Our Human Emotions; ITS&FYD.ch1, pt9.

THE EMOTIONS.

What are the basic emotions?

Well, lots of people have had a go at this, so I can stick my tuppence worth in as well.

Explore

As in, Panksepp’s SEEK. (See GRANDIN)

This seems hardly an emotion per se; it is much more a basic drive for all life, but its lack, as in, the inability to do so leads to the kind of depression that is aligned with feeling trapped. This is apparent in animals as well as people. Exploration is stimulating and interesting. It is usually fear that is at the bottom of people feeling trapped. Anger may be expressed but fear will be behind that anger.

The emotion that goes with this depression is boredom, (although boredom doesn’t feel like an emotion) usually expressed as looking for stimulation in whatever way in a multitude of possibilities. This stimulation can lead to overwhelm, but trying to relieve the overwhelm can lead to exposing the boredom which does not solve the problem. It is the entrapment/blocking and fears that have to be addressed.

Desire

Is also difficult to define in terms of whether it is a drive or emotion, but it certainly seems to be ‘built in’. ‘Desire’ gets mixed up with ‘want’ and it is ‘want’ that is considered ‘bad’ in some religions. We absolutely need the drive, but it is the ‘wants’ that gets us into trouble. The difference between them is that Desire is the internal ‘emotion’, and the Wants are the names we give to the external thing/person/goal. The ‘cure’ for ‘wants’ is not to stop wanting/desiring; it is to identify for yourself what the internal state would be that you would feel if you had these wants. More below.

If our desire(s) is/are blocked, we again end up feeling trapped, and need to back up and enquire as to just what we are desiring and similarly, just what are we exploring.

Now, to the standard emotions.

I am going to use where we feel these emotions in our body as part of my definitions.

Fear and Anger.

Here we are ready to fight or run; both of these are felt internally in the same manner; as a tightening in the body, especially the gut. This is the ’fight or flight’ response, and the heart rate increases, our breath rate is up and so on. All the other functions which are apparent when we feel relaxed and safe, eg digestion and so on, are ditched under these situations.  

Society tends to dictate which of the 2 is more acceptable for the different genders. Fear is culturally acceptable for women and anger for men. But, basically, when 1 is there, so is the other, just hidden.

Our modern world provides plenty of opportunities for us to experience lesser versions of these states, which are felt as lesser degrees of said ‘tightening’. It is this tightening that we dislike when we can’t release it, ie very unrelaxing.

Guilt and Shame.

These 2 are very difficult to deal with. They are both felt as twists in the gut which feel horrible enough but can extend to nausea in the stomach if it’s worse. Extreme shame can leave one feeling actually ‘burnt up’. Basically, we avoid them like the plague, as in, do anything rather than face them. They feel disgusting.

These are the ones we really run from, and they are also the ones that really hang around.

Guilt arises from the perception of having done the wrong thing, while shame arises from the perception of failing to have done the right thing. This begs the question of just what are the wrong and the right thing, but I address this below in XXXX?, which see.

Sadness and Joy.

These are felt in the heart and of course, both of these are very important.

Sadness can be felt as a broken heart with a major affect on the body, while joy can bring great lightness and release from the tension brought by any of the -’ve emotions.

Love and Hate.

Well, we all know what Love is, don’t we. It’s that nice, warm feeling in the heart when we think of who/what we love, and hate is its opposite as we shut down our heart and armour it up to wish them ill and/or gone from us in whatever form.

From this we can see that we are actually wishing the loved one well, so that they are able to continue to be in our lives. (I will continue to use only the word ‘people/person’ in this discussion, but things are also relevant; and they are also attachments.)

Thus, so far, love is a warmth in the heart, which feels nice; delightful, in fact, plus a desire for more of this ‘nice’ in the future.

We want to spend time with this person because it feels good.

We want to know more about them and who they are, as in, we are interested in them.

We want to make sure we’ve got this person in our future, so we look to keep them or sustain them and protect them, so they stay around and we can be with them.

Keeping involves feeding them, nurturing, and generally sustaining and protecting them as required at whatever level is needed PEMS. How much we do this as physical effort and for how long depends on who is receiving this love. For those closest to us, especially children, there will be the greatest amount of effort involved.

Hence, we could use Time, Interest, Sustain and Protect (TISP) as an abbreviation for what we want to do to promote and maintain, our own internal feeling of Desire and Delight which we label Love.

Thus, I would argue that Love includes Action/do/give. We can feel love which is nice enough  for the feeler, but it also needs to engender an Action ie TISP, that we will desire to do.

Thus, my definition of Love is…

We will Desire and Delight (= Love as our own feeling) to give our TISP (= Love as action) to ‘the other’.

We want to Love Loving. This is why I feel that Desire is important.

This definition of Love=TISP becomes quite useful if you are an adult child trying to work out if your parent(s) loved you. (But, of course, all parents love their children!) The questions can then be; ‘How much Time, Interest, Sustain and Protect were rockin’ around the household when you were young?’

