We have thoughts and we have emotions. Thinking is
information processing, sometimes guided by conscious
presence and its oversight, more often left to automatic processes. We process
information comprehensively, continuously, whether we are directly aware of it or
not. In itself, aside from habit, reflex, and instinct, this information processing provides no structure to our
lives. It is, rather, a tool and resource of conscious focus.
Conscious focus seems to be an ability to choose, the
thing we call volition. More precisely, it is conscious focus based
upon personal values we acquire in life. A mother will likely concentrate
upon her child as an emotional priority, and the child may focus upon the
experience a toy provides. They are at peace with the flow of their
experience unless the child suddenly disappears, or the toy breaks. They
then move with all deliberation in an attempt to reestablish the status
quo
If we had the option, it would be convenient to
postpone a sudden need to act. A pause button in our lives would come in
handy. Unfortunately, if a mountain lion has leaped from an overhead ledge
with every intent to eat us, we have no way to postpone the need to act.
We have no pause button with which to freeze the mountain lion in midair
so that we can have our 'time out', think the situation through, and
derive our best strategy for survival. Instead, we fight or we flee
without thought or hesitation, just like antelope. Sometimes we escape.
Sometimes we leap the wrong way, right into the jaws of the predator.
The things we call reflex, instinct and emotional
reaction evolved to exquisite perfection in the dog-eat-dog world where
biological death awaits those who hesitate. Evolving conscious presence
has had no hope of coping with the full spectrum and pace of information
available for item by item consideration, at least not the level of
consciousness with which we are familiar.
Emotion, therefore, lies at the heart of all human behavior,
based upon the experience of eons of evolution.
Emotion is also programmed by personal meaning and significance, again based
upon early personal experience. Some of us love dogs. Some hate dogs, having been
bitten by dogs, perhaps. Past
experience and emotional evaluation of that experience determines which.
But we all react to the unexpected hiss of a snake. That start of fear
goes back as far as the first animals to crawl upon dry land.
Emotional evaluation is systematically assigned to each
and every thing and event, from a cloud moving in the sky to an insect
crossing a sidewalk. No element of our environment is emotionally neutral.
An innocent cloud in the sky may forewarn of changing weather. A glance
our way by a stranger may portent violence. The insect may be an innocent
ant, but closer examination may reveal it to be a spider, or a wasp, and
we have reason to fear those.
We think our ‘objective physical reality’ to be 'out
there' and 'objective', but because of the entirely personal emotional
connotations we have assigned to absolutely everything, the world we each
perceive is far more like a waking dream. We've contaminated it,
personalized it to saturation with our own unique values. There is
absolutely nothing objective about any aspect of it, although we still
assume there is an 'objective' world that we all share aside from what we
think and feel about our own. The reality of death and logical chains of
events beyond our immediate sphere of awareness seems to confirm this
deduction beyond reasonable doubt.
Emotional reactions are almost entirely social in
nature. Alone, we are far more reliant upon abstract thought and conscious
monitoring of our behavior, our environment, and our decision-making
processes. We read books, watch television, play games of chess, preen
ourselves, or take rides on our motorcycle courtesy of the neocortex and
conscious presence.
Thrown into a crowd, most of us become emotionally
reactive in a heartbeat, sleep-walkers, seeing the world through the
ancient limbic system, or old mammalian brain. Everything happening around
us ties in with our self-esteem, our social standing, evokes emotion, and
triggers emotional behavior intended for very specific effects upon
others. We play psychological games with one another. Others push our
buttons and we, in turn, push theirs. Conscious presence goes with the
flow and may dread the experience, or enjoy it immensely.
Conscious presence coupled with the analytical
abilities of the neocortex operate too slowly for the fast pace of most
events in our daily lives, but it has one overriding advantage over
emotional reactivity. Unthinking habit is stiflingly inflexible and
repetitive. Our powers of extrapolation allow us to contemplate all
possibilities of a situation and to work out the consequence of each in an
imagined space and an imagined time where harmful outcomes cannot
immediately impact us. Within our imaginations, we built and then
implemented civilization.
