Chapter 5
Feelings and Emotions
In some of the previous chapters, I have been promising to explain the difference between feelings and emotions. Well, now is the time.
Feelings are certain natural, built-in sensations that we all have and which are completely natural (and unavoidable) to experience. Some of these feelings are pleasant, some are unpleasant. Some of the pleasant ones are happiness, joy, love, and satisfaction. Some of the unpleasant feelings are loneliness and rejection. The common denominator of feelings is that they are a direct result of the current situation. If you gain attention and approval from someone, you will feel pleasure, joy, and happiness. If someone or something gives you pleasure, you will probably feel love for that person or thing. If you are alone for a while, you will start to feel loneliness (you don't have to wallow in it, however). If someone tells you they do not like you, you will feel rejected and disapproved of. The situation exists and we feel a sensation that is connected with it.
Emotions, on the other hand, are a secondary or indirect response to our environment, based on how our inner thought processes respond to it. A combination of thoughts that are in conflict with each other or with reality produces a mental energy that is undirected or misdirected. This mental energy cannot easily be used and therefore produces a generally unpleasant sensation we call emotion. Typical emotions are fear, anger, anxiety, and guilt.
There are specific thoughts that lead to each emotion. Studying which thoughts lead to which emotions can have several benefits. First, knowing which thoughts cause which emotions can allow the awareness to be on the lookout for these thoughts and recognize them when they come into the awareness. It can then not accept them unquestioningly, just as it has learned to not accept thoughts discussed in previous chapters. This will prevent them from being put into the action center, and will decrease the amount of emotions we experience. (Note: Some people refer to "negative emotions." I am declining to use that term here simply because all emotions are negative as we are defining them here. That is, all emotions are a response to inappropriate and mistaken thoughts that are accepted by the awareness. All emotions generate violent or destructive mental energy which has no place to be effectively channeled to, and are therefore destructive to the body and mind. Therefore, all emotions are negative. Please be aware that we are using the term emotions here in a specific sense that is slightly different from the common usage of the word. Some people include feelings in the things we are calling emotions here, which we do not.)
A secondly reason for studying which thoughts produce which emotions is that it can help us be aware of what thoughts are slipping past the awareness by observing what emotions we are feeling. That is, if we find ourselves feeling certain emotions (note that we are feeling emotions, not having or being those emotions. Remember chapter 1), we can look back at what thoughts caused those emotions. This can serve as a sort of biofeedback on our thoughts that will help us be aware of thoughts that we may have missed as they passed through the awareness while it was not on the job.
The first emotion to understand is fear. Fear is caused by a combination of two thoughts. The first is that something unpleasant is going to happen soon. "Soon" may be in a few seconds, hours, days, or years, but the person feeling fear thinks of it as "soon" (usually "too soon"). The second thought is that you must do something about this situation NOW. Both of these thoughts are usually in error. The first is in error because we cannot really know the future with total certainty. That is, we may know that it is fairly likely that something is going to happen in the future but we cannot know with absolute certainty that anything (except possibly death and taxes) will happen. We also cannot be sure that it is going to be as bad (unpleasant) as we think it is. We may be building it up in our minds to unrealistic proportions. The second thought, that we must do something NOW, is always wrong when we are experiencing fear. That is, fear is always caused by trying to do something about a future situation before it is possible. We envision the situation as we expect it to exist in the future. We try to respond to this situation now. The body releases chemicals such as adrenaline that generate tremendous amounts of energy in the body to deal with this situation. But the body has no use for this energy, because there is nothing for the body to do about this situation, because the situation does not presently exist. Thus, all this tremendous energy is flowing through the body with nowhere to go. The person feels great urgency, a need to do something, to run away or fight someone. This is the sensation of fear.
For example, lets say that a person is due to give a speech in front of a large crowd. The person has the thought that he will make a mistake and embarrass himself, or that the crowd will be hostile to his speech. He has the thought that he wants to run away from this hostile crowd. He has all this energy mobilized to run away from these dangerous people. However, he has not yet made any mistakes in his speech and the crowd is not yet hostile. Perhaps he has not even started his speech yet. In fact, the speech may be days in the future. Therefore, he has no place to run and nobody to run from at the moment. This sensation of wanting to do something about an unpleasant situation before there is anything that can be done is fear.
The second emotion to understand is anxiety. Anxiety is very similar to fear. In anxiety, the person also has a thought that something terrible is about to happen or is happening now. As in fear, the person has the thought that they must do something about this terrible thing. In anxiety, however, the person has no idea what to do about the situation. With fear, the person had a pretty good idea what they wanted to do (usually either run away or fight someone). With anxiety, the person still has the thought that they want to do something about the situation, but does not know what to do. Sometimes, the reason the person does not know what to do is because they do not know what the terrible thing that is about to happen is. That is, they have a suspicion that something is about to go wrong, but they do not know what it is and therefore do not know what to do about it. As in fear, the body generates tremendous amounts of energy to do something about the situation, but the body has no way to expend this energy. Anxiety can be described as unfocused or uncrystalized fear.
The third emotion to understand is anger. Anger is caused by the thoughts that something unpleasant has happened to you and that someone or something specific is to blame. That is, if that someone or something else would behave differently, you would be happy. It involves the thought that you must make that person behave differently. Again, the body releases lots of adrenaline and related chemicals into the system in order to give you the energy to go force that person to behave differently. Often you have only a fuzzy idea or exactly what you are going to do to this person. Sometimes you feel that by beating this person up, or even killing them, the situation will improve. This is especially true when the person has made you feel inferior (powerless) or rejected you. By severely injuring that person or even killing them, you can at least feel that they are no longer more powerful than you or can no longer reject you. Occasionally, you have only a fuzzy idea of exactly who the person is that is to blame. You just are angry at the world. Sometimes you are angry at a situation or inanimate object. The principle is the same. The body still generates energy for you to use to fight this person, situation, or inanimate object. Remember that when the awareness is asleep, it is accepting and acting on suggestions coming up from the intellectual and emotional centers. These centers are just providing these suggestions based on the closest situation in their data files. Often that information says that when you have had something unpleasant happen to you, someone has probably done something to you, and you should punish that person to make them stop. The sleeping awareness will pass on this suggestion to the action center and it will try to hurt someone, even if that someone has not been clearly identified.
