The Sapwood of Synchronosophy (13/18)
Symphony of Senses
I know not what instruments,
what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura
I sound and clash inside myself.
All I hear is the symphony.
〰 Fernando Pessoa 〰
Salutogenesis and the Sense of Coherence
The quiet sense of something lost.
〰 Tennyson 〰
In lessons of human anatomy and physiology we learn about five senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting. Digging a little deeper, we might find a couple more: a sense of balance, proprioception, kinæsthesia, a sense of pain or pleasure, a sense of temperature…
All of these ‘senses’ relate to the physical organism and may give the impression, as if ‘sensing’ is a purely physical activity.
What about leaving the house, and as soon as you close the door you are overcome by the sense of having forgotten something?
What about a whole array of 12 senses ~ the sense of beauty, consistency, comfort, confusion, danger, depth, despair, distress, harmony, helplessness, hope, and humour?
Encompassing all of these and many more, a vital sense has been identified in the 1960s by Aaron Antonovsky (1923-1994), a medical sociologist who conducted his research mainly in the USA and Israel.
Antonovsky discovered this sense by asking and holding his key question ~ what is the origin of health? The answer came to him via his wife, Helen who suggested the term the sense of coherence.
The Sense of Coherence (SOC) is now inseparably connected to Antonovsky’s model of health called Salutogenesis [from Latin salus = health + Greek genesis = origin, creation] ~ a theory of the origin health and support of a healthy equilibrium.
While the conventional Western medical model of health is focused entirely on pathogenesis ~ the origin of disease, and how to eliminate manifestations of pathology ~ Antonovsky was looking at health and dis-ease as a continuum.
Perfect health is virtually non-existent, Antonovsky observed, due to the sensitive equilibrium of the human organism within a suboptimal social, environmental, psychological, cultural and political context. The ‘health-condition’ of any human can therefore be found at any moment somewhere on this spectrum of well-being, between health and dis-ease.
Instead of searching for ways to prevent or eliminate pathological symptoms, Antonovsky explored the relationship between stressors (social conflicts, professional or private challenges, noxious biochemical substances, environmental hazards, political threats, financial stress, daily hassles), and resources available to the individual.
Early on in his research, Antonovsky had worked in Israel with a group of menopausal women, all of whom had experienced the holocaust in Nazi Germany firsthand. To his surprise, he discovered that about one third of these women showed an unexpected resilience and superior levels of health and equanimity.
While other holocaust-survivors were suffering from ongoing PTSD, these women had the inner strength to recover from their horrific experience by responding with what would now be called spontaneous post-traumatic growth. (The term PTG had not yet been invented.)
When Antonovsky identified the sense of coherence as the answer to the ‘salutogenetic question’, it was like detecting the secret personal power source which enabled these women to come out of extremely challenging situations stronger, rather than broken.
In his efforts to fully understand the sense of coherence (SOC), Antonovsky studied the works of other original thinkers such as Hans Selye (neurologist and stress researcher) and Victor Frankl (author of Man’s Search for Meaning) and came to the conclusion that SOC has three components: Comprehensibility, manageability, meaningfulness.
In practical terms this means››› if a person can comprehend and manage a stress thrown at them, and if they have a meaningful reason to overcome the difficult situation, they are more likely to rise to the challenge and emerge from the ordeal transformed in a good way.
Inner Senses of the Instinct
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
〰 Henry David Thoreau 〰
In the Noctarine Web of Consciousness, Senses in general are associated with the Faculty of the Instinct. The physiological senses ~ seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching ~ are directly linked to physical organs, of course. Therefore they must surely belong to the Body…
True. The physical ability to perceive through the sensory organs is related to the Body. At the same time, these physiological sensory functions form a strong link with our emotional memory. One example is the so-called ‘Proust-phenomenon’ mentioned in my wordcast The Knowing Nose.
Smells, sounds, flavours, textures, sights can provoke instinctive feelings, associations, emotional responses. Physiological sensory events give impulses for emotional/ instinctual sensing such as agitation, antipathy, apprehension, comfort, danger, dissociation, ease, excitement, incoherence, joy, poise, relief, serenity, suspense, tension, trepidation.
Like the organs of the physical organism, the Faculties of the organism of Consciousness are all connected with one another. They affect each other. The Instinct gives instinctual impulses to all the other vital Faculties. Their purpose is to support each other, continuously working on the healthy equilibrium of the whole system, contributing to salutogenesis.
You may have a different definition for the term ‘instinct’ than it is used here. Perhaps you associate the word with animal instinct, survival instinct, maternal instinct etc. The definition you are familiar with may consider the instinct a physiological function, or a behavioural activity.
In contemporary English (and other languages), the word instinct is used interchangeably with intuition and inspiration. In the Noctarine these three words are used with more specific meanings (see Glossary of the Noctarine part 1)
As we become more familiar with the vital organs of our Consciousness, it gets easier to understand why and in what way they contribute to our sense of coherence. This has many benefits beyond coping better with the stresses of everyday life.
Feel free to harvest bits and bites of self-knowledge along the way, which can open doors to whole new worlds, a whole new life…
With that in mind, let’s take another look at emotions ~ the perennial outsiders of human Consciousness ~ the offspring of the Inner Senses.
Champions for Emotional Rehabilitation
I’ve learned that ignoring negative emotions is similar to
trying to tune out a tantruming two year old:
it doesn’t work. They just get louder.
