Emotions and the Dance of Mind

In his book Spiritual Bypassing, Robert Augustus Masters talks about how spiritual life is not about trying to transcend emotions or perceived "limitations" but rather working with and through those limitations. He critiques a lot of New Age spiritual movements, which often try to use the language of 'getting over' or 'transcendence' to sidestep more difficult interpersonal relationships. There is even a beautiful chapter on anger and how different spiritual and therapeutic traditions try to approach anger. While certain schools emphasize venting anger, others treat anger as an inside job which should not be expressed outwardly but worked out 'inwardly'.
    I find that both approaches assume that there is an object of emotion that is outside the mind. But in fact the experience of emotion itself is often in a dialogue with someone else.  Even if I say to myself "let's deal with this emotion, not the person outside me", there is still this perception of a person 'out there' with whom I am trying to distance myself. What if I looked at it differently? In certain schools such as the Jungian school, the person with whom I am angry is really not a 'person' at all but is a kind of mental projection of disowned parts of me I dislike. Fine and everything, but what does it mean, to treat our dislikes as the 'shadow' of disowned parts of us? I think this theory suggests that all of our interactions interconnect, to the point where we can't say there is a subject and object. If the person with whom I feel anger or irritation is just a part of mind, there is no longer a reason to be angry. It would be futile and kind of silly. I can then be like the director of a theatre troupe, playing each of the actors' parts to try them on and see how they sound. And what would be the point of that? It would be to soften the hard sense of self. Sounds good, but of course it's not easy at all.
    People might want to take this to mean that we need to be more loving toward all parts of our being and others as well, but I am not so sure of that. Why is only the 'loving' or positive emotion honored? Could other emotions such as sadness and disconnection also be part of the human equation? To honor only loving or positive emotions is like wanting the weather to be sunny all the time. Is that realistic? So I go back again and try out the different kinds of weather: wind on my face, snow against my skin, rain on my hair, sun in my hands. Don't they all have a place in the world. Why privilege one state over the other? None of them are alien, and none of these states are accidents either.
    Sometimes I might feel disconnected in a social situation, but what does it mean to be 'disconnected'? Am I not right here and now all the time? Is this disconnection perhaps the hidden desire for things to be different from what they are? Is not the desire itself giving the illusion of disconnection when in reality we are always interconnected?  Here again, the model for encountering emotions may not be about internal or external, but about a dance that only happens in mind. In that case, there is no reason to feel that others are ever separate from us.

Masters, Robert Augustus (2010), Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects us from What Really Matters. Berkeley California: North Atlantic Books