The Heartwood of Synchronosophy (Part II, Chapter 7/12)

Emotional Messengers

It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.

〰 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 〰

Into the Land of Tears

Feelings are a constant dimension of human consciousness. To be is to feel.

〰 Ken Robinson 〰

If you have young children, or remember what it was like when your kids were small, or have the opportunity to observe a little one in their emotional melt-downs, you will notice that totally different events trigger the exact same response ::: an outburst of tears.

Why is the baby crying?

The instinctive response of any responsible adult is (for most of us) to comfort the child, to try anything to counteract the painful experience, to turn off the tap that makes salty water squirt out of the tearducts, and especially to turn down the unsettling vocal track which accompanies the flow of lacrimal fluid.

Phew! The relief when you manage to transform that grief-stricken little face into a smiling one.

Why is it so hard to bear the sound and vision of a crying fellow human?

The Scottish philosopher John MacMurray knew the answer. “All of us, if we are really alive, are disturbed now in our emotions,” he wrote in his book Reason and Emotion (first published in 1935). “We are faced by emotional problems that we do not know how to solve. They distract our minds, fill us with misgiving, and sometimes threaten to wreck our lives.”

In other words, emotions ~ whether our own or the emotional expressions of others ~ set off a spark within ourselves to produce more emotions. That’s fine, as long as the ripples and waves of the emotional waters remain within the feel-good spectrum, which we consider positive.

As soon as the balance tips towards negative, we notice ourselves coasting down the slippery slide into the dreaded pool of bad-feelings… Oh No!!! HELP!!!!!

Why is that so terrible?

Emotions are like invisible magnets. It’s as if they are charged with some electrical force. They attract other emotions of a similar kind, and drag them to the surface of our awareness. The more aware we become of them the louder they wail and the more they hurt ~ so it seems.

Anyone who dares to throw an emotional magnet into the dark depths of their Consciousness will find that this bait follows an irresistible gravitational pull. When you let it sink below the limen of awareness, it will not just plummet to ‘the bottom’ ~ wherever that might be ~ or vanish into oblivion.

When thrown into the dark side of the inner wilderness, negative emotions plunge into the inner ocean and are carried by the currents towards a particular area ~ suitably labelled as the inner permafrost.

This is the most dreaded part of the inner world. The inner permafrost is where all the frozen tears of the past ~ whether your own, or the uncried emotional pain of your ancestors, your clan, your soul tribe, fellow travellers on planet Earth, anyone you might feel an affinity with ~ have drifted and set into a solid cluster of ice crystals, glued together by common unsolved human experience.

The inner permafrost is risky because we can get trapped there. We become numb and apathetic. Unable to move or feel anything. Dead inside while alive. Zombies cut off from the heartwarming fires of love and life.

“It is extremely difficult to become aware of this great hinterland of our minds, and to bring our emotional life, and with it the motives which govern our behaviour, fully into consciousness,” MacMurray wrote nearly 90 years ago.

The causation of these difficulties, I believe, can easily be traced back to an earlier philosophical era known as The Age of Reason.

photo © Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Crusaders against Emotions

Don’t turn your heart into a murder pit.

〰 German proverb 〰

Over the past few centuries gone by, armies of scholars and experts have declared emotions as obsolete. They explained them away as ‘outdated relics of a pre-historic past when man had to worry about survival in the wilderness and defend himself against the now extinct saber-toothed tiger’.

Influential philosophers theorised that emotions could and should be controlled by the ‘superior rational mind’.

One of these crusaders against emotions was the Russian writer and philosopher Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, better known by her pen name Ayn Rand. Born in 1905, she moved to America in 1926 and made a name for herself as a bestselling author and founder of her ‘philosophy of objectivism’.

According to Rand, “emotions are not tools for cognition,” and “reality exists independently of consciousness.”

Rand’s theories were born out of a personal story of loss and trauma. She’d left her family behind in the ‘Soviet hell’, assuming she could erase a painful past with a dizzying rise to celebrity status in the golden West. Which she did ~ at the material level.

Coming from a poor background, Mr. Rosenbaum, Alisa’s father had studied chemistry and built a respectable business as an independent pharmacist. In 1917, the pharmacy was confiscated, the family had to flee to Crimea, and survived in poverty. Alisa was 12 years old.

