Some Basic Emotions

In times gone by, when society was a low-stress one, the spiritual idealist could withdraw from the social world into solitude. A low-stress society means that the intensities of mental activity and of emotions are usually low. In his solitude he found that the intensity of his emotions reduced even more, so that their influences were easier to manage. The person revelled in the peace and quietude of nature. This allowed him to find comfort by following traditional spiritual practices. He knew what he could expect by following tradition.

After his time of solitude was over and he had to return to the social world, he found that he also returned to the world of emotional activity. This effect has become highlighted in modern times, since modernity is now one of highly stressed societies. High-stress societies mean that the activities of the mind and emotions become more active and more intense. Society now poses more problems for the practice of the spiritual life than it did in the past. As negative emotions increase their activity and influence, so life becomes one of intense dramas. Traditional spiritual practices are no longer adequate to cope with modern times; they need to be supplemented by modern approaches to handling emotions and desires. The modern spiritual seeker needs to study the ideas of modern psychology.

Traditional spiritual approaches were based on the concept of transcendence. The seeker had to transcend his difficulties and limitations. In modern times, the concept of transcendence has been replaced by the concept of transformation. Psychology has now become the way to transform negative difficulties. Instead of transcending his difficulties and limitations, the seeker has to transform them into better qualities of character.

What is Emotion?

What can be done to master the influences of negative emotions? Before we can attempt this, we first have to learn how to identify the range of important emotions that we usually experience. Why is this necessary? The inability to identify them results in a lack of self-awareness, and is a major source of self-deception and psychological confusion in theories of human nature, ethics and spirituality. Hence, from a modern point of view, traditional spiritual beliefs are based on a faulty analysis of human frailties.

The exploration of emotion is a key feature of dynamic psychology, by which I mean the kind of psychology practised in psycho-analysis and existential counselling (also called Rogerian counselling). The purpose of exploring emotion is that it helps to raise the level of our self-awareness. This effect is needed in modern spirituality. The usual practices of solitary spirituality – meditation, contemplation, visualisation – develop powers of the mind but they do not develop the person’s level of self-awareness. The virtue of having an adequate level of self-awareness is that it enables the person to detect the errors in his beliefs about himself and about society.

Once our level of awareness has been adequately developed by exploring emotion, what we will find is that all traditional theories of spirituality lack any real psychological understanding of the mind. Traditional theories may be accurate in their descriptions of the psychic nature of reality, but they fail in the psychological descriptions of it. This failure is understandable since significant ideas about psychology only began developing from the 19th century onwards. Nevertheless, it puts a question mark over some traditional ideas on the value of a human life on planet Earth.

In this chapter I present some new ideas on emotion, and then I make use of these ideas in the other chapters to present new views about some important stages of the spiritual journey. I derived these ideas by an empirical exploration of my mind. By this I mean that I analysed what I actually experienced and not what I imagined. Then I tested time and time again my results by analysing emotions as I was actually experiencing them.

The origins of emotions are derived from the three feelings, which are the positive, negative and neutral ones. The neutral feeling is a rare one, so the positive and negative ones predominate. In practice, these three feelings give rise to the whole range and multitude of emotions. The way that this is done is that each feeling combines with certain ideas in the mind. An emotion is simply the combination of a feeling plus a mental concept or idea: a particular concept defines a particular emotion and the feeling energises that concept. Or we can say that the feeling brings the concept alive and produces the emotion.

For example, one emotion that is very important to the spiritual life is love. What is love? No one seemed to know, even in psychology books. There were plenty of wild guesses as to what it is, but these were based on what the person would like love to be, rather than on an analytical understanding of what it is. During my exploration of emotion I was able to formulate an accurate analytical description of it, as well as for a few other significant emotions. The mental concept that defines love is that of identity. The positive feeling, when it energises this concept, produces the emotion of love. Love means that I am the same as everyone else and I have the same value as everyone else. The opposite emotion to love is hate. The mental concept that defines hate is I am different from everyone else. Hate is felt when the negative feeling energises the concept of identity.

However, what confuses things when love is felt is that it is usually accompanied by either joy or bliss. The person does not understand that the joy or bliss is not part of love but separate from it. Hence he believes that love is either a joyful emotion or a blissful emotion.

An emotion energises us either positively or negatively, depending on whether the current feeling is positive or negative. The function of emotion is that it enables us to experience life instead of being just a detached observer of it.

The positive and the negative feelings are complementary and form a pair of opposites. This pairing means that emotions can also be arranged into complementary pairs, or we can say that each emotion has its complementary one, one being derived from the positive feeling and one from the negative feeling. I call each pair a binary. The one exception is the neutral feeling and this gives rise to equanimity, the neutral state of mind that is unaffected by either happiness or unhappiness.

List of Binary Emotions

I give a list of some binary emotions that are regular companions to the person on his spiritual journey.

Fear – anger
Love – hate
Jealousy – narcissism
Pride – guilt
Vanity – self-pity
Resentment – bitterness
Envy – greed

Some emotions are complex ones and consist of two simpler emotions. So I call them compound emotions; each compound emotion has two other emotions as its factors. These factors do not exert their influence simultaneously; only one factor is dominant at any particular time. I use the term mode to indicate which factor is being dominant when the compound emotion is being experienced. Because it has two factors, each compound emotion can be experienced in two different ways. For example, guilt is a compound emotion and comprises the two simpler emotions of self-pity and self-hate. When the self-pity factor is being dominant, I describe this as experiencing guilt (in the mode of self-pity). Similarly, when the self-hate factor is being dominant, this is guilt (in the mode of self-hate).

List of Compound Emotions

Repentance = regret + guilt (mode of self-pity).
Sadness = regret + jealousy (mode of self-pity).

