In preparation for sermons on the First Sunday of Lent I have been re-reading one of my favorite books – The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle.

A section that once again grabbed my attention follows:

Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance.  But they are not what I would call emotions.  They lie beyond the emotions, on a much deeper lever.  So you need to become fully conscious of your emotions and be able to feel them before you can feel what lies beyond them.  Emotion literally means “disturbance.”  The word comes from the Latin emovere, meaning “to disturb.”

Love, joy, and peace are deep states of Being, or rather three aspects of the state of inner connectedness with Being.  As such, they have no opposite.  This is because they arise from beyond the mind.  Emotions, on the other hand, being part of the dualistic mind, are subject to the law of opposites.  This simply means that you cannot have good without bad.  So in the unenlightened, mind-identified condition, what is sometimes wrongly called joy is the usually short-lived pleasure side of the continuously alternating pain/pleasure cycle.  Pleasure is alwyas derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

Pages 29-30 — http://www.amazon.com/Power-Now-Guide-Spiritual-Enlightenment/dp/1577314808/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330191411&sr=8-1