In the 1930s, after settling with relatives on the safer side of the Atlantic, Alisa tried to help her family move from Russia and follow her to America but didn’t succeed. Later she learned that her parents died during the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis in World War II.

The Rosenbaum family lost their hard earned wealth to Russian tyranny. Alisa Rosenbaum lost her family to Nazi tyranny. Ayn Rand’s philosophy was born from a survival strategy ~ an adept and subjective act of rebellion against overwhelming political forces ~ nothing to do with ‘objectivism’, but motivated by repressed unbearable emotional suffering.

Ayn Rand’s philosophy became popular in the West, feeding the American Zeitgeist of selfish pursuits for personal happiness. Her philosophical theories fell on fertile ground, not least because the soil had been prepared for more than three centuries by another historic influencer.

The French philosopher René Descartes rose to fame with the bold statement, ‘cogito ergo sum.’ To underpin his philosophy of I think therefore I am, he wrote a lesser known philosophical treatise called Passions of the Soul.

Descartes’ ‘passions’ were later identified and redefined as ‘emotions’. According to his theory, there are six ‘basic passions’: “wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, sadness.”

He also made a fundamental distinction between a ‘thinking soul’ and a ‘non-thinking body’.

Within the body there were ~ according to Descartes’ so-called ‘rational hypothesis’ ~ ‘animal spirits produced in the blood’. They caused the body to move, and were therefore beneficial. But they could also ‘attack the soul and force the body to commit inappropriate actions.’

Now we know that what Descartes viewed as ‘animal spirits’ turned out to be the nervous system, which is neither exactly ‘produced in the blood’ nor does it ‘attack the soul’.

Like Ayn Rand, René Descartes’ childhood left him traumatised. His mother died when he was one year old. His father, Joachim Descartes, was absent as a busy lawyer. René was a sickly child, raised by his grandmother.

One comment by Descartes Sr. tells us what he made of his famous son: “Of all my children, I am dissatisfied with only one! Must I have given birth to a son ridiculous and futile enough to write and be bound to a calf!” (This is a reference to books bound in calf leather)

René Descartes lost his mother while he was barely out of his nappies. His father neglected him as a child and ridiculed him as an adult. The phrase I THINK THEREFORE I AM was a battlecry in defiance and protest against emotional abandonment ~ voicing a personal survival strategy ~ nothing to do with ‘rationalism’, but an expression of a deeply wounded child.

Although various philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, cognitive scientists, and non-academics have rediscovered emotions over the past 90 years, many contemporaries continue to view the indigenous natives of our inner emotional hinterland with suspicion.

A current trend suggests that we should be wary of the way we talk about our emotions ~ that we should take care not to identify with them.

Instead of saying, “I am angry” emotion-experts recommend, it would be better to say “I notice that I feel anger.” The rewording from I am to I notice that I feel enables us to deal with those ‘nasty creatures’ at arms length ~ so they say ~ preventing a ‘false identification and attachment’.

While I can understand the sentiment behind such a formulation ~ and fully agree that detachment is important to enable us to handle emotions and work with them, I am not in favour of internal segregation. We have better and more integrative tools for this job.

In the long run, integration of our negative emotions proves to be more effective and conducive to our mental, emotional, physical health and overall wellbeing.

Moreover, these ongoing attempts to explain emotions through the rational mind are eerily reminiscent of certain humanoids with a supremacist attitude theorising about ‘what it is like to be a native humanoid from a different culture and ethnicity and how to handle them’.

John MacMurray has a refreshingly different view of the ‘intellect versus emotions debate’ when he writes, “Intellectual knowledge tells us about the world. it gives us knowledge about things, not knowledge of them. It does not reveal the world as it is. Only emotional knowledge can do that.”

In other words, emotions have a mind of their own. They can speak for themselves. They can tell us exactly what they need and how we can relate to them in a beneficial way without using the Intellect as a mouthpiece ~ but only if we are willing to listen.

photo © Deborah Diem on Unsplash

The Emotional Permafrost

The radical acceptance of all of our emotions

~ even the messy, difficult ones ~

is the cornerstone to resilience, thriving, and true, authentic happiness.

〰 Susan David 〰

One of the great fears around negative emotions is that once you start letting them out, something terrible is going to happen. As if there was a ‘Pandora’s box’ inside you, and by tapping into those emotions you might open the lid, and the contents of the dreaded box would spill out, and there would be no end to the mess this might cause.

