Emotions are feelings: negative emotions like sadness and fear cause suffering; positive emotions like happiness and gratitude cause joy. They appear when you are aware of yourself in relation to your surroundings. They change according to changes in that relationship and your intention.

Everyone has their own way of using emotions as a tool for developing awareness of their environment. This includes both the awareness of how you influence the environment and how the environment influences you.

Your emotions develop as you become aware of different situations and experience either suffering or joy because of them. Repeated development creates the habit for your intention as you relate and connect to different environments.

There are four intentions which create all emotions.

1. The first intention is to distrust.
   You have this intention because you have engaged in untrustworthy behaviours and believe that everyone else is just like you; you have lied, cheated, or created suffering for yourself or others. When you have a deep feeling of distrust, you create negative emotions like jealousy, loneliness, and hate. These appear because you are unable to feel joy from yourself or others. These negative feelings reinforce themselves with negative behaviours, then they create the view that all the suffering is from other people.
2. The second intention is to blindly trust, without understanding why.
   You want to trust other people, but do not take developing your own wisdom as important. This lack of wisdom causes you to build relationships in a blind way, resulting in many different types of suffering. Once suffering appears – and you are not aware that the cause is your blindness – you will end up distrusting others, as in the first intention.
3. The third intention is to trust logic.
   By observing a situation from every angle, you can use logic to decide what outcome you would like and how you can achieve it. When you have developed this ability, you will know what you can trust and what you cannot. If you use this ability in a greedy way, however, you will still fall into suffering.
   If you never develop a sharing heart, then you will never truly value emotion as a tool for creating unlimited joy. You might end up using emotion to control others in a negative direction, creating suffering for them and yourself. This will cause you to stop trusting yourself, returning you to the cycle of distrust.
4. The final intention is to trust wisdom.
   When you have developed your logic ability to a high level, you will be aware that the value of life is sharing, not accumulating material wealth. Your intention will naturally be to create joy and value all lives equally. This allows you to freely experience positive emotion (joy) in all situations. When different lives connect with this emotion, pure sharing appears as the true value of emotion.

Written by Simon.