Take a moment and think back to a time when you had a disagreement with someone that resulted in some sort of altercation. It doesn't matter who did what or what specific events occurred. It isn't even relevant who was "right" or "wrong". Someone said or did something that we didn't like or that triggered us. In turn we decided to speak up to defend our honor or pride which in turn caused them to push even harder which escalated us. Before we know it, we are having a screaming match or throwing punches. Sometimes that one event will lead to criminal chargers or embarrassment or the loss of a friend or family member.
We then spend weeks, months and even years replaying that one event in our minds over and over again trying to justify our own actions. We attempt to make sense of the situation. We try to think of what we could have done differently. We try to prove ourselves right in order to justify our actions in the event that took place. Our anger, bitterness, and hatred grow and grow over time towards the person who "wronged" us never once realizing that they are doing the exact same thing themselves. They are justifying everything they did to themselves and are convincing themselves that they are "right" and we are "wrong".
When we react to any given situation, it can only do one thing, which is to escalate the situation. We humans feed off of each other. Think about a concert you've been to where the whole crowd is in sync with the band and your sense of self fades away into the group of people and you become immersed in the moment and atmosphere and you along with the crown stop being human and become bliss. This experience can also happen at a church or religious event where everyone is singing praise songs together. Ultimately this experience can happen anywhere a group of people get together and do something as one. "For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." - Mathew 18:20
The amplification of emotions within a group of people applies to all emotions within the human realm. If you've ever been in a group of people where there was fear, you were able to feel the collective fear of the entire group. A perfect example of this would be 9/11. Most of us were with a group of people at the time of the attack. Think back to that day and how it felt. It was more than just a feeling of personal fear, it was as if the entire country became engulfed in fear. The collective fear become so overpowering that it could be felt in the air and all around us. In that situation, we were able to put a face (Osama bin Laden) with the fear, so we were able to find a common enemy to fight and we banded together to fight that fear and attack our enemy.
Fast forward twenty years to Covid. Despite what some people may claim, there was and still is a lot of fear surrounding Covid. That's where the phrase "faith over fear" came from. Most of us were scared and some of us chose to trust in faith and others of us chose to trust in science. Just as during the 9/11 attacks the fear could be felt in the air all around us. Only this time we didn't have a face to put with the fear, we only had an invisible virus to put with the fear. A virus that we couldn't see and so some of us chose not to believe it was real and others of us chose to believe it was. Fear took over and we became divided and from there it wasn't a very big stretch to extend that division to every other aspect of our lives including but not limited to politics, religion, morality, economy, and even family. By reacting to the fear from the 9/11 attacks we ended up in a twenty-year war in which could be argued was "pointless". By reacting to the fear from Covid it divided humanity.
Taking this down to a much smaller scale we can think of mass shootings or a fire in a crowded place or a bombing of some sort. We've all heard of "mass panic" where the crowd reacts to a dangerous situation and mass panic ensues which commonly leads to people being trampled by a stampede of people trying to flee and just plain chaos. Now down to an even smaller scale which is at the individual level. When we have an encounter with someone in which we are the target of their anger we can react which will escalate the situation and lead to everything we discussed in the beginning of the discussion. Or we can simply not react. We can just stay calm and not speak or become aggressive ourselves. The person directing their anger at us may keep doing so until they get it all out or they may realize that since we aren't going to react, it is pointless to continue on. In very rare situations they may try to escalate even further themselves in order to invoke a response from us but as long as we don't respond, we will have a clear conscious.
No matter the outcome, we will feel good about the situation. We won't waste any time trying to justify anything we did because we didn't do anything. We won't regret anything we said in the heat of the moment because we didn't say anything. We won't try to convince ourselves that we were in the "right" since there wasn't even a disagreement. We end up seeing that the situation wasn't even about us in the first place. We aren't the cause of the anger from the person who is "attacking" us, they were already angry before we came along. We just happened to give them a situation in which they could express the anger and we become the object of their anger. By reacting, it confirms to them that we are in fact the object of their anger and we then get infected by their anger which is contagious.
All emotions are contagious. Someone attacks you with their anger and you become angry. Someone we care about receives good news and becomes happy, we become happy with them. We see a child upset and crying because they lost their family and became orphaned the day before Christmas, and we become sad with them. Since we have the ability to become infected with the emotions of others, we also have the ability to infect others with our emotions. Here's an experiment you can try. Find a person, doesn't matter who, and find a reason to get angry with them. When you find a reason to be angry with them, go to them and release your anger onto them and see what happens. Nine times out of ten they will become infected with your anger and give it back to you. Now try going to someone and share some joy with them. Find something that makes you extremely happy such as you just got married or had a child or got your doctorate, really it doesn't matter what it is as long as it makes you extremely happy. Go to someone and share your joy with them, tell them how happy you are about your news and how you are so happy that you just had to share the news with someone, and you didn't care who it was. They will become happy for you and with you, you will infect them with your joy.
Calmness in a way is the absence of emotions. When we are calm, we aren't feeling anger or sadness or fear or even joy. We are just in a state of peace and stillness. Calmness or the absence of emotions is also contagious. When we are faced with a situation and we remain calm, all of those around us will remain calm. Our calmness will infect others. If we feel emotions welling up within us, we can be aware of the fact that they are not actually coming from us but are in fact coming from those around us. As we remain calm and don't react to those emotions that are coming from others, we calm those emotions in those with whom the emotions are coming from. When we react to the emotions from others, we identify with the emotions, and they become "our emotions". Causing us to become infected with the emotions.
If we think of ourselves as a serene pond with still waters and we think of the emotions of others as wind or rocks. We are able to see that even though the wind may cause ripples upon our surface, as soon as the winds stops, we are able to see the calmness that never left. If we become the object of someone's anger and they throw a rock into us, it may cause a pretty big splash and a lot of ripples depending on the size of the rock. When the anger goes away and the rock vanishes beneath the surface, once again all that is left is the peace of the still surface. When we react to the rock being thrown within our still waters, we identify with it, and we think that we are the rock, and we forget that we are the peaceful waters that the rock momentarily disturbed. By staying calm, we stay true to ourselves and our true nature which is the calm waters and see that the rock never had any effect on us at all. Love and Peace!