Simple emotions and existential meaning

For some, losing an argument can be life-threatening. For others, tending a flower-bed into full bloom can be the epitome of heaven. One look of intense recognition can be the turn-around you'll never get again. We're told to beware of using cruel words. One of them could be the last straw.

We encounter simple feelings every day on an unexpected basis. Someone came up and interrupted the conversation between a colleague and myself. I was deeeply angered. On the internet I saw a funny picture which made me giggle for hours. I heard a bird-call and was given an immense peace that not only was all well, but that all will be well. I hear a quote from the Bible read in a particular tone, and fall into a deep depression over human folly, and then I hear the same quote in a different tone, and my soul grasps a truth for which I have been thirsting for a long time.

Simple emotions can reach very deeply, and the pattern for this is set largely in childhood. It was put to me, very early in childhood, that I was excluded from God's mercy unless I went through the correct initiation part of which had to be intellectual surrender. I don't mind surrendering, if that's the right word, to God in this way, but I never surrendered to the people who were demanding this of me. They weren't speaking of God, in any case, but of their own needs. The point I'm making is that I connected certain kinds of emotions with an understanding of God which automatically took me to deep places of understanding and feeling. Deep, intense feelings and daily activities connect very easily, as road rage shows us.

What we deem to be understandings are living patterns of emotions. If you still feel the trauma of watching a squirrel getting run over when you were a child, that's no feeling in a museum. That will link to many, many emotional triggers and expectations on a daily basis. Experiencing a regularly and violently drunk father, or a usually vacant mother, or a daily bully results in complex patterns of a base state of self-awareness. In general a base state of self awareness has to be complex.

So the argument goes that all simple emotions are short cuts to the existential platform which is a turbulent well. Yet the well can be read. The book Time Light by Bryan Hubbard is helpful in respect of doing this. Thank you, Bryan.

For me, emotions veer from one intensity to the next, the intent of which is truth-seeking. I am not a good light conversationalist. Each momentary event is a direct two-way path to the core of awareness.

The core itself is peaceful, yet the affective effects of the core are not, because we have to learn how to align ourselves to the core.

More on the core in blogs to come...