Just some more observations here. I am trying to describe unitive realities in a language of duality, so aspects may sound contradictory: alas, our language cannot well express a reality that is A and B at the same time: well ours is A (objective), B (subjective), C (quantum field or spiritual/energetic), three different ways of looking at the one fundamental reality. I am seeking a language which bridges subjectivity and objecivity, and the term I use for this emphasis is ‘psychosocial’. I ought to flesh these out and try and bring more clarity to this but finding it impossible to edit or read my own work at the moment…
What is an emotion? Emotions are neither personal or impersonal until we make them so. An emotion is wordless, but the ways we label them, judge and personalize them are social and endless. Emotions are psychosocial energetic manifestations of unresolved, inner systemic tensions, but if you can be emotionally free thus not fear them, you can see they are also a language: and if you can master them, they can become a radical, productive power in themselves. However, emotions are far more usually in bondage to the idea, to the norm, to what other people think, thus keeping us wedded to the emptiness of non-being. Why? Because emotions are socially and historically enslaved beingness. They relate to human evolutionary-historical work – it is what produces and then churns the world. It’s what in the East they call karma. It’s what I see as part of a social-historical emotional structure and structuring force of life.
An emotion is a form of unmediated truth, until it has been labelled. Experienced in its pure state, an emotion is life tasting itself: an emotionally meaningful world is life tasting the world – tasting itself in this world. It is this essential meaning, that which connects self and world, subject and object, that is currently missing in the West. That which is missing is the real subject (what we think of as a subject is actually its objective face – I.e. subject as object, subject over there in objectivity, not subject in here looking out).
Obstruction of emotion changes its character, for example from a state of readiness to one of waiting, which contains a mild ‘straining at the leash’ of frustration (one could describe all our various emotions in this way, as distortions of an original love and wonder): so you have a kind of inner air of tension, an ‘edge’ (maybe hard edges or soft): if it is of a certain undisciplined (Western) type it pounces – it becomes a rebel: an impulse: it is a life in itself – it has its own agenda, its own aim which is always self-fulfilment.
A ‘self’ is a kind of ‘space station’ for all these stray cosmological, evolutionary energies we call, variously, emotions, feelings, consciousness, being, matter and so forth.
When we are ready or waiting, we are always waiting or estranging ourselves from ourselves for the purposes of a desire that is not present: and even where we can’t locate that desire directly, if we really looked into it we’d see fear, and that actually our waiting is more about fear, and our fear is more about our caution, and our caution is more about our desire to experience pleasure and avoid pain – so the basis of fear and desire are not separate.
Fear is desire that has tested the waters and knows what it is up against. Fear is desire wedded to the trauma of its own negation.
On negative thinking: the negative part is always true – the feeling tone – and the form is always strategic, i.e. it is a means to an end and cannot be the truth of itself. It is a way of asserting its emotional, wordless truth-content (‘force’) into a social form therefore a form of social life, so as an example: you are so quick and ready to say ‘OK I’m hopeless’ or ‘this is hopeless’, you never discover the truth behind such experiences: this is no small inconvenience! Because such thoughts, unchallenged, are allowed now to repeat ad infinitum, thus further underscoring the old thought-pattern ‘I’m hopeless’ coming round again to depress you over and over. It becomes your reality. And because you are so reluctant to see what’s before you, preferring to judge yourself (as wrong) or try to deny or change yourself (‘control’ yourself), then your life is populated with judgement and strategies of self-escape from a reality, a self, you don’t even understand. And you are insensitive to boot: yes – because you have your eyes closed. You are asleep, and it leads to your attitude, your stumbling block – ‘i give up’ – as both a cause and effect of your unhappiness. Yes – this is you making your bed and lying in it, night after night, day after day. This is why Westerners are depressed – you don’t need to live like this anymore. My advice is to recognize the truth of this and change the record, as these unhappy thought-streams flow through as all, accumulating, generation unto generation.
Eagle Nebuli: this is real yaknow!
Everything is either good or bad, and the true measure is an emotional one. When there is a social hegemony, emotion takes its measure between what is and what was expected: the emotion reacts to the actual concrete social obstruction, or the mental form (idea) that represents it. The emotional reaction to an idea represents an inner social hegemony – subjection to the limited social agent, ego. However, this alters nothing of the fact that under ego, emotions do express a truth content: they express the truth of how life is, which is to say, how life feels in a particular space and time, as perceived by ego.
Any emotion that is not presently fuelling an activity is there, on ‘standby’: if we are content we are in a state of readiness, and when we are not content with the situation we are said to be frustrated. When the situation is a mere means to an ends we are perhaps waiting, and/or working, and/or bored: so there is the activity (form) and the emotional energy (force) allocated to it, plus any free emotional energy that abounds in the system. It is this free, orphaned energy I am referring to here: there is something very profound to note about them. The emotional energy coalesces and operates within as separative, living beings that may pounce at any moment on an opportunity to discharge themselves, right in, through or around our volitional activity: this is why Westerners are ‘jumpy’ – owing to these orphaned packages of emotional energy, as we get the subjective stuffing knocked out of our objective experience of being. They operate like alive, separative beings which seek to work themselves out in a reactive, I.e. programmatic or teleological way: for example as a flower bud reacts to sunlight in a way anticipated by the seed. So they are like simple life. They are not us: if we want to merge them we need to recognize this – if we want to discharge them we ought to do so, obviously, without guilt, otherwise we are at the same time taking ownership of them. The crucial thing is to watch for what happens to this ‘free energy’ when it is going unclaimed.
Desire is the seed of emotion: emotion, the seed of action and creation, and each desire is its own centre, its own worth. The vehicle for the evolution, birth, delivery and fulfilment of the desire is the I or object or self, depending on where from the human continuum you look from. The ego here would be a mere shell: it is that which experiences desire, which manifests as if from darkness, and thus births it through expression.
There is a source deeper than ego out of which ego, emotions, and pure awareness flow. What would you call this center once you discover it? I go by the notion of soul, which in the West has been long buried under ego, but, just as it was getting darkest before dawn, we are now finally witnessing its sudden, and after a century of Western horror, pretty miraculously unexpected ascendancy right now.
Nothing worth achieving has been achieved by us but through the force of our human emotion: not even a thought can produce itself without the desire to do so, and so too of all volitional acts.
Love and fear can morph into each other with ease: it is thought that determines whether love expresses itself as itself or its absence.
If you find something emotional, you find it meaningful: it engages the heart and the brain: it produces a moment of subjective wholeness, within which the truth about this subject with its object and emotion is experienced. The emotion is that lightning which bridges the world between the you that you are and the you that appears. This is the essence of beauty, which links it to the divine as love.
Emotions work through all of us. They precede the self: they are social-historical and energetic, and they work through us – we are their works. Indeed they are one, but they split from the many streams of beingness that, reconciled, we have traditionally called ‘the godhead’. What you feel wordlessly and negatively in the shadow of your real self is the future, is social humanity manifesting itself through you in your actions, moment to moment. This kind of knowing too is returning today.
From www.aaronasphar.wordpress.com
And sorry, I had to put this somewhere…(Anthon Semenov – ‘Society’)
