consequence, there must be a reason”, and he is looking for the “reason”, he imagines it and even refuses to apply healing remedies because he wants to deal with the “reason” and not the consequence! We think of such behaviour as stupid because the cut is successfully healing due to an application of medicine, so why imagine the “reasons” and refuse treatment with an infection as an end result? It is the same with negative emotions eradication. When you suppress negative emotions (which means you still go on experiencing them, you suppress only what is revealed), negative background and negative emotions intensify and lead to understanding that suppression does not bring liberation from them. When you start eradicating negative emotions (switch over from negative emotions to enlightened perceptions and stop experiencing negative emotions completely at a given moment), you are getting the experience, that negative background decreases and the pattern of negative emotions weakens and there are no side effects, but on the contrary there will appear very welcomed consequences in the form of intensified and more frequent enlightened perceptions, so why think over the “reasons” and “consequences”? Acquire your own experience, eradicate negative emotions and get the proof that there is no reason to identify this activity as a “treatment of consequences”. Acquire your experience that if you do not eradicate negative emotions but instead think over the “reasons”, then the “wound” will start being infected, wrong concepts will strengthen, joyful wishes will decline, your body will feel worse and your life will become a nightmare. TRUST YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE, not somebody else’s words.

e) In this interrelated spiral of distresses it is impossible to identify what the “reason” is and what the “consequence” is, because one distress attracts another.

f) The comparison of the results for your efforts to eradicate negative emotions and the thoughts of reasoning will speak for itself.

2) Some cunning and clever technique is being researched to enable you to get rid of the negative emotions without any efforts, something like Big Red Button (BRB), you press it and all problems disappear. People try to use whatever possible as a BRB, like sitting in a certain posture, performing spells, fasting, making themselves busy with sports, sex, meditations, thinking over and talking about the integrity of the universe and so on, whatever, but not making an effort to eradicate negative emotions.

It means that such a person has no wish to eradicate negative emotions (he only thinks he has it) or it is very weak, much weaker than the wish to experience negative emotions. The quest of the BRB is fruitless and to hope is pointless.

3) After the successful act of negative emotion eradication there may be some fear that negative emotion will return according to the old pattern and again you have to get rid of it. It leads to a spasmodic wish to hold this state of relative freedom from the negative emotion. And sure enough this fear brings back the negative emotion even faster and it attracts new negative emotions.

I recommend that you meet negative emotions fearlessly, with determination, persistence and face to face, not being afraid of them coming back repeatedly because these old patterns are very strong but you will be able to exercise the effort in their perfect eradication. Don’t be in a position of the victim, be a hunter for negative emotions, track them down and feel the anticipation of a new experience, new victories as well as defeats which will inevitably bring the desirable result.

4) There may be a misguided assumption that there are so many distresses and the achievement of perfection in eradication of just one negative emotion takes ages, as a result life will not be long enough for you to deal with all the distresses and while you deal with just one of them all others will intensify.

This assumption is all wrong. Even a little experience is enough to discover that it is hard to eradicate negative emotions in the beginning. Gradually you will form the patterns and acquire the skills for making the efforts, the wish of experiencing enlightened perceptions and the eradication of negative emotions intensify and become easier and faster every time you do it. Achieving progress in eradication of one distress is similar to pulling the thread from material, you pull the thread in one spot but the material will show a defect through its entire width, that is the work with one distress will ease the work with the others. Besides, the further you advance in your practice the more frequent are the enlightened perceptions and the more interesting it becomes to live, there is more enthusiasm, persistency, anticipation and determination. Your life time lengthens tenfold, one day you will accommodate as many experiences as you had in a month.

I consider two years of intensive and sincere practice are enough to achieve the perfect eradication of negative emotions and the continuous enlightened background.

5) If you have the wish to avoid some part of the practice (e.g. you do not want to disperse concepts or develop your sexuality or eradicate a negative emotion, etc.), it means this is the area of your strongest distresses and you give up in advance. If you want to achieve progress in the PDP you definitely have to choose the line of your main activity according to your joyful wish, not according to the concept of the kind “I must develop in all aspects”. But if in some aspect you feel a strong rejection or fear that is caused by just an idea of dealing with it, it means that here you have very strong distresses. Be aware of it, eliminate your fears and negative attitude, catch every splash of anticipation from the thought that you can do it, this is just the matter of your sincerity in the aspiration for the enlightened perceptions.