Emotional reactivity works in harmony with the limbic
system. It is, in fact, an integral part of the limbic system and is
largely a blind process. It clashes
with the abstract thought processes of the neocortex. When we imagine we
are being threatened, our blood pressure skyrockets and we became fearful
because the limbic system believes the imagined to be real. It is our
neocortex alone that can analyze the danger free of emotional
reactivity and determine alternate courses of action, even defying fear
generated by the limbic system. We can even purposefully imagine various scenarios and, by
virtue of our neocortex, cold-bloodedly observe our emotional reactions to
each. We can even
enjoy such emotional reactivity, as with a visit to a movie theater.
We cannot rationally act in response to an fantasy, but we can
‘worry’ about it if we think it real and pertinent, repetitively imagining
the sequence over and over with every conceivable variation in a futile
attempt to disarm the threat. Most of us worry more than we’d like. Why
can’t we stop? Why can’t we let go of something that’s not really
happening?
We think we know the difference between reality and
fantasy. We are correct, because the neocortex thinks and it does know the
difference. The limbic system, however, feels and absolutely does not
know. Real or imagined events evoke an emotional response and associate
with past experiences of the same nature. We can, and many of us do, live
largely in our own imaginations, and in our memories of the past.
Sensory reality and our emotional reaction to it
interface directly within the limbic system. Animals and many people live
their lives entirely within it. And yet no one part of the mind
orchestrates the whole aside from conscious presence, a phenomenon which
has no powers or abilities at all aside from the ability to focus upon
core elements of meaning and significance.
Conscious presence, if we give it some thought, does
not think for itself. We do not select, or even know from moment to
moment, what words will pop into our heads, or what words we will speak in
some rapid-fire conversation we are having with another, although we guide
our conversations in vague terms, often steered by the play of emotional
interactions. Conscious presence experiences emotion, but is not the
source of emotion.
We direct the course of our experience by virtue
of our conscious focus. Conscious presence can be said to create the
reality we experience by virtue of that shifting, directing focus,
although we are not speaking of a focus within our sensorium, but the
veritable source of the sensorium. At the
same time, keeping in mind that there is no boundary or separation between
a thinker and his or her thoughts, conscious reality can only be defined
as a field of interacting conscious information. The moment we attempt to
dissociate from a conscious experience, we give birth to two separate
realities, one that can never be directly accessed, so-called 'objective
physical reality', and the paradox of the mind-body problem that ensues.
We can try to objectify reality until we turn that
proverbial blue in the face. Regardless of how large or complex reality
may be, it is, in the end, both a unified field without divisions
and an entirely self-referential system. We as individuals are contained
within that system, and we are an integral part of it.
The process of our lives defines human existence. We
cannot see beyond it. It is true that we are blind to that which we do not
understand, information we cannot process, and, therefore, do not see, but
it is there in the same way a dog chases a tail he does not recognize as
his own. Until we can incorporate the incomprehensible into our relatively
isolated subroutine of the mathematical structure of reality we call our
self, we will be oblivious to it. We will think it beyond our self, not
part of what we are.
Because of the power of the neocortex to extrapolate
and simulate multiple realities, the value of conscious intervention in
emotional situations becomes increasingly apparent, and increasingly
critical. Because our limbic system wants to physically respond to every
imagined threat, hormones enter our bloodstream to heighten our physical
prowess. We need to clear those hormones from the bloodstream when the
threat has passed. If the danger is an imaginative worry, a constant
influx of hormones can take a decisive toll on our health. Once we learn
to think clearly, we need to be able to control that process and its
interaction with older and more primal levels of the mind. We need to
learn to think clearly to hasten the conscious breadth, or scope of our lives. We need
to grow to provide ourselves with more options for more rewarding
features of experience. Hamsters run endlessly upon their exercise wheels. Humans have
their equivalents as well, and they waste energy and potential for growth
going nowhere.
The nature of our emotional reactivity is intensely
personal. Tell us we’re fat and one of us may burst into tears and another
into unconcerned laughter. Flatter us and one of us might beam in
appreciation, but another may fall into a fit of depression, thinking the
comment a cruel lie. We’ve had different experiences and place different
values upon every aspect of our lives.
We needn’t be prisoners of emotional reactivity. We are
certainly able to take conscious note of an emotion and analyze it during
an idle moment for its origin and what it hopes to accomplish. If
experience tells us when an emotional reaction is counterproductive, we
can then evoke the imagination to reframe the experience that gave it
birth, interpret it in a different manner, and elicit a more useful
emotional reaction.
