21. The Seven Emotions  

The Seven Emotions are seven modes of feeling: Joy, Anger, Sorrow, Pleasure, Love, Hatred, and Desire (to rejoice, to be angry, to grieve, to be glad, to love, to hate, to want).

Desire is the governing emotion. Desire is the most crucial of all emotions. It can raise a human being to the rank of Immortal or Buddha, and it can also cast one down into a demon or fiend.

From the Six Desires arise the Seven Emotions. From the Seven Emotions arise greed, anger, and delusion.

• • Greed is covetous craving
• • Anger is resentment and wrath
• • Delusion is ignorance and blindness of mind

Thus, greed, anger, and delusion all arise from emotion. In this way, uncontrolled desire turns a human being into a demon. Demons must fall, revolving endlessly through cycles of rebirth.

Yet desire itself can also elevate a human being to Immortal or Buddha. For although the Six Desires give rise to the Seven Emotions, the Seven Emotions need not produce greed, anger, and delusion, when desire is governed by discernment and measure.

Within the Seven Emotions, one must know which tendencies are corrupt and discard them, and which are wholesome and retain them. Desire is wanting; if there is no desire, there is no wanting; without wanting, there is no greed; without greed, there can be no anger or delusion.

This is why desire is the governing and decisive emotion.

In other religions, when cultivating the Three Treasures, practitioners seek to extinguish the Seven Emotions entirely. But in Cao Đài Đạo, the Subpreme Being teaches not total rejection, but rather: “Abandon Four, Retain Three.” It is precisely in this principle that Caodaism differs from other religions.

• The four to be abandoned are: Anger, Sorrow, Hatred, and Desire.
• The three to be retained are: Joy, Pleasure, and Love.

To relinquish the Six Desires and regulate the Seven Emotions, the five senses must be restrained to the utmost, at all times and in every moment.

• Seeing, yet not seeing.
• Hearing, yet not hearing.
• Smelling, yet not smelling.
• Tasting, yet not tasting.
• Not touching the body of the opposite sex;
• Harboring no lustful thoughts.

Only thus can the turbid settle and the clear emerge; only thus can one truly refine Essence and transform it into Vital Energy.