Hatred is similar to anger. The difference is that in anger, you actively feel (at some level of the mind) that you intend to take action against someone soon. In hatred, you have accepted that you cannot do anything in the immediate future, but you intend to do something if and when you get the chance. It is basically anger put on hold. The body still generates energy to hurt someone, but it puts it on hold. The thought is then put into the intellectual center to be on the lookout for ways to hurt the target of the hatred. This makes for easy associations with violence within the intellectual center.
Guilt is when you decide that you are to blame for the current situation, rather than someone else. You try to punish yourself, rather than someone else. This is certainly easier than punishing someone else (someone else will probably resist the punishment), but it is a rather unpleasant solution.
Depression is caused when you feel that an unpleasant situation exists, and there is nobody at all to blame (not even yourself) and nothing that you can do about it (like run away or fight). Instead, the suggestion being followed is that since the situation cannot be made any better, you may as well make it worse, or at least make it seem worse by finding worse and worse ways of looking at the situation and describing it. At least that way, people will pity you or you can wallow in self-pity. People who are accepting the depression thoughts will usually actively resist any attempt to make things better, since if the situation gets better they will miss out on all that pity. Suggestions like, "Why don't you do something to cheer yourself up, like go to a funny movie?" will fall on deaf ears.
As an exercise for this week, let's be on the lookout for any of these thoughts that generate emotions. We can look at them as suggestions and decide whether we want to act on them. In all cases, we can look at (and not identify with) the suggestions that the current situation is so bad that we MUST do something about it. Looking at things in terms of relative unpleasantness rather than absolute good or bad will go a long way toward reducing the urgency of the emotions. We can also look out for specific thoughts that lead to specific emotions.
For fear, be aware of any things that enter the awareness that suggest that something terrible is going to happen. Look at whether you really KNOW that this is going to happen. If it seems fairly certain that the event will happen, look at whether you really KNOW that it is going to be as bad as you are imagining it. Most importantly, look out for thoughts that suggest that you must do something NOW about this situation. That is, look at whether you are living in the NOW. When the thought comes into the awareness to run away from this situation, look at whether there is anything to run away from RIGHT NOW, or are you simply envisioning something that may appear sometime in the future. If the person, thing, or event that you want to run away from is not present now, you can realize that the suggestion to run away (or fight) is not practical. In that case, you can make the decision not to accept the suggestion to run (or fight) now, and therefore not to generate all that energy right now. Practice living in the NOW and responding to things that exist right now, rather than the things your intellectual center is showing you could happen in the future. If the event does happen in the future, you can always accept the suggestion to run away or fight then, when you actually have something you can do. By not generating all that energy until you can use it, you will save yourself having all that energy running through you with no place to go.
The same basic idea goes for anxiety. If you feel that something bad is about to happen, look at how sure you are that it will happen and how sure you are that it will be that bad. When the suggestion enters the awareness that you must do SOMETHING about this situation, look at that suggestion. Does the suggestion give you any idea WHAT to do about the situation? If so, is it something you can do? If you look at the suggestion and see that it does not offer anything specific you can do, you may see that it has no value to try to do SOMETHING. If you see that the thought is just a suggestion that popped into your awareness and that it has no value, the awareness will not accept it, the suggestion will not be passed on to the action center, and you will feel less anxiety.
For anger and hatred, look at the suggestion that someone is to blame for the situation. Is there really one person or thing that is to blame? That is, was the situation really caused by a single individual or group or thing, or was it a combination of events that lead up to it? Is it possible for this one person that you are blaming to fix the situation or make it better? If not, there is little use in your trying to take action against that person. If it is possible for that person to fix things (make the situation more pleasant again), is there a snowball's chance in Hell that you will be able to persuade them to do it by arguing with them, or even by violence? If the answer to any of these questions is no, you might look at the suggestions that you blame them and try to get them to change as just suggestions, and decide whether you really want to expend the effort and make the personal sacrifices (which will be discussed in the next chapter) to act on these suggestions. Remember that if the awareness can separate itself from these suggestions and decide not to accept them, they will not be put into the action center.
If you detect the thoughts that lead to guilt entering the awareness, look at these suggestions carefully. Is there any benefit from punishing yourself? If you decide that you really do not want to do the thing that you were starting to feel guilty about, you can stop doing it. It is not necessary to punish yourself to get yourself to stop doing it, just stop doing it. And if you decide not to stop doing the thing, what is the benefit in punishing yourself for doing it if you are still going to do it? You might as well go ahead and do it, and enjoy it. Be aware of thoughts that say you should (there is that "should" again) punish yourself by feeling guilty, and decide if you want to do that.
As for depression, watch out for thoughts entering the awareness that suggest that you make the situation worse. That is, watch out for thoughts that look for the bad side of a situation. When you detect such thoughts, ask yourself if you really want to make things worse, or if you would prefer to make things better (even a little better). You can talk yourself into thinking things are worse, or you can look at the bright side and make the most of the situation, and maybe even do something to make the situation better. The choice is up to you.
Spend a week or so practicing being on the lookout for the thoughts that lead to these destructive emotions. In the next chapter, we will discuss emotions some more. For now, getting some practice at being aware of the thoughts that create these emotions can be well worthwhile.