6) There is a point of view: “If you accidentally run into a bear in the woods, fright will take over thoughts and emotions. This is the moment when the body changes its chemistry and produces adrenalin but because it’s a natural reaction of the body which is not overruled by the mind, is there a point and a need to avoid it?

When you see a bear in a zoo, by some reason you are not scared, but you are amazed and fascinated. It proves it’s not the perception of the bear that caused the fright but it was caused by a chain of thoughts you were not aware of: “the wild bear – free – dangerous”, this is why there appeared negative emotions and related negative feelings in the body. The same example proves that the chemical changes of the body do not inevitably bring the negative emotions, but vice versa, the negative emotions inevitably cause chemical changes of the body and this has already been discussed earlier when I stated that any illness and ageing are consequences of negative emotions. The pattern of being scared at the sight of a bear can be changed as well, this will also allow you to think faster and clearer and react if there is danger.

7) Main difficulty of negative emotion eradication consists not in the overpowering of its pattern, as it may seem, but in not being sincere enough. The practitioner does not notice or does not want to notice, that actually he is trying to find side routes instead of negative emotions eradication, because he is reluctant to halt negative emotions and at the same time to have enlightened perceptions. Such a practitioner reminds of the swan, the lobster and the pike pulling in opposite directions (this is a russian saying) this is why the efforts are ineffective. Usually the insincere practitioner wants to talk about negative emotions instead of eradicating them. Hours and hours he can talk about his problems, day after day ask the questions of the kind “how shall I eradicate negative emotions”, “why did it happen”, make excuses like he cannot identify what exact negative emotion he is experiencing at that moment, though differentiating negative emotions is not a necessary condition for their eradication, you can eradicate the “foul state” as a whole. When you have negative emotions there is no point in thinking this will not lead to the eradication besides your mind can be not very clear at that moment, because negative emotions cause dullness and obstruct consecutive and creative thinking. First eradicate negative emotion, then think if you like, this is the effective performance.

8) There is a wide spread delusion that if you want to halt negative emotions it is enough to “accept everything as it is”, just realize your negative emotions, accept them as they are, ask yourself “who is experiencing them?”, relax, stop identifying them as welcome or unwelcome and they will vanish.

Such a point of view is an excuse allowing you to have negative emotions, it is a way of cheating yourself and others. It is especially spread among “esoteric people”, i.e. people who want to impress others with their wise and profound speeches, important looks, who want to be recognized as “teachers”, but do not want to stop negative emotions. It is nearly impossible to hide negative emotions, they are always noticeable for an attentive person who can judge by the face, voice and manners, that is why an “esoteric person” says: “I am not just experiencing negative emotions I am observing them and do not assimilate with them, they do not have power over me”. In reality this is just a juggling of words and if you are experiencing a negative emotion it is impossible “not to assimilate” with it, because a “person” is a set of perceptions and if in this set there is a negative emotion then he is the one who is experiencing a negative emotion and no word games can change that. If a person doesn’t start eradicating a negative emotion at the moment it appears, it means he wants to go on with it, and his situation is utterly hopeless if he is not sincere and does not realize that his wish to experience a negative emotion is stronger. How can such a person “teach” if he is not sincere and wants to experience negative emotions, he is cheating himself and others with his abstruse speeches?

While you “accept everything as it is”, “observe and not assimilate”, the pattern of experiencing negative emotions will only intensify.

9) As a result of the consecutive development of civilization the number of people is steadily growing who aspire to the creation and the accumulation rather than destruction and dull vegetating (exceptions to this rule are known from news broadcasts). But in this problem of choice what to accumulate, perfect, create, there is a total confusion, and when a person makes his choice, he is guided by stereotypes, wrong concepts and not by his wish.