Emotional reactivity is simple habit. Our habits and
the idiosyncratic behavior that arise from them are generally so
individualistic and consistent that even when presented with a black
silhouette on a white screen and our voice distorted beyond recognition,
friends and family can effortlessly identify us. They'll laugh nervously
doing so, because they'll be unsettled by how predictable we all are.
We feel we are at the helm of our lives when we live
through our limbic system, when we ‘go with the flow’, but when we defy
reactive behavior, when we try to lose weight, or quit smoking, we are
attempting to override the juggernaut of the limbic system with
instructions from the neocortex. Still, the neocortex offers conscious
presence an overview of our thought and feeling processes, because the
neocortex and its processes is a resource, not a motivation to act as with
the limbic system's reactivity. The two processes, rational thought and emotional reaction,
must supplement and complement one another to coexist peacefully. We need both to survive as human beings. Conscious presence needs emotional
reactivity when we must move, and rational thought to best determine in
which direction to do so. Conflict
born of conscious inexperience in handling its resources risks self-inflicted damage.
The fact that conscious presence unifies the
information processes our our lives in this fashion hints at a level of
'thinking' that transcends awareness of the narrow fury and thunder of the
space-time moment. It seems apparent that our final determination of the
best move to make in the next moment is determined by the alternate
choices made elsewhere under different circumstances within the higher
realms of our superpositioned existence. This would be a consequence of
the quantum information processing capability of the human mind. We are
not just taking possibilities into account, but actual realities and the
consequences reaped within them.
In the end, though, conscious presence rules the roost.
We are initially conscious of each move we make learning to drive a car or
play a violin. Every habit and value upon which the limbic system depends
presented itself to conscious presence to be included as part of our
personal history, or discluded. Once the moves and value of a habit are
committed to reactive recall, we can concentrate upon destinations and
melodies while driving or playing our instruments.
But once in motion, habits gain a momentum that is
difficult to consciously interrupt. Imagine reversing the brake and
accelerator pedals in a car and watching someone try to drive the vehicle,
even forewarned of the change. How often in a power outage have we
thoughtlessly flipped on a light switch in search of a flashlight?
We program our emotional reactivity by the evaluations
we place upon things, people, and events in our life. Are things, people
and events in our lives for us or against us? Do these things, people, and
events need to be embraced, fought, escaped, or hid from? Emotional
evaluations are based upon experience and we often intellectualize,
rationalize, or justify these evaluations if they disturb us in some
manner, if they contain some inner conflict we'd prefer not to deal with
directly. We all have difficulty justifying violent behavior. Being ‘bad’
is often easier than being ‘good’ when ‘good’ demands more personal
resources than we have available. We may then make a virtue of evil in
retaliation of those who expect more from us than we can provide. We can
then experience guilt for our 'bad' behavior and try to compensate as with
a thieves 'code of honor'.
Some beliefs we consciously reason out as best we can,
but as social as we are, and as ignorant of the world as we have been in
the past, we accept many beliefs from various social authorities without
question. Determining a social authority to be trustworthy is a conscious
choice. Unless we have reason to question that authority, we tend to abide
by it. Beliefs about reality become our working facts of reality. They
accumulate as we age.
Emotional programming involves habits of perception and
thinking as well. These are the tools we use to implement our emotional
evaluations. We learn to see the world in highly specific ways and we
learn to think about the world in the manner of our parents and guardians.
Their world precedes ours. We see through their eyes.
As we age, we make changes and modify beliefs that are
obviously in error or severely inconvenient. We drop many beliefs
outright. Those that survive begin to chase themselves in increasingly
tighter circles and intensify, usually the most negative beliefs about
things we fear may harm us as we grow older, weaker, and less able to
defend ourselves. If this is an unpleasant process, we contemplate death
and do some emotional reframing. Oblivion terrifies youth and its
precarious ego, but as pain and discomfort intensifies in life, we
contemplate the possibility of peace and escape in nonexistence.
As we age, we believe our increasingly eccentric
behaviors, our efforts to stand against the looming crisis of age,
justified. We have less allegiance to the goals and dreams of youth. We
know how little we generally accomplish in life and how terrible and
sudden the pitfalls that can and do befall us all. Some of us have
justified and intellectualized and rationalized our narrowing lives to
absolute perfection. For others who have lacked stability in their lives,
fear intensifies and takes a death grip upon us, and nothing narrows one’s
perception of reality as intensely as unbridled terror.
Either way, the quandary of our lives deepens.