What happens when both parents have to work to support an enormous mortgage? How much Time do the children actually get? (Nor am I sure that labelling it ‘quality time’ will impress the children receiving it.) Not to mention Interest if both parents’ attention is with their work.

If your father roared at you, how protected did you feel? Were there any concessions to your smallness?, and so on.

Other useful questions would be how much TISP do you yourself actually give and to whom?

The whole point about TISP is that it is required for the growth of life. Children and animals grow when they are loved and have a more difficult time when bits of TISP are missing.

Thus, Love as TISP is needed for growth and Life; it is required for Life.

We get our definitions of love from our families and some of these ‘definitions’ are absolutely not love. Yes, it may be ‘love’ according to the family, but really what you are getting is ‘what they know of love’ and that may not be very much. But we may not know this until we can access our own anger at the lack of real love that we have received. We cope with this lack of love by disconnecting from our bodies, but our body knows what’s right for us, and sometimes the amount of anger and the lack of real love can surprise us greatly (because the body’s awareness is unconscious).

This is why I have been very careful about defining Love as TISP. Lots of people think they give and get love but it may have little relationship with TISP.

One of the trickier sorts of ‘love’ could be called ‘lerv’, which I could define as the glitter and illusion of love. But its giveaway is it just does not feed or satisfy us and we just want more and keep thinking that this is love, and becoming increasingly desperate for more from others. Giving TISP to ourselves does leave us feeling fed and satisfied. Yes, we want more, but we are actually growing in our receiving of it, and it is nourishing us. It also builds our Self-sufficiency. Hence I recommend finding out how to do it.

Love as Energy.

Love is an energy which we can feel with our bodies.

What then is this energy? It leads to life, creativity, growth, joy, truth, coherence, cohesion, integration, building up, wellness, glow, beauty and so on. Notice that giving it is good for both the giver and the receiver.

Then what is its opposite and what to name it? Un-love? Hate? Evil?

It leads to death, chaos, disintegration, tearing down, pain, sickness, suffering, lies, greyness, destruction, ruin, and so on; all of which seem to me to be the attributes of war and the ultimate in Un-love. ‘Live’ spelt backwards is ‘evil’.

Thus, the logic goes that Love leads to Life and Un-Love leads to Evil?

Then the actual energy continuum stretches from Love to non-Love to Un-Love, with an enormous range of possibilities between them, and life must encompass all of it.

And if…

God is Mind exploring Energy (as are we).

God has worked out how this energy works ie its rules. The making/manifestation of Life requires giving Love/TISP. This is what God understands and uses all the time. But, in under-standing this, God is actually subservient to the rules of this energy. It’s the energy that is coming first and God has worked out how to have the best time with this energy and experience, feeling ‘love-ly’ all the time. This is what we are looking for because we want to do that too.

So, this subservience looks like ‘being under’ but, that’s irrelevant if you love it, and this is really the answer to what or which comes first. We have such trouble with God having to be all-powerful, but this is not the kind of ‘power’ as we think of it that God has. I will deal with power issues in chapter 2.

This energy has rules.

By this I mean that there are consequences to how this energy is used. If you do ‘a’ then ‘b’ will follow. More on this later.

Serve. We have lost Serve.

To Serve Life means using your skills and attributes to ascertain and meet the needs of a new, or young or small organism in order to nurture it in a manner that maximizes its own potential and thus grow to serve others in its own right. You are giving TISP. Thus, I include Protect in this definition.

True Service requires a kind of Submission on your part to the needs of another organism that is dependent upon your care. It is not a ‘beneath’ (and if it feels like a ‘beneath’ something is wrong); it is an understanding that the seed requires your ‘keeping’ to be able to grow. True Service will absorb you and delight you, but is not necessarily always easy or playful. Finding what delights you to submit to and serve is a large reason to Explore and Desire.

Notice that as we Serve our children or Life or our creations, we are actually serving ourselves, and difficult as the process may be, it also provides de-light, fulfilment, and TSE and can be the ultimate selfishness really.

Till and Keep.

This is God’s only directive to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. So what then, do we think these might be?

To Till is ‘to turn the sod/earth’. There’s no way around the fact that this requires effort. Our Life in the physical world requires effort.

To Keep is to help Life to continue to continue. This requires Sustaining and Protecting Life and my argument is that this includes all Life. This does not mean exploit it to hell for whatever until it dies or wears out. Learning how to Till and Keep requires Time and Interest in so doing, which is for our ultimate benefit, and our children’s; hence ‘sustainability’.

Thus, we need TISP to Keep, and Effort to Till.

My suspicion is that Till and Keep = Serve, and my observation would be that we don’t like it very much. We would much rather be served by others than serve them.

The crux of this is then...

God loves creating Life and loves Her creations.

Notice that God does actually Love here. God is not just some vast mental Spirit ‘out there’. She is not Split. She has invested TISP in our welfare, and still does even if we are not aware of it. There has been a great deal of thought and awareness put into this business of creating Life on Earth.