а) Accumulating money. How much does a person need to purchase everything that pleases him? Is one million dollars not enough? Especially if you put your money to a conservative bank and live on the interest, then half the amount will be enough. In the USA there are more than one million people with a fortune greater than $1 million. Did they stop their business activity, vacate the commercial area for others and enjoy their life? Nothing of the kind. They go on working ten hours a day every day to earn more millions and so on. This is not accumulation, it is an addiction. This is a paradox, but they do not have time to enjoy their life and they spend all their time like a hamster in a wheel. Also how many people are there wasting their life and earning nothing to speak of?

b) Accumulation of things. Things can be damaged, broken, stolen or they can go out of fashion, all this can make an accumulator’s life a nightmare. If you have had a car you have been driving for five years and you can drive for ten years longer, why do you need to buy a new one? Is it only producing an impression for other people (keeping up with the Jones’s)? Or is it to get more comfort? Is it so necessary, will it make you happier? If you work harder and earn more you can buy a better car (or a country house or furniture, depends on what fixation you have). After that if you earn more, you can buy a more luxurious model. You can also purchase lots of things on credit and after that having to pay them off for the next 30 years… Is it an addiction? Did these purchases make anybody happy? Look at the faces of those possessing the expensive cars and it will become clear that their faces are distorted with suffering, with negative emotions as well as the faces of other people, and maybe even more. People have forgotten that things are for people, and they have become servants for things.

c) Education. A person can spend a few years and receive another degree which will quite often not give him any advantage either at work or an interaction with other people, or, what is more, get any pleasure. The sense of your own importance is growing of course but it makes you more helpless and inclined to resentment, self-pity, unable to follow your joyful wishes, to be open and kind. You cram your head with lots of rubbish and after that you receive a certificate witnessing that you have one more garbage bin in your head and that your hands and feet have acquired a few more skills that you will hardly ever apply. Information can be forgotten, your skills need regular practice, and as a result you can forget about enjoying your life. All your tertiary diplomas are framed and mounted on the wall and certificates for skydiving, scuba diving, paragliding and tourism only remind you that the skills are being reduced, the money you paid is wasted and right now you are bored and have to cope with dullness and other negative emotions as you do not have any joyful wishes.

d) Children and grandchildren are indeed a huge bottomless pit, millions of people invest their lives in them. Have you heard this: “I live for my children”? This is met with every step. A woman gives birth to a child and from this moment she does not have to have joyful wishes, she has no time for that as now she has lots of “I must”, “I should”, “I have to”, “it’s sensible to”, etc. Lots of caring, concerns, no time for anything else, including realizing that all this “life for children” is just an addictive drug you take. It’s not worth mentioning, that children do not want their parents “to live for them”, thus making themselves speechless creatures who have no free time and no choice of what to do. They want freedom from the parents care and surveillance which quite often takes a form of primitive and rough physical and psychological violence. The longer a person lives “for his children”, the higher degree of his dependence on the addiction from “upbringing” of the children. If the upbringing was “successful”, resulting in obedient and listless mechanisms, now they get bored together and fight with each other or shift their addiction onto the grandchildren. But if the upbringing was “not a success”, children send their parents as far away as possible and negative emotions overpower the parents again with a new intense strength.

There are lots of examples of this kind but all of them have one thing in common and this is the wrong object of the accumulation. During the process of this accumulation and due to the result of this process negative emotions intensify as well as the addiction from impressions and the person’s insecurity regarding the safety and the using of things he has accumulated, also is growing with an increasing feeling of his life being useless. He remains with a broken wash basin and is either rapidly and completely destroyed, or he has to intoxicate himself persuading that his life was not empty and looking for new objects for accumulation while trying to close his eyes and not to see that this accumulation does not make his life happy.

Differently from all that PDP allows you to have a unique object for accumulation, these are enlightened perceptions that profile a person, i.e. not what “he possesses”, but what he is himself. You do not need anything, except being alive, to make the journey in the world of enlightened perceptions. It is impossible to deprive you of these accumulated “possessions”, these possessions don’t need to be dusted and don’t age or expire. This is an exclusive and unique chance for a person’s way out of the deadlock that he has been trapped in for thousands years.