That’s a modern myth. In the Ancient Greek myth, Pandora didn’t have a box at all. She was carrying a clay jar, commissioned by the Greek god Zeus and filled with alleged ‘gifts’. The jar was officially her dowry. As she was sent off to marry Epimetheus, brother of the better known Prometheus, she was told not to open the jar.

Because Zeus was a vindictive character ~ and had an axe to grind with Prometheus ~ he had filled the jar with ‘sickness, death, and evil’ hoping that Pandora’s curiosity would get the better of her ~ that she would open the jar and spill the whole damn thing ~ which is exactly what happened. Now that the contents have long since been spilled, there is really no need to worry about an empty jar.

photos © Alex Alvarez + Egor Myznik on Unsplash

Negative emotions are a thorny subject nonetheless. But that’s only because they have been misunderstood for so long. Because emotions have been persecuted, condemned, vilified, threatened with extinction for centuries. Since before anyone of us or our grandparents were even born. That’s why they are hurting.

They are traumatised. That’s why we need to heal them. Because as long as our emotions are hurting, we are hurting too.

Seeing that emotions play a vital role in our lives, they have a crucial function in our synchronosophic practice too. There is no way to avoid them. If we want to heal, we must face, acknowledge, understand, and integrate our unprocessed emotional pain.

Don’t worry, we now have wonderful tools for handling those prickly sensitive creatures huddled together in the inner permafrost.

The greatest danger of negative emotions doesn’t come from accepting these ‘nasty feral creatures’ and allowing oneself to express them. That’s another common misconception. It is based on the theory that negative emotions make us do terrible things.

This is an incorrect assumption based on animal instincts, made by some ancestors. Perhaps they forgot for a moment that humans are not animals?

The evolutionary theory of the times certainly played a big part, but there is a darker backstory to this emotions-are-dangerous hypothesis. The roots of this way of thinking go back to the 19th century, when Charles Darwin (and other influential scientists) observed a link between emotional expression and mental illness.

“The insane notoriously give way to all their emotions with little or no restraint,” Darwin wrote in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1899).

Darwin’s view reflects the general attitude towards emotions during the Victorian era (1837–1901). Emotions weren’t just a nuisance, or painful, or could trigger irrational behaviour. Emotional expression was interpreted as a sign of insanity.

Moreover, leading experts believed and taught that emotions cause human behaviour.

No wonder everyone was keen to keep their emotions under wraps. If they didn’t, others might think they were crazy. Emotional suppression was a matter of protecting one’s reputation, one’s position in society, one’s career and marriage prospects. There was a lot at stake.

Now we know that the absence or deficiency of emotional expression in early childhood can have detrimental effects on child development, disrupt the sense of identity, and interfere with the relationship with oneself.

We have begun to realise that emotional suppression doesn’t make us more intelligent. It doesn’t make us more rational, or help us make better – or more ‘objective’ – decisions. It doesn’t improve our mental health or prevent us from ‘going crazy’. On the contrary!

The source of negative emotions is always emotional trauma in early childhood. And the greatest damage negative emotions can cause ~ as we now know due to recent trauma research ~ is related to suppression.

Once negative emotions are lodged within the inner permafrost, they don’t go away. If left unprocessed they can cause a wild and scary horde of further negative events, including dysfunctional relationships, dysfunctional social behaviour, degenerative diseases, autoimmune diseases, accidents, mental health problems and attract all sorts of conflict and unwanted experiences into your life.

There are good reasons for this, which we’ll explore later. For now, it helps to keep in mind that processing negative emotions is a good thing ~ if only to prevent further trouble.

That’s what I did spontaneously in response to stumbling into the dark side of life, without a full understanding (yet) of all the principles, which I am sharing with you here.

the author, 1990s © private collection

Emocean Sessions

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

〰 Mary Oliver 〰

During the first months of recovering from the worst chapter of my life I felt euphoric. Grateful to be alive, to get another chance to live my life in alignment with my own truth, values, and dreams.

I didn’t register that I might be traumatised. In those days, trauma was neither a trend nor a buzzword. It was something terrible that only affected people who had suffered ‘real trauma’, such as a war, gang-rape, nuclear accident, terror attack…

At the time, the understanding and diagnosis of PTSD was focussed on overwhelming events which had happened to a person, rather than on the subjective experience of the individual.

