Sensations, Thoughts, and Emotions ($)

Understanding our emotions is a necessary step forward in our evolution.

“Cognition and emotion are today understood as interrelated phenomena, and their integrated action is necessary for normal adaptive functioning.”
— Goran Šimić, et al. (2021)

As humans, we have distinguished ourselves through the use of our hands and brains—in particular, our intellect. The intellect has become the source of our greatest strength and weakness. We are manipulators, but we are far from experts. We are poorly aware of our role in the world.

Much as medicine sees differences as abnormal, humans see the world through a lens of opportunity. If we better understood our spirits and emotions, we would be in greater touch with the consequences of our actions.

Before modern times, when we were more involved in the natural world, our intellects were more integrated with our emotions. Our knowledge was limited, but we were more deeply informed of those subjects in which we were involved. Our modern success and the global scale of our manipulations have given predominance to our impersonal, separate, and mechanistic inclinations.

We have developed the intellectual ability to fail and correct ourselves, but we have lost emotional stability and spiritual perception. Our isolation as individuals has led to our being emotionally out of touch with the social and environmental consequences of our actions. Our emotions have been buried beneath the intellectual demands of our modern world.

Sensations

We think with our bodies, emotions, and intellects. These three layers underlie our perception and cognition. Sensations are our most overlooked mode of thought, which we demote to the level of insensate perception, but senses have thoughts. They are our most fundamental level of awareness and ability.

Our primary sensation is sight, with sound and touch subordinate to it. In addition to perceptions from outside, a host of sensations come from within our bodies. Inner sensations include awareness of comfort, metabolism, health, and fitness. We’re vaguely aware of many internal signals we cannot accurately resolve.

I see people through the lenses of sensations, thoughts, and emotions, and I work to regain a balance between these aspects of experience. Like all three-part structures—and unlike structures with more legs—three-legged structures can rest their feet on unlevel ground. I extend this metaphor to self-awareness: if we see ourselves as having three parts, then we can develop ourselves so that each part is grounded and stable.

Ten years ago I went on a dark, psychedelic trip with the help of a small plant in the mint family called Salvia divinorum. The world that unfolded was short-lived—it only lasted 10 minutes—but it was the darkest of possible worlds.

The experience was based on what I could sense of myself and what was around me, and it gave me first-hand knowledge of the desire to kill oneself. I was thinking clearly, but my sensations created a lifeless world. This proved to me that sensations can create reality.

Because our bodies take care of themselves, we believe our organs perceive the world without judgment. Besides attending to our needs, our bodies know how we understand and react. We may think our intellects are making all the decisions, but our bodies determine what we see and play a role in what we recognize.

The human intellect is both our crowning achievement and a tool for self-destruction. We can barely behave morally as individuals, and we’re wholly unable to do so as a species. Ethical behavior must become innate through an integration of our neural structures. This is far beyond our current state.

This is sad because it ignores truth, which is rooted in feeling, and it’s pathetic because, rather than being secondary, emotions rule the intellect. Our motivation to do anything is rooted in emotions of self, purpose, and survival. Yet we believe our intellects are fully informed and in complete control.

White/Black, but Robert MacPherson

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