01-08 The practice of consolidation

While you are eradicating the strong negative emotions you discover a whole swarm of minor negative emotions which you have experienced but did not notice in the background of more intensive negative emotions. You discover it while trying to find a reason why your enlightened perceptions are so rare and weak, even though you eradicate negative emotions perfectly and have a wish to strengthen enlightened perceptions. In this case you can make a “consolidation”. What earlier you would identify as a “3” or a “4” on the scale of intensity, now you will estimate as a “10” and thus all “minor” negative emotions that earlier you were not even aware of will get significantly higher in intensity rating and will be revealed and eradicated. The negative emotions that were estimated on the old scale as 3 to 10, now will be identified as “exceeding the limits”.

Make the “attacks” of total control and try to be aware of the tiniest splashes of negative emotions, even when you are not sure if there really was a negative emotion. As a result you will find that during half an hour you experience not just 5 or 6 negative emotions as you have been thinking, but 50, 100! They seem to be so minor but when you eradicate them perfectly there appears a very strong splash of enlightened perceptions in frequency and intensity. Then it becomes clear that those “minor” negative emotions are not minor at all as their effect on enlightened perceptions is paralyzing and their eradication leads to enlightened perceptions intensity.

Qualitative consolidation always brings awareness that if earlier you could reveal only a few negative emotions, now you discover tenfold.

When you practice consolidation I recommend that you divide your day with 5 minute periods for recording the number of negative emotions (and eradicate them, of course). The more there is of such 5 minute dividing periods, the more successful consolidation is. If you dedicate a few hours a day to this exercise, then in a few days you will form the welcome pattern of noticing and eradicating “minor” negative emotions.

Technically it is very simple to eradicate the micro-negative emotions, but it requires a very high degree of attentiveness, because they are so tiny and hardly noticeable, that it is very difficult to tune yourself into their complete and perfect eradication. But ignoring them is dangerous and wasteful. Dangerous because they appear one after another, thus feeding the negative background and blocking enlightened perceptions. Wasteful because the perfect eradication of micro-negative emotions leads to the unexpected increase of the intensity and duration of enlightened perceptions.

While the number of negative emotions is decreasing and the enlightened perceptions is increasing there appears and intensifies an “effect of a longer day”. Just during one day you will experience as much as for a week, two weeks or a month. It is especially clear when you compare the number and the significance of your discoveries that are recorded in your diary and it is especially revealed while you are practicing consolidation. As a result and due to the practicing consolidation the real life expectancy grows tenfold.

01-09 Satisfaction, “nothing-is-happening”, light-grey state

It often happens that you are not aware of either enlightened perceptions or negative emotions – “nothing-is-happening”. Which means that at this given moment there is negative background, because if you have neither negative emotions nor negative background there must be an enlightened perception. This is how this negative background is called – “nothing-is-happening” (“NIH”). If NIH has a low intensity, then PE splashes happen often and the negative background is called the “light-grey state” (“LGS”). I will call this trinity of perceptions: satisfaction, NIH and LGS as “SNL”.

When you get to the finalizing stage of eradication of strong and frequent negative emotions the problem of SNL will present itself in full capacity because SNL are absolutely incompatible with enlightened perceptions. The person suffering from dominating negative emotions for many years and considering his total life that SNL will save him from his sufferings will not easily say good bye to SNL. Sometimes he will “plunge” into these states until he feels disgusted and aspires to enlightened perceptions but even after that overpowering the pattern of SNL is not an easy task.

The wish of PEs is strongly revealed in the background of SNL, which is often called the “wish of impressions” (“Wimp”). The concept of Wimp also includes the wish of all activities that would please a person and bring PEs, like reading a book, watching a movie, talking, sometimes even “lip-synch practice”, i.e. imitate practicing through copying its outward forms (most frequent form of imitation is empty discussions about the practice).

I recommend in order to overpower SNL and wish of impressions that all formal practices are to be actively used to their maximum, like expressing your wish [of experiencing enlightened perceptions] aloud, generating enlightened perceptions, emotional polish and so on. Formal practices will be effective if you exercise them not less than 1000 acts per day, with the optimum series of 20-50-100 acts on completing each series with a free quest of enlightened perceptions and “attentive sensing” of enlightened perceptions.