I never saw myself as a victim. I felt responsible for my own life. I felt sorry for the ‘perpetrators’ from whom I’d walked away. They were unable to walk away from themselves and had to live with their own shit.

A few months into finding my level of normal again, after settling into my new life by the sea, I experienced sudden surges of emotional overwhelm. They came over me like waves, in the middle of working on a translation project.

Drowning in floods of fear, shame, anger, guilt, despair, helplessness, confusion, was paralysing. Impossible to think straight, never mind string coherent sentences together and deliver good work.

Being self-employed, I was fortunate to have the option to respond to these emotional tsunamis spontaneously. I would shut down my computer, take my journal, and drive to a nearby bay, unpopular with surfers and bucket-and-spade tourists, hidden behind the golf course.

Alone with the ocean, a long sandy beach, the blustery winds, waves and seagulls I pulled out all the stops and let my emotions spill over in whatever way they needed to express themselves.

I encouraged them to tell me about all the pain of terror, humiliation, rage, betrayal, grief, despondency, anguish, neglect, abandonment… in recognition that their pain was mine, and my pain was theirs.

In these emocean-sessions I did not make a distinction between my emotions or myself. I was the abandoned baby and her mother, the betrayed adolescent and her parent, the young adult and her elder sister.

I stepped into both roles simultaneously, giving myself the opportunity to share everything that needed to be heard and healed. Somehow, this was easy in the lap of the ocean and the embrace of the surrounding cliffs.

Grandmother ocean is at home in saltwater. My salty tears were welcome in her swell.

Ocean winds are expert howlers. My howling was met with emphatic and unrestrained gusts.

Ocean birds are master screamers. When I let out screaming, seagulls screeched their enthusiastic echo in response.

Ocean waves know sobbing by heart. My sobbing was sucked into the waves and slurped out to sea.

Grandmother ocean doesn’t mind crashing and roaring. When I needed to roar, she rolled my agony all the way to the horizon.

These conversations were neither painless nor graceful nor civilised. They were wild, free & authentic ~ free from judgement, embarrassment or enforced restraint.

They were filled with heartfelt connection to the well of being. The source of life itself. They enabled me to come into presence with my authentic emotions ~ a whole symphony of felt experiences which for some reason unknown to me had been denied their existence from birth until now.

During this period I followed the urge to talk to the ocean, if necessary daily. I would spend about an hour on the beach, mid morning in any weather, do a call and response with the Atlantic soundscape, sit in the sand, scribble into my journal. Then go home, my mind calm and at peace, ready to continue my work.

These weeks ~ now recorded in my personal history as ‘my PTSD period’ ~ taught me to communicate with my emotions and appreciate their healing power. I understood that emotions are messengers from the inner wilderness, that they can lead us straight to our deepest wounds. They tell us precisely what needs to be healed ~ if and when we are ready to listen, and bear the pain.

Many well-meaning people, including ‘experts’ and ‘healers’, claim that negative emotions are ‘irrational’, ‘not logical’, therefore ‘unreasonable’, therefore not to be taken seriously, and therefore should be ‘reframed’ or ‘reprogrammed’ and effectively ‘wished away’.

This a fundamental error. A logical fallacy!

Of course, emotions are neither rational, nor logical, nor reasonable, if you try to assess, evaluate, and understand them via the Intellect.

Emotions don’t speak the language of the Intellect. They speak their own language, which most of us have forgotten, due to some ‘enlightened influencers’, whether a few generations and centuries ago, or from a more recent lineage.

Misunderstanding human emotions runs deep. The roots reach all the way back to the myth of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which we’ll explore in a later chapter. For now it’s sufficient to remember that negative emotions are not evil, and positive emotions are not necessarily good.

In Synchronosophy we don’t assess or evaluate emotions via the Intellect. Negative emotions are valued highly as useful sources of information.

The practice of Synchronosophy not only teaches us to communicate with our own emotions ~ which happens to be one of the sacred ancient paths to true healing ~ it also guides us on a treasure hunt, in the tacit knowledge that the layers of emotional permafrost hold buried gifts.

There are personal treasures, which you can only reach, if and when you break through the emotional ice frozen by trauma. You will learn, that every negative emotion is imprinted with a personal code, a secret message, guiding you to your dormant creative potential.

Communication with our own emotions is one of the core practices of Synchronosophy.

Missed the earlier chapters? Click the links

Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6