Category Archives: Emotions

The body reacts to information about the environment.

Information which we are not consciously concerned. That same information is highly important to the body’s integrity, however, and therefore to our own mental stance.

On cellular levels the body has a picture not only of its own present condition, but of all those aspects of the physical environment that affect its own condition. In its own codified fashion it is not only aware of local weather conditions, for example, but of all those world patterns of weather upon which the local area is dependent. It then prepares itself ahead of time to meet whatever challenges of adjustment will be necessary. It weighs probabilities; it reacts to pressures of various kinds.

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We are aware of pressure through touch, but in another version of that sense entirely, the cells react to air pressure. The body knows to the most precise degree the measurements involving radiation of all kinds. At one level, the body itself has a picture of reality of its own, upon which our conscious reality must be based — and yet the body’s terms of recognition or knowledge exist in terms so alien to our conscious ones as to be incomprehensible. Our conscious order, therefore, rides upon this greater circular kind of knowledge.

Generally speaking, the psyche has the same kind of instant overall comprehension of psychological events and environments as our body has of physical ones. It is then aware of our overall psychological climate; locally, as it involves us personally, and in world terms.

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Our actions take place with such seeming smoothness that we do not realize the order involved. A volcanic eruption in one corner of the world will ultimately affect the entire earth in varying degrees. An emotional eruption will do the same thing on another level, altering the local area primarily but also sending out its ripples into the mass psychological environment. The psyche’s picture of reality, then, would be equally incomprehensible to the conscious mind because of the intense focus upon singularity that our usual consciousness requires.

Our dreams often give us glimpses, however, of the psyche’s picture of reality in that regard.

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We become aware of probabilities, as actions sometimes that seem to have no connection with our own, but which are still related to them in that greater scheme of interaction that ordinarily we do not comprehend.

When we grow from a baby to an adult we do not just grow tall: we grow all about oneself, adding weight and thickness as well. To some extent events “grow” in the same fashion, and from the inside out, as we do. In a dream we are closer to those stages in which events are born. In our terms they emerge from the future and from the past, and are given vitality because of creative tension that exists between what we think of as our birth and our death. We make sentences out of alphabet of our language. We speak these or write them, and use them to communicate. Events can be considered in the same fashion, as psychological sentences put together from the alphabet of the senses — experience sentences that are lived instead of written, formed into perceived history instead of just being penned, for example, into a book about history.

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Our language to some extent programs our experience. There is a language of the senses, however, that gives us biological perception, experience, and communication. It forms the nature of the events that we can perceive. It puts experience together so that it is physically felt. All of our written or verbal languages have to be based upon this biological “alphabet.” There is far greater leeway here than there is in any of our spoken or written languages.

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I use the word “cord” to express the source out of which such languages spring. There are many correlations of course between our language and our body. Our spoken language is dependent upon our breath, and even written language is dependent upon the rapidity with which messages can leap the nerve endings. Biological cords then must be the source for physical languages, but the cords themselves arise from the psyche’s greater knowledge as it forms the physical mechanism to begin with.

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Dreams are a language of the psyche, in which man’s and woman’s nature merges in time and out of it. Man and woman have sense experiences. He/she runs, though he or she lies in bed. He/she shouts though no word is spoken. He/she still has the language of the flesh, and yet that language is only opaquely connected with the body’s mechanisms. He/she deals with events, yet they do not happen in his or her bedroom, or necessarily in any place that he or she can find upon awakening.

Daily language deals with separations, divisions, and distinctions

To some extent our language organizes our feelings and emotions. The language of the psyche, however, has at its command many more symbols that can be combined in many more ways, say, than mere letters of an alphabet.

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In daily language, objects have certain names. Obviously the names are not the objects, but symbols for them. Even these symbols, however, divide us as the perceiver from the rest of the world, which becomes objectified. We can ourselves understand far more about the nature of the psyche, for example, than we think we can. To do this, however, we must leave our daily language behind at least momentarily, and pay attention to our own feelings and imagination. Our language tells us that certain things are true, or facts, and that certain things are not. Many of our most vivid and moving feelings do not fit the facts of our language, so we disregard them.

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These emotional experiences, however, often express the language of the psyche. It is not that an understanding of our psyche is beyond us: It is usually that we try to understand or experience it in one of the most difficult ways — Through the use of daily language.

The imagination belongs to the language of the psyche. For this reason it often gives experiences that conflict with the basic assumptions upon which daily language is based. Therefore the imagination is often considered suspect.

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We might stand alone in our doorway, or in a field — or even on a street, surrounded by many people in a large city — look upward, suddenly struck by the great sweeping clouds above, and feel oneself a part of them. We might momentarily experience a great yearning or feel our own emotions suddenly filled with that same moving majesty, so that for an instant we and the sky seem to be one.

Mundane language tells us, as we think with its patterns, that our imagination is running away with us, for obviously we are one thing and the sky is another. Us and the sky do not equate — or as friend Spock would say: “It is not logical.” The feeling swiftly fades after bemusing us briefly. We might be spiritually refreshed, yet as a rule we would not consider the feeling to be a statement of any legitimate reality, or a representation of our psyche’s existence.

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The emotions and the imagination, however, give us our closest contact with other portions of our own reality. They also liberate our intellect so that its powers are not limited by concepts it has been taught are true. Instead, such concepts are relatively true — operationally true. For example, the example, the physical laws that we are familiar with operate where we are. They are true, relatively speaking. In those terms we are one person physically objectified, staring upward in the scene just mentioned at an objectified sky. We weigh so many pounds, tilt our head at such-and-such an angle to peer upward at the skyscape, and physically speaking, we can be categorized.

In those terms the clouds could be physically measured, and shown to be so far above us — composed of, say, winds of a certain velocity, ready to pour down a precise amount of rain or whatever. Physically speaking then, obviously, we are separate from the clouds, and so in those terms our momentary experience of uniting with them would seem to be a lie — at least not factual, or “the product of our imagination.”

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Instead, such an event is a direct expression of the psyche’s knowledge. It senses its quite legitimate identification with nature, exercises its mobility, and feel its own emotional power leap. Our emotions in such a case would be momentarily magnified — raised, say, to a higher power. There are multitudinous such examples that could be given, as in each day our psyche presents evidence of its own greater being — evidence that we are taught to overlook, or to dismiss because it is factual.

What is imaginary is not true: We are taught this as children. The imagination, however, brings us into connection with a different kind of truth, or a different framework in which experience can be legitimately perceived. The larger truths of the psyche exist in that dimension.

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From it we choose physical facts. Thoughts are real. Only some thoughts turn into physical actions, of course. Despite distorted versions of that last statement, however, there is still obviously a distant difference, say, between the though of adultery and its physical expression.

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We cannot treat thoughts and imagination in such a literal manner, nor in a large respect should we try to “guard our thoughts” as if they were herds of animals that we wanted to keep purely bred. Our thoughts do form our reality. If we do not fear them, however, they create their own balances. The psyche dwells in a reality so different from the world we usually recognize that there good and evil, as we think of them, are also seen to be as operationally or relatively true as the difference between the perceiver and the object perceived.