Seeing the Creator in All Entities

[Black Dragon]

I still find the negative things that humans do to each other appalling. I would think that that then creates the opportunity to change the feeling of being appalled into the feeling of love for the Creator in all its variation. Maybe this is a lesson that we have incarnated here to learn?

If someone enslaved another human or abused animals or deforested the land, is there any obligation on us to find some small thing acceptable in them?

No, I wouldn't say there's a cosmic or a social obligation, necessarily.  I think it simply depends on the degree to which your heart is either opened or closed.  Some would say that this is the basic lesson to be learned here: to be conscious of catalyst while maintaining an opened heart to it, to all. 

After all, can one not be appalled and also have an open heart?  Naturally, that does require a disciplined personality to hold the one emotion in purity and not allow intrusion of fearful thoughts of past or future worries or other such emotions which might close the heart.  Some would call this equipoise.
   

Which is very admirable but quite difficult to attain. Some out there with less experience than you or even I think they can just repress and deny their emotions and forcefully discipline themselves into this sort of...I guess stoicism/asceticism/detachment. Doesn't work that way, at least not on the STO path. You've got to integrate the emotions rather than invalidating them. Do I know exactly what that's supposed to look like? No. But I'm in the process of trying to find out. If one allows themselves to be ruled by the emotions, one is much like a machine. If one denies and invalidates the emotions...well..."same difference". They are like a machine. There's a lot of nuance to the idea of discipline and emotionality and how those things interact that people would rather over-simplify than explore in depth... so, there's really a kind of delicate balance with this issue that's easily missed.

What are your thoughts on when emotion is viewed as an inconvenient thing to be controlled and repressed in an anal-retentive manner(sort of how "society at large" and some very hardline ascetic seekers tend to see it) rather than embraced in a working holistic balance? From the perspective of new, novice, and intermediate seekers: how can those two dead-end extremes be avoided and what's a more holistic way of approaching the ideas of emotion and emotional discipline?