🕊️ The Point of Arising: Where Emotions Become Ego or Energy for Being

The Desert Fathers and Buddhists were saying the same thing.

Emotions aren’t the enemy. They’re just fuel. What you do with that fuel decides everything. You can burn it up defending your ego, or you can use it to stay awake. The monks, the Buddhists, and Thomas Keating all said the same thing: the real spiritual work happens in the few seconds after your heart rate jumps. That’s where transformation starts — or ends.

The Spark Before the Story

Every reaction starts as a spark.
Catch it early enough, and the world softens around you. Miss it, and you’re back in the same story again.

You know that half-second before you say the thing you’ll regret?
That’s the point of arising.
It’s the instant before the mind jumps in and paints reality with its old colors.

In Logion 19 of the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says,

“Blessed is one who came into being before coming into being.”

Cynthia Bourgeault interprets it as an invitation to awareness:
Be present at your genesis before you come into temporality.

He didn’t say those words, but that’s the heartbeat of it.
Stay awake in the gap before the spark becomes a story.

The Machinery of the False Self

The Desert Fathers described the same process.
An image flashes in the mind, stirring emotion.
Emotion shapes perception.
Perception feeds thought.
Thought becomes action.

Image → Emotion → Perception → Thought → Action.

That’s how the false self takes shape.
The Buddhists call it the five skandhas: form, sensation, perception, formation, consciousness.
Two languages describing one human reflex.

Emotion vs. Feeling

Emotion isn’t evil; it’s energy that got tangled in a story.
Feeling, though, is what remains once the story lets go.
It’s clean, direct, and honest.

Real feeling has edges. It can hurt and heal in the same breath.
Rilke said it best:

“Beauty is the beginning of a terror we can just scarcely bear.”

Emotion is the heat of ego burning fuel.
Feeling is the warmth of God moving through the body.

Drop the Witness Down

Most of us try to manage emotion from the head, narrating it or reasoning with it.
That isn’t presence. It’s avoidance with good posture.

The early monks said to drop the witness down into the body.
Let the mind stop policing the experience and let the heart feel it.

That’s where Thomas Keating’s Welcoming Prayer becomes useful.
It doesn’t ask you to escape the moment. It teaches you to stay in it without getting scorched.

The Welcoming Practice

When something flares—anger, fear, shame, even joy too bright to handle—do three small things:

1. Feel it.
   Find it in your body. Let it have shape and weight.

2. Welcome it.
   Say, “Welcome, rage.” “Welcome, panic.” “Welcome, grief.”
   You aren’t inviting it to dinner; you’re refusing to exile it.

3. Let it go.
   Not by forcing it away, but by letting it move like a wave returning to sea.

Stay with that rhythm—feel, welcome, release—and the energy changes.
What was tight and poisonous becomes alive.
That is what Bourgeault calls “energy for being.”

The Breath as Hinge

Breath is the hinge between reaction and revelation.
All the old teachers knew it.
Gurdjieff called air our “second being-food.”
In Hebrew and Greek, breath and spirit share one word.

Every inhale is God lending you existence.
Every exhale is you returning it.

When you remember to breathe right at that spark, the moment anger or fear is about to clamp your chest, you rediscover what it means to be human on purpose.
Sometimes that’s all salvation is—remembering to exhale before you say something stupid.

The breath doesn’t argue. It just moves.
And in that movement you see that what you called “problem” is only unspent life asking to be noticed.

Weather Passing Over the Field

When the witness settles in the body, the storm still comes but it doesn’t own you.
Anger still flares, but it doesn’t turn into a speech.
Grief still aches, but it doesn’t hollow you out.
Fear still knocks, but you don’t have to answer.

You start to sense the steady current underneath it all.
The Buddhists call it mindfulness.
The mystics call it the descent of the mind into the heart.
Different names, same homecoming.

At that depth you don’t have to suppress or perform emotions.
They pass through like weather over an open field.

Attention Is Liberation

Both Buddha and the Desert Fathers knew this.
Liberation doesn’t start with morality. It starts with attention.
What you do after the spark matters less than whether you were awake when it lit.

The Buddha said form touches form, sensation arises.
The Fathers said an image flashes, the self forms around it.
The Gospel of Thomas blesses those who “came into being before coming into being.”
They’re all pointing to the same split second where consciousness decides whether to contract into ego or open into God.

Grace in the Regrouping

Of course we miss it most of the time.
We yell, sulk, scroll, and swear we’ll do better.
But even noticing we missed it is a kind of awakening.
Awareness sneaks back in through the side door.

Keating said the spiritual path isn’t about never losing it; it’s about regrouping faster.
Catching yourself mid-spin and saying, “There I go again.”
That’s grace in motion, not perfection.
Holiness isn’t serenity. It’s sincerity.

Every Emotion an Invitation

Live like this long enough and you start to see the pattern.
Every surge of emotion is a telegram from God saying, “Stay awake.”

Irritation, heartbreak, joy—each is an invitation.
This is how emotion becomes energy for being.
Not by crushing it or fixing it, but by letting it belong.

When the spark meets breath instead of story, the ego’s appetite weakens.
Something vast and quiet moves in.
It’s the same consciousness that existed before you started calling yourself “me.”

That’s what Gospel of Thomas 19 is pointing toward.
That’s what the Buddhists mean by Nirvana.
That’s what the Desert Fathers called the Kingdom within.
And on good days you can feel all three breathing through you at once.

Closing

May you notice the spark before the story.
May the breath find you before the words do.
May the next reaction turn into revelation.

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