The Three Brothers: Part 2 The Feelings

The Three Brothers: A First Look at Self-Awareness

Part 2: Am I My Feelings?

Now let’s take an introductory look at “feelings”, the second lamb in the pen, or the part of us that is often within our daily awareness, unlike the instinctual functioning of the body, with all its natural marvels that remain hidden. When do we notice feelings or emotions? Wait, what are feelings or emotions? …We have to know what we’re talking about.

When you say “I feel….X”, there are two things: “your Awareness” and your awareness of “something”. But this “something” sits in the middle of the body and the thinking mind. That is, the position of this little lamb in between its two brothers means that it can be pushed from one side or from the other. When it receives a push from the instinctual or moving part, these are the physical feelings, like when we say “I feel tired”, “I feel sick” or “I feel pain”, and other states of bodily aches, soreness or discomfort. Or “I feel joy” because a tingling sensation has passed through your body upon seeing something beautiful. When pushed from the third lamb, the thinking part of us, an emotion is generated by a thought, and this emotion may be termed a positive reaction or a negative reaction. Our definition of a feeling or an emotion, therefore, is a charge of energy that flows through our “nervous system” or our mind, and comes to our awareness, or sense of “me”. This energy cannot come from nowhere. It has to come from either a bodily state, a physical condition, or from a mental state or a thought or series of thoughts. Therefore, when we get up in the morning and go through our day, feelings come and go because we have physical reactions, and thoughts, and reactions to thoughts, and reactions to the thoughts, emotions and actions of others, filtered through the screen of our minds, which unfortunately have habitual ingrained patterns and conditioned responses, mostly outside our Awareness, only becoming conscious to us when they have already made their appearance in reaction to a given situation, whatever it may be. 

Now lacking a set of “systematised thoughts” or some sense of “right and wrong”, or a life philosophy, creed or religious teaching that is actually followed and adhered to, it would seem that just about “anything goes” in the field of emotions. All possible emotions are taken as valid or normal, and a description of supposedly “human emotions” is a complicated affair, what with contrasting basic emotions, emotions by groups, wheels of emotions and other classifications. But some categories talk about “negative thoughts” when defining emotions, so this is a clue to actually seeing what an “emotion” is. On this blog, we are interested not in the thousands of theories and categories that have been put forward, but in practical, everyday things as seen from the inside – inside our minds, with a modicum of Self-Awareness or presence to able to see them and analyse them.

Below is a “modified list” of the original 48 terms used for HUMAINE's proposal for EARL (Emotion Annotation and Representation Language). It’s good enough for our purposes. After re-arranging them, we have left only 18 “negatives” and 19 “positives”. And the order of negatives and positives also more or less coincides as opposites or dissimilars. The reason for this will be given later in other articles. For the time being, this list can help us to do an exercise that might be interesting.

Everyone is free to discover this for her or himself. Pick a day, print out the list of “emotions” given here, and mark down how many times you feel what you think is described by the terms used below. Add up the check marks at the end of the day, or the next morning, to see what your “emotional state” has been like on that day.

It is not an easy task. You may not even be able to do it. Or if you do decide to do it, you may often forget throughout the day, or you may feel embarrassed to be seen doing something crazy like registering your own feelings! What about my spontaneity? My freedom to feel in response to whatever happens? Test it out and see if you are really free or not. Maybe marking recently-sensed emotions every half hour throughout the day will help. See what you can do.

Emotion felt

(one ✔ each time you feel it up to 20 times a day)

total

Timepoints:

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

Fear (fright, panic)

Despair (disappointed)

Impatience

Covetousness (envy)

Sadness (hurt, sorrow)

Boredom

Anxiety

Annoyance

Irritation

Anger (wrath)

Frustration

Nervousness (worry)

Jealousy

Disgust

Contempt (hate)

Hostility (bitter)

Guilt (shame)

Pride (vanity)

Courage

Trust (confidence)

Calmness (serenity)

Generosity (thanks)

Delight

Joy

Excitement

Happiness (contentedness)

Tenderness (caring)

Love

Compassion

Satisfaction

Interest

Pleasure

Friendliness

Surprise (amazement)

Amusement

Hope

Longing (for good)

TOTAL NEGATIVES:                  TOTAL POSITIVES:

Description of timepoints, situations or Notes:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Next, you can do another exercise. Take any of the emotions and see if you can will yourself to feel them. Easy right? Maybe you will start thinking about the word, the feeling, some past experience that you may have had involving this feeling, but can you actually make yourself feel a given feeling? Can you notice that you feel, say “frustration”, and then immediately switch to an opposite feeling, like “delight”? If it is possible for you, what is involved in this? You have to have a thought and then an opposite thought. You have to decide whether the thought and opposite thought is really “you” – and operating through your Awareness – or whether it’s just another unconscious reaction, outside the reach of your Awareness.

You might start asking yourself where these feelings or emotions come from? Known or unknown sources? Automatic reactions or conscious choices? Are they within my power, or do they just happen to me, depending on my circumstances?

Then if you want to think about or analyse certain emotions and the benefits you get from them, that’s another story. What benefit do I get from feeling anger? What are the advantages of feeling anxiety? Feeling surprise, if the unexpected thing is pleasant, sounds good; but feeling surprise if you’re being presented with someone’s anger doesn’t sound so good. Feeling guilty is not necessarily a bad thing if what you feel shameful for is a recognition of wrongdoing that you intend to remedy.

So we have to look at emotions and feelings from an entirely different way, which is:

1) where they come from (conscious or unconscious)

2) how they affect our well-being (for better or worse)

3) how they affect others (for better or worse)

4) what results we get from them (good or bad, ie, whether they are appropriate to the situation or not, effective or not)

5) what they actually do to our minds (benefit or harm). In other words, an emotion uses energy to produce work. What kind of work is it? And “who” is doing it?

It would be really great if we could get say 10 people to do this, send in the (anonymous) results, and then see what we can gain from this sharing exercise and report on it. How about it, would you like to share in this little project?