The nature of overcoming.

[Shin'Ar]

The balancing exercise has two distinct parts:

1. You experience, examine, feel, grasp the emotion. You let it become distinct so you can see all of its features.
2. You look within yourself for its opposite, that is, the emotion which contradicts it, as you described. Then you repeat the process for this emotion.

The emotions push us towards actions, but they need the ratification of the will in order for any action to manifest. Those with weak will ratify all emotions, hence their actions contradict. The balancing exercises foster a strong will through awareness. When you become aware of what it is you feel and why you feel what you feel, when you become aware of the motivations for your actions especially during the actions themselves (this is called "catching yourself in the act"), then you give your will the necessary information to choose which direction it wants to go. This is where the choosing that Spaced mentioned comes into play: if you learn that one of your desires is STO and the other is STS, then you know which one you want to encourage. To encourage a desire is to act on it. To discourage a desire is to allow itself to play out in your mind and then release the experience as satisfactory, or, even better, to see exactly why and how it is not an appealing prospect to manifest the desire.

Most importantly, however, the purpose of the balancing exercises is to release attachments, regardless of the content of the emotion. When we have conflicting desires, it is because we are attached to some aspect involving them. For me, the attachment was always a bias about what is "right" and "wrong". Thus, I have attachments to desires which align with certain social norms. But I also have attachments to desires which directly conflict with social norms. This is because telling yourself "you can't have that experience" causes you to want the experience, even if your heart does not truly desire it. If I can let go of the notion that I must abide by social norms, the desire to break the rules just for the sake of breaking the rules will fall away, just as will the desire to follow the rules. So the more you tell yourself "I need to have X eating habits," the more you will want to break that rule. Rather, if you observe exactly how you feel when you engage in your various dietary experiments, you will learn which feelings you want to encourage (by repeating the action) and which feelings you want to discourage (by ceasing the action). For my part, I have reduced the sugary foods in my diet, not by imposing a rule upon myself, but by observing that I do not like giving into the emotions that make me want to eat them and I do not like the effects they have on my body.

wiser words were never spoken!

well, probably, but always by very wise people, lol.

This is what Ra is saying in a nutshell,(wonder what that analogy means),

to understand our emotions we must make the effort to be in control of them. And being in control does not mean denying an aspect of them, it means discerning the consequences of allowing one specific emotion to be the one which we actually experience, as opposed to the one we cast off as a result of our imaginary 'discerning' of the experience that it would subject us to.

many times in our lives we will find ourselves giving in to particular emotions without indepth consideration of why we feel that way or why we allow ourselves to feel that way.

The choice is always ours, and yet we often just fall right into an emotional state without even discerning why. emotions are far too often irrational, ill conceived, and spontaneous.

First impulses and first impressions we know are wrong. And yet we often enable such quickness in reaction to stimuli and catalyst with regard to our emotions.

When we face a problem that makes us respond immediately with anger, instead of attempting to discern whether or not we should actually be angry, or what the future consequence of such a response will be, we tend to just go with the spontaneity of the moment and then accept that our emotional response must therefore be rational and deserving. And so we allow that anger to build and become the mainstay for that situation, even defending it further as the players in the circumstance try to explain.

the anger overrides and deafens us to rationale now and becomes a thing to hold tightly to rather than cast off as our mistake.

How many times have we found ourselves in argument with an other only to later find resolution and wish that we had handled that differently in hind sight?

Emotion is the trigger finger of expression and feeling, and if we allow it, that gun will pop off at every little bump in the road.

Discernment of and understanding all of the emotions that could be expressed/felt in a situation, is the solution to that trigger finger going off unnecessarily.

I think that in this case Ra is utilizing overcome as a synonym to conquer. whereas we engilsh speaking folk might tend to interpret overcome as succeeding.

Ra is pointing pout that we are not to conquer our emotions by ignoring or avoiding them, because it is necessary to experience each in order to discern which is the best emotion to achieve a beneficial end.

This human experience is for us to learn about emotion throiu8gh discernment, and discover the various aspects of love and how it relates to other aspects.

"The proper role of the entity is in this density to experience all things desired, to then analyze, understand, and accept these experiences, distilling from them the love/light within them. Nothing shall be overcome. That which is not needed falls away."