Awake: Chapter 14 Notes

I hated this chapter. I don't think emotions are either important or unimportant. They're brain noise, just like thoughts. Sometimes they're useful, often they're the product of a system that evolved long ago and that doesn't understand the modern world. It's doing its best to help but a lot of the time it leads us astray because it's assumptions are based on life in a small group that lives in a cave.

Much like thoughts we need to learn that our emotions are not us.

An Emotion Is Never Wrong

Truth.

an emotion doesn’t have a truth value

Truth.

that it has a right to be

Untruth. It has no rights, it just is.

What you do know is that the emotion is valid and has a right to be a part of your experience.

Wooshit. It's not valid and it has no rights. It just is.

The correct question is, is the emotion useful or not useful?

PS. Just because it's not useful doesn't mean you push it away. It's trying to help you, it's just a bit mixed up about how to do that. (Anthro!)

When we trust the emotion of anger, we know intuitively how to structure our boundaries

He's saying anger is harmless and then explain how we can avoid it. Why do we need to avoid it if it's harmless.

When we understand this, we can see that there is nothing negative about the emotion of anger at all. If anything could be called negative, it would be our misunderstanding of the emotion and the disallowance and denial of its intelligence.

Wooshit. Could be AOL but then it would sloppy writing. Your emotions are not “right” or “valid” or “wrong” or “invalid”. He was correct earlier when he said they have no truth value and then he proceeds to say repeatedly that they're “valid” and have “intelligence”.

They're only valid in that they exist. They're only intelligent in that they exist for a reason, but, that reason is often total and utter bullshit and even when it's a good reason the emotion is often not useful.

IMO, emotions are brain noise just like thoughts. Emotions are primitive parts of the brain trying to nudge in some “useful” direction, but they're idea of useful is based on a small social group that lives in a cave and where getting kicked out of the social group is on very slightly better than a death sentence. You're emotions don't understand social media. They don't understand that they're watching a movie. They don't understand much of anything. They assume that every social interaction involves a small group that could decide to murder you if you don't treat the tree spirit appropriately.

“I always thought it was a story about something, about me, but now I see it’s just this, this purity. Water comes from the eyes. It’s so light! There’s nothing here, and it’s perfectly expressing itself as sadness.”

. Wooshit. Puke.

Why Do We Repress Emotions?

There is no why. This is a wholly unconscious mechanism. If we knew what we were doing and knew the cost, we wouldn’t do it.

Or… they're unpleasant and we don't like unpleasant things and we avoid them. Which is probably why they exist. We do a thing, feel an unpleasant sensation and so don't do the thing again.

Also, there are LOTS of examples of people doing things where they know the cost and do it anyway. I haven't stopped eating cookies even though I hate being fat.

Emotions are never a problem. Even when they feel like they are a problem, they are not a problem. Even when it feels like anger is raging on inside of you and you feel like it might burn you up; even when it feels like you are going to drown in an ocean of sadness; even when it feels like the shame and guilt are endless, the emotions are not a problem.

This is correct but he doesn't give you all the info. The emotions are not the problem, the story is the problem. We feel anger and make up a story about how righteous our anger is and how we're justified in smiting the “source” of our anger.

But that's just a story and we don't really know what the source of our emotions is. They're just things that happen in our head and we should treat them as if someone tapped us on the shoulder and said “pay attention”. But that's all we need to do with anger or any emotion, is just pay attention. Don't make up a story about it, just pay attention to the feeling and the surrounding events, but no story.

It’s the resistance to the emotions that is the problem. Well, even the resistance isn’t a problem in the grand scheme of things, but it is the resistance that causes the emotional experience to seem like such a struggle at times. Resistance is what causes us to mistrust emotions. It is what causes us to act out in unconscious ways and perpetuate violence.

I really feel like he doesn't understand emotions at all. We mistrust emotions when they feel unpleasant, and smart little apes that we are, we avoid unpleasant things.

Angelo's bought into the lefty stories about how important emotions are and on this the lefties are badly wrong. Emotions are speechless bits of your brain trying to help you, except that they don't understand the world we live in. So they're doing the best to help but it's like they only know how to play checkers and we're playing chess, they're not gonna be able to help much and they're going to mislead us a lot.

By pure I mean physiologically pure, undistorted by thought and interpretation. I could also call these “simple” emotions or “basic” emotions. They are:

Happiness/Joy
Fear
Sadness
Anger
Surprise
Disgust

I'm not sure there's any such thing as an unemotion that's undistorted by thought but it's an interesting idea so let's examine it.

Happiness/joy - Maybe. You will almost always immediately start telling yourself a story about how wonderful this is but the initial emotion just comes from things being right. Happiness is almost the abscensce of fear.

Fear - This is a good candidate, it's our most common emotion, but it's always trying to tell you something. It's trying to keep you safe. If the immediate cause isn't obvious you'll immediately start making up a story about why you're afraid.

Sadness - I'm inclined to think that sadness is a derivative of fear. Isn't sadness based in story? Someone dies and we're sad because they're not here any more, but isn't the possibility of them still being here a story? I think sadness takes more examination than I can do in a footnote.

Anger - Anger is a derivative of fear. We're only angry because we threatened in some way. No threat, no anger. The threat doesn't have to be directly to us, it can be to anything we identify with. Our children, someone elses chrildren (because they represent our children), an idea that we hold dearly. Anger comes from fear. No fear, no anger.

Surprise - This isn't an emotion. It's either a momentary reaction to something or it's cognitive dissodance because something didn't match whatever model your brain made up.

Disgust - Isn't disgust is a derivative of fear. It's fear of disease, infection, contamination, etc? It just manifests a bit differently but it's still just primitive brain telling you to stay away from things that can make you sick.

obvious that we’d been running from and resisting that which we most desire—wholeness

No, what we most desire is safety, security. The absense of fear. We're monkeys who understand very well how random and dangerous life is and we are consumed with fear and constantly lying to ourselves in order to _feel_ safer because we'd rather have the illusion of fear than deal with reality.

Wholeness is an idea that comes from other ideas.

deepest truth

Puke. He's got some bad ideas about emotion and it's brought in a lot of wooshit.

Situational fear is the type of fear that causes a fight or flight response when facing an immediate physical threat. This type of fear is necessary and adaptive. Psychological fear, on the other hand, is what we will be addressing in this section.

Psychological fear is also necessary and adaptive but I don't think he gets that. It was much more necessary and adaptive when we lived in caves with small bands that could kick you out if you weren't careful.

All of our defense mechanisms equate to various levels of protection to assure we never come face to face with this primordial truth.

This bit is confusing and I don't want to highlight three paragraphs. Is the primordial truth helplessness? That would fit with my view. In my original Kobo note I wrote:

He doesn't say what primordial truth. It's death. We know we die.

I believe that the thing we spend our whole life running from is… helplessness. I wouldn't have used that word a few minutes ago but it fits very nicely. We know we will die and we are helpless to do anything about it. We know everything we love will die (change) and we are helpless to do anything about it. We know we have almost no control over anything and we are helpless to do anything about it.

Rereading the next couple of paragraphs and I see I missed it the first time through. Yes, helplessness wraps in one word the sentences I used to need to explain. Nice find, Angelo.