Life is there to Serve us. God is delighted in us and in everything that we do, because She learns about Herself as we Explore. We are part of Her. She does not need anything from us. She knows from the rules of energy that we will ‘get there in the end’ because She did, and there is no end. The ‘getting it’ is realizing how to get to love self; all of self. And that is a big search.

We want to do the same.

We want to find out how..

●                   To ’Know thyself’, and really I’m talking about the InSelf which=GLS ,

●                   Which leads to Loving InSelf = Loving ‘the other’ (the person you don’t know),

●                   Which leads to Merge = Partnership with God,

●                   Which leads to Owning InSelf = Self Expression; our Heart’s Song.

●                   Which leads to conscious Creation from the heart ,

●                   Which leads to ‘feeding’  the growth of ‘the other’ and yourself,

●                   which leads to true self-esteem (TSE) and fulfillment and peace and rest; we ‘rest in peace’.

●                   So then you can do more….

Because there is great Desire and Delight in so doing.

Creativity, Fulfillment and TSE.

The Creativity that comes from the Heart is the result of the Inner Merge of outself and InSelf. It is the Expression of Self. [“In the beginning was the word”; but I wonder if this is a mis-translation of ‘in the beginning was expression’.] Remember, Explore is first, Expression is close behind as a major drive for us. We are God’s Expression of Her Self as is all Life. This is our great Search, as in, this is what we are searching for in life; our own unique Expression of Self. It is why we have life, and being incarnate on earth is the only way we can find it. Soul and Spirit are only together when we are here. We have the opportunity for great fulfillment when we are able to have children, but I am trying to say that having children is not the only way to find fulfillment or the only reason for our existence. The Inner Merge will provide it as well. Our failure to find this unique Expression of Self leads to an inner feeling of shame, frustration or disappointment which we may try to bury a long way down and look for other things in life to be proud of or ‘pride ourselves’ about, but the hole Is still there, and we try to fill it with whatever we can find. Feelings of jealousy or envy are an indicator of this ‘hole’.   

Remember, this stuff is unconscious, and as such, is terribly hard to get a handle on, or to name it. But, it is still there, even if we don’t know it, and however far down it is, we keep searching for full-fill-ment. We don’t feel ‘filled’ or ‘fed’ emotionally, and that’s the problem; we’re ‘hungry’ and the answer is not the physical act of eating. We search all the time and can find no rest and no peace. Thus I am saying that finding and owning our individual and unique Expression of Self is what leads us to fulfilment and rest and peace. This fulfilment is what I refer to as true self-esteem (TSE); it could also be called True Self Expression.

Notice also the similarity between finding peace and rest and our RIP of death. We are prone to think that the only way to find rest and peace is in death, but if we can find it while we are alive, that could feel very good. It is also true that Life absolutely wants this Expression of Self. It’s as if you have an instrument about which you know almost nothing. You get to work out what it is, and what it does and doesn’t do. Then you get to work out how to play it and practise using it (not all of us are good at this). Then you get to work out what music you want to play. Then you get to work out who you want to play it with. And then you get to be part of this great musical event; a wonderful symphony which you will love. But, it’s also true that it’s up to you. And it is also true that every single person has their own unique ‘voice’/instrument.

I will call it Creativity (’big C’) to separate it out from much of our creativity which although it can be valuable may not necessarily come out of Merge.

·      It is heartfelt; we are passionate about it. The heart centre is the point where our upper half meets our lower half.

·      We need to say it (express it) and we want to say it. (Doing so may not necessarily be easy or straightforward, however.) This expression is where our ‘needs’ and our ‘wants’ come together, which is also part of God’s Design. What we need to do and what we truly want to do are in fact exactly the same; fancy that!

·      Thus, the advice for looking for what you truly and most ‘heart-feltly’ wish to do is good advice. Look for Desire and Delight.

·      you will feel as if you have ‘come home’  when you do it

·      you will ‘grow’ in this, as will others, because it supports life; there is love here, and

·      as you ‘grow’ you will change; your Expression changes you as you grow into further expression.

And this does not stop. You will not find the end of it. Neither has God

Plain old ‘self expression’.

We are in fact kind of aware that ‘self expression’ is important, as is ‘having a voice’ although I wonder how much all of this is about unconsciously feeling as if we have neither voice nor expression in this day and age (see next chapter). Thus we think that if we voice our opinions we are expressing ourselves, but what we are expressing is our outself, which is not our Self at all, or only a very small part. We hope that if we express this stuff, we may be able to stop the ‘racket’ in our head of all our unexpressed ‘stuff’, but it doesn’t, and we get no peace. It simply adds to the gossip, opinion, facebook, twitter, sports talk, ('give them bread and circuses') and immense media ‘noise’ overwhelm. We don’t grow; it’s just ‘racket’ and it sends us deaf to our InSelf and ‘the other’.

What happens when we don’t heal the internal split? The answer is normal human life; good, bad and indifferent and wondering if there is any point to it all.

So now we turn to Healing the Split.