A question arises about emotions and passions and how they operate in a state of stillness. We'll start with a discussion of emotion in general. Emotion is simply energy in motion. It's simply a way that energy moves, and from our perspective, when emotion is reactive, it is triggered by one's very personal way of labeling and identifying his or her experience. This means you react emotionally to situations and circumstances that you have some kind of personal engagement with and that you have labeled or identified in a way that triggers a reaction.

Responsive Emotion, Reactive Emotion, and Passion

Responsive emotion—we're just making a distinction here—is an emotional experience in the moment that is not so personal, but a bit more transpersonal. Reactive emotions most often will feel like a runaway train of feelings, and they will usually start a big storymaking process in the brain. They will often trigger a need to protect or a need to lash out. They will trigger human expressions that are very automatic and oftentimes have very little to do with the actual experience in the moment.

Most of the time, a triggered or reactive emotion is not very much about the present; it's about something from the past. It could be from another lifetime, from childhood—it could be about yesterday—but most often, it is not really about the actual situation and circumstance of the moment. You've either projected something way into the future or dug up something from the past, and suddenly the runaway train is on the tracks. Now, responsive emotion includes something like passion. If you're standing in the midst of an orchestra playing and emotion comes over you, that's responsive energy in motion. Now, you could say it was triggered by the music, but we're not really talking about triggers in that way; we're talking about being present, being in the moment, and having emotion. When emotion is responsive, it's a pure energy in motion, and it's excellent fuel. The stories that will be written about responsive emotion usually operate at a different level. They don't feel like a runaway train on a track going to nowhere. They feel instead like understanding, or a reverie about what is. They feel instead like a deeper sense of a deeper self—an intuited knowing coming through.