Consume Your Lion, Control Your Emotions

Consume Your Lion, Control Your Emotions

The non-expression of negative emotions is a pillar of the Fourth Way and a discipline that is perplexing to our modern “express yourself” culture. Nearly every esoteric tradition recognizes, however, the pitfalls of expressing negative emotions. The ancient Greek poet, Sappho, said, “When anger is flooding through your chest best to quiet your reckless barking tongue.”

These raw feelings represent many of our most mechanical behaviors and are often associated with the animal side of man. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas asserts that, “Blessed is the man who consumes his lion, and cursed is the man who is consumed by his lion.” In the Fourth Way tradition, P.D. Ouspensky was unequivocal on the necessity of avoiding negative expressions for achieving real work, yet he also acknowledged that such primary mechanical tendencies, like struggling to curb a bad temper or self-pity, are the raw materials from which we connect to Higher Centers. Ouspensky even says that if we didn’t have negative emotions, we would have to invent something else from which to transform ourselves into Presence. What he meant is that we must consume our lion.

We must resist these negative expressions and transform them into a finer substance, much like an oyster turns an impurity into a pearl. That’s the ironic twist of man’s condition. Our very own mechanical manifestations contain the ingredients for building our Higher Self. But how does one do this? It starts with observation. Our observing part must see and familiarize itself with our favorite negative emotions. Repeated and intense observations lead to realizations of the causes of these negative feelings and expressions. Oftentimes, such personal observations reveal parts of our being that are needlessly attached or identified with an imaginary idea of who we are. In other instances, we see that we place exaggerated meaning to the value of some object, activity, or human relationship.

We learn not to express negative emotions through Work then on observing, understanding, and resisting the expression of these natural and mechanical tendencies based on identification or attachment. We depersonalize our daily frictions and petty annoyances and rise above them with effort. It’s not easy, but once the Observer is fed by sustained effort, we begin to make progress on overcoming our mechanics. We learn to control “the reckless barking tongue” and ultimately to “consume the lion” and thereby find a deeper sense of who we are, freeing ourselves from one of our greatest mechanical responses.

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Temperantia, Edward Burne-Jones (detail)