3.5.2 In what way are emotions, experienced within the limitations of the personality, relatively illusory?

Prior to attaining the first stage of enlightenment, the emotions are the primary medium through which you experience the conditions of life. You respond across the range of emotions according to the way your personality interacts with reality. As the circumstances of your life unfold, so you respond emotionally to a greater or lesser degree, according to your individual nature.

It is possible for a personality to appear to operate primarily from an intellectual rather than an emotional base. This is simply a form of emotional camouflage, based on a flight from the reality of emotional experience. It is not possible to experience life fully through the intellect.

All aspects of the personality set limiting structures on the direct experiencing of reality. The emotional range of responses, as experienced within the constructs of the personality, embodies a relatively underdeveloped reaction to reality. In relation to one who experiences reality from the standpoint of the first stage of enlightenment, these emotional responses are best understood as self-generated, self-perpetuating activities, illusory in the face of reality.

The experience of time as fragmented into past, present and future becomes understood as an illusion relative to the sense of the eternal present which is experienced after attaining the first stage of enlightenment. In the same way, the emotions experienced as real within the limitations of the personality become experienced as only relatively real. After the first stage of enlightenment, emotions are still experienced within the personality, but now such emotions are understood as being of only relative and limited importance in the face of reality.