Is something I’m beginning to come to terms with.
One of the things that has always been a thought presence for me is a disdain for emotional indulgence.
The more that I feel into this presence, though… The more it doesn’t really make sense. And it becomes increasingly clear that the thought presence itself is an emotional indulgence.
For one… I cannot come up with any reason whatever to do anything at all other than an emotional one. I feel compelled by excitement, desire, curiosity, and reprelled by fear, anxiety, sadness, anger… All of these are at their core just animal emotional appeasement apparatus. Nothing more and nothing less than a crude system of navigating and surviving in an arbitrary world.
Except that’s not what I believe it be, really. That’s a materialist point of view.
My relationship to my emotions has changed so fundamentally it’s difficult to put into words. I didn’t believe that general audiences have an awareness of their emotions and feelings. Which is the way that I actually remember being. I remember having to no awareness of my emotions. I used to think, and really believe that my emotions were a result of thoughts in my head.
That notion, I know, is completely laughable. I know that the general audience will take great exception to this. For, how could it be? That when I read a book, I am thinking of a scene and generating emotional experience therby.
Except you’ve never examined that theory. I know you haven’t, because you are making the argument. It’s a flawed argument. One cannot attribute causation based on the very perception that one uses to become aware of both cause and effect. It’s self refuting.
Taking my own experience; I believed that I became sad when I imagined my mother dying. And, like clockwork, I believed that I felt shame and guilt when I did not feel any grief whatever at the thought of my dad dying.
Except, why in the world would I induce grief and sadness and Shame and grief in myself by imagining such things? And, is it even possible to create such deeply affecting emotions with a thought or clear imagination? Wouldn’t it be far more plausible that, since emotions arise out of a relationship to something outside of us in the world, that the emotions are there, I experience the sadness and grief and loss, and only afterward does my mind come up with a story to explain it?
This scenario is bolstered further when taking the context; that my parents were selfish and vain; blaming me as the child for every problem so that in my appropriate child consciousness, I had to be the problem. There is no room at all for a child to reject the identity box created for him by his caregivers. If the parent-gods say that he is the problem, then that is what he is in his awareness and conscious mind. Whatever emotions and feelings he has, the mind creates acceptable narratives for within the framework given him.
With this basic fact in mind, my relationship to the outside world was a sense of loss of my mother- that she simply was not there, not present, and had in fact rejected me since infancy. That is an emotional experience that stays in my body and is experienced directly- it is only the mind-narrative which butts in when this emotional feeling becomes too strong to suppress from conscious awareness.
Likewise, my father is a sadist. He enjoys hurting me and blames me for being bad so that he must punish me. The shame and guilt for having been three reason for my own torture bled through in a less convoluted way. I was more consciously connected to the fact that my dad was mean than to any notion that my mother rejected me. So my mind didn’t have to make up any particular story about my dad. I felt the pain of the shame and guilt for not loving him- for even though I knew he was mean, I still had to take on the burden of being wrong for not loving him.
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