Guilt and pride have a significant impact on the person by restricting his sense of higher idealism (whether moral, ethical, philosophical or spiritual). Resentment arises in him when guilt restricts his idealism, and bitterness arises when pride restricts his idealism. The temporary failure of idealism leads to a corresponding temporary failure of motivation.

Characteristics of Four Emotions

For the spiritual seeker, the most important emotions are those of guilt, pride, narcissism and jealousy. To help the reader learn the differences between them, I list some characteristics of each emotion.

Guilt
When guilt is the emotion that I am currently experiencing, it brings up thoughts of my failures in life. The self-pity mode switches off my motivation to achieve anything. One way I cope with this is by becoming inflexible in my beliefs about myself, so that I accept dogmatic rules. Another way I cope is by becoming a perfectionist in my work. The self-hate mode devalues me, so that my sense of self-esteem collapses. I feel that I have wasted my life and wish that I could start afresh. One way I cope is by adhering to a belief in purity (especially sexual purity) and cleanliness.

Pride
When pride is dominant in me I feel superior to other people. In the hate mode I want to be free of social restraints since I value only my own independence. I avoid engaging in social activities since I prefer to be left alone. When I think of my life, I see how dreary it has been. When the vanity mode is influencing me, I abandon moderation and judge all issues in black and white terms. I become dogmatic and inflexible in my beliefs about other people.

Jealousy
Jealousy propels me into social activities and social ties. The self-pity mode makes me seek validation from other people and I become socially conformist and dependent. I see morality as the practice of duty and obligation. The love mode makes me care for other people. Now my views on morality switch and I become an evangelist for my beliefs.

Narcissism
Narcissism enhances the quality of my life. In the vanity mode I see life as an heroic drama and so I romanticise everything. Instead of doing things for other people I prefer to encourage them to help themselves. I do not impose my beliefs on others. In the love mode I feel good about myself. I am glad for my life, even the aspects of it that caused me distress. I dance to my favourite music. I prefer to co-operate with people instead of competing against them. I do not judge anyone.

Unconscious Ideas

In daily life we are aware of what we are thinking and doing, and what our desires are. I call this kind of consciousness the normal consciousness, or the surface consciousness. From my exploration of my mind, I found that some contents are not in normal consciousness: these contents are usually hidden from our view. Some of these contents are fairly easy to detect, whilst others are far more difficult to detect. So I consider that these hidden contents form two layers within the mind. One of the hidden layers is focused on what is personal and specific to each person, whilst the other hidden layer is focused on what is universal to everyone. The terminology that I have adopted is that the hidden personal mind I call “the subconscious mind”, whilst the hidden universal mind I call “the unconscious mind”.

Subconscious mind refers to those aspects of mind that are particular to a person.
Unconscious mind refers to those aspects of mind that are general to all humanity.

Since emotions are universal to everyone, so therefore they come from the unconscious mind. Emotions are partly derived from ideas or concepts. Now the concept that is associated with any particular emotion actually creates the boundaries of that emotion. What I found from my experience is that if the concept changes, the emotion does not change itself; instead, it fades away and a different emotion arises, one that fits the current concept. The concepts of emotions are not normally a part of our awareness; they come from the unconscious mind too. So I call such a concept an unconscious idea (a term that Freud used).

To understand the role of the concept in an emotion, I present a list of some unconscious ideas that determine some emotions. The way I worked out these underlying ideas was to consider the overall theme or motif of any particular emotion, that is, what that emotion is trying to express. One difficulty is that a compound emotion has two factors to it, which implies that each factor has its own unconscious idea. So a compound emotion gives rise to two unconscious ideas. However, one unconscious idea needs to be harmonious with the other one. For example, in jealousy, the unconscious idea of jealousy (in self-pity mode) needs to be harmonious with the unconscious idea of jealousy (in love mode), since they are only two forms of one basic emotion, which is jealousy.

I use the word “implies” to indicate the central idea that determines a particular emotion. For example, the central idea of guilt is that of punishment. When guilt is currently dominant in a person’s mind, he is being influenced by the unconscious idea of self-punishment.

List of a few Unconscious Ideas

The motif of guilt and pride is punishment /humiliation
Guilt is self-punishment.
Self-pity mode implies life is punishment.
Self-hate mode implies I deserve punishment.

Pride is punishment /humiliation of other people.
Vanity mode implies you are inferior to me.
Hate mode implies I despise you/I will punish you.

The motif of jealousy and narcissism is responsibility
Jealousy is social responsibility.
Self-pity mode implies I need a reward (from other people).
Love mode implies I reward other people.

Narcissism is self-responsibility.
Vanity mode implies I will do it my way.
Love mode implies I do not depend on anyone.

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Ian Heath
London, UK

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.	Tradition versus Modernity The ideas in this chapter are an introduction to the central importance of emotion in the spiritual life of a person. They are the result of an ongoing psycho-analysis that I have been engaged in, on and off, for over 35 years. As we journey through life, some of the main obstacles we face are the ways that emotions affect us. We welcome good emotions but the bad ones often cause us difficulties and distress. The manner in which we interpret our experiences of emotion will have dramatic consequences for our spiritual journey. Though we may have the occasional episode of a spiritual vision to inspire us, more usually our life is dominated by pervasive influences of guilt, shame, and other negative emotions. These emotions can exert their influences in ways that we do not detect: they may produce strange desires in the mind, and lead us into becoming confused and troubled by our life. The manner in which we adapt to these influences will shape our beliefs about reality and our place in it.
Sub - Headings
What is Emotion?
Table 1: List of Binary Emotions
Table 2: List of Compound Emotions
Characteristics of Four Emotions
Unconscious Ideas
Table 3: List of a few Unconscious Ideas