“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”
— Gertrude Stein, novelist and poet
Intellect
We’re under the illusion that thinking is the process of putting ideas together to reach conclusions. Even those of us who are artistic fall into this trap and see the creation of good art as a conclusion of our thoughts. For Homo sapiens, thought is good when it produces a result. Thinking is a prison of misery, and most of us are locked in.
The obsession with executive function explains why few of us can communicate with animals. It also explains why few of us can express our authentic nature. We believe that we are thinking beings but we are not; we are feeling beings. It’s our pursuit of an independent identity that forces us into our thoughts and away from our feelings. The idea of our independent being-ness is a sterile construction.
“We have for so long defined ourselves as separate personalities that we have fallen into the hypnotic spell of believing that separation, no unity, is the underlying reality.”
— Larry Dossey, 2006, in The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things, p. 72.
When we talk about intelligence we’re talking about the properties of our intellect. The idea of emotional intelligence is an oxymoron because emotions do not act intelligently. They don’t formulate, strategize, solve, or construct. Intellect is what we use to navigate our separateness through a landscape of meaningful events. Emotion makes that landscape meaningful. Emotion is the geography of the meaningful.
To “think” emotionally is to be aware of what’s within us and around us. This is not thinking in the intentional sense. You can no more “think emotionally” than you can think yourself to sleep. There is no process or output but it is not static either. Let’s reserve thinking for intellect and use feeling for emotions. The two feedback into each other but they operate by different processes.
Our reality is our emotional landscape. It is a living system that grows of its own accord. You do not think your emotional world into existence anymore than you think how to walk. You can think and you can walk, and you can think about how you walk, and you can focus on walking and become more aware of it.
You can think yourself to focus and become more deeply aware, but being is not focus, and focus is not thinking. Thinking is structural and computational. Thinking can trigger feeling, but it’s the feeling that is the being.
Most of us cannot stop thinking, and some of us cannot start feeling. We’ve grow up in a world that so obscures feeling and so denigrates our having feelings of our own that many of us don’t even know how traumatized we’ve become. Give the chance to feel many of us behave psychotically, entering fits of delusion to create dichotomies, projections, and childhood conflicts we never learned how to resolve.
Much of psychotherapy is designed to patch up this container and convince us that our disembodied minds will make it to the nonexistent finish line. As the Lakota shaman Lame Deer said, people “stumble along blindly on the road to nowhere—a paved highway which they themselves bulldoze and make smooth so that they can get faster to the big empty hole which they’ll find at the end.”
Emotion
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