〰 Stella Lyn Norris 〰
In 1972 Candace Pert, at the time a graduate student of pharmacology, “discovered the brain’s opiate receptor – the cellular site where the body’s painkillers and ‘bliss-makers’, the endorphins – bond with cells to weave their magic.” The discovery lead to the publication of her groundbreaking book Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine in 1997
In 1990 two psychologists, John Mayer & Peter Salavoy published an article entitled Emotional Intelligence. The term was popularised in 1995 through the publication of Emotional Intelligence: Why it can Matter More than IQ by Daniel Goleman. The bestseller opened the floodgates for a sudden stream of interest, new research, and publications in the field. Here is a short list:
- in Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1995) Antonio Damasio, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists takes the reader on a journey of scientific discovery to show that “emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking and to normal social behavior.”
- Emotional Literacy: Intelligence with a Heart (1997) by French-American psychologist Claude Steiner offers a step-by-step program to achieving emotional power.
- in Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life (2003) Paul Ekman, American psychologist and pioneer in the study of facial expression and nonverbal communication “led a revolution in our scientific understanding of emotions.”
- Emotional First Aid: First aid for failure (2013) by American psychologist Guy Winch is a “first aid kit for minor emotional and psychological injuries such as failure, rejection, and loss,” while promising to prevent more significant emotional dis-ease.
- Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life (2016), by South-African psychologist Susan David, offers a four-step approach to help navigate life in the most stressful and difficult circumstances.
- How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2016) by neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett promises to answer questions such as “Why do emotions feel automatic? Does rational thought really control emotion? How does emotion affect disease?” and many more.
- The School of Life: An Emotional Education (2019) by Swiss-British philosopher Alain de Botton is a crash course in emotional maturity, bringing together “ten years of essential and transformative research on emotional intelligence.”
- in Emotional Logic: Harnessing your emotions into inner strength (2021) British medical doctors Trevor Griffiths and his wife Marian Langsford, share true stories of transformation by understanding and harnessing difficult emotions.
– Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking (2022) by Leonard Mlodinow presents the ‘cutting edge of neuroscientific discoveries’ about the “limited power of rationality and decision-making.”
This new (at the time) genre of books shares results from psychology, neuroscience, sociology, philosophy, and medicine. Here is an (incomplete) summary of the conclusions drawn by the authors:
Emotions
– have ‘intelligence’ which may be more important than IQ
– drive our actions and behaviour
– tell others when we’re under stress and may need support
– have interpersonal/ social functions
– bring people together and help us understand each other
– have innate wisdom
– give warning signals in dangerous situations
– influence cognitive processes, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, decision making, and problem solving.
– play a key part in helping us understand how body and mind affect each other.
Being aware of our emotions and learning how to handle them in a constructive way promotes so-called ‘emotional intelligence’ which has many benefits, far beyond the emotional state itself. Here is a short list of some of those benefits:
Emotional Intelligence
– increases self-awareness
– improves self-regulation
– promotes empathy
– supports social skills
– drives motivation
– the above benefits have a positive influence on productivity, mental health, cooperativeness, communication, understanding oneself and others etc.
The Collective Trauma of Emotional Suppression
Crying does not indicate that you are weak.
Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.
〰 Charlotte Brontë 〰
It’s been about 50 years since Candace Pert discovered that“emotions orchestrate the interactions among all our organs and systems.”
John Mayer and colleagues have brought their insights about the importance of emotions to public knowledge for at least 30 years. Their work has triggered a seismic shift in our collective understanding of emotions and their vital role for our personal wellbeing, healthy relationships, and even professional success.
The impact of these realisations has begun to filter through from popular science publications into the privacy of many homes and social interactions. However, knowing that emotions are useful and important ~ even more important than IQ etc.~ at the rational level is one thing. Being able to manage one’s own negative emotions in everyday life is quite another. Why is it still so difficult?
In the secret inner space of subjective experience, these cutting edge discoveries listed above are hardly big news. We’ve all experienced how much our emotions influence every part of our inner and outer life every single day since we were born.
We’ve always known ~ at some level ~ that emotions have a major influence on our physical and mental wellbeing. We might have doubted this self-knowledge ~ at another level ~ but it was always there. The real big news is that scientists are now recognising and confirming this fact.
Finally it’s official. Emotions have been let out of the closet. They’re not taboo anymore. At last we’ve been given permission to feel our emotions, talk about them, acknowledge them, admit that we’ve got them, be emotional and share our emotional being with others…
If it only was that easy…
Emotional suppression, which has been promoted for centuries, has left us
– more confused
– less self-aware
– more incoherent
– less able to self-regulate
It must have decreased our empathy, social skills, motivation, productivity, cooperativeness etc.
Why? Because emotional suppression reduces emotional intelligence. And because of the intimate link between emotions and healthy brain functions, the suppression of the natural function of the Instinct can have disastrous consequences for our physical health too, as Dr. Gabor Maté tells us in his book The Myth of Normal.
Dr. Maté works predominantly with patients suffering from autoimmune diseases and degenerative disorders. Following his discovery that these physical syndromes were linked to suppressed emotions, he developed a technique to facilitate emotional healing, in some cases with spectacular results on the physical plane.
Emotional suppression is not something we can simply switch off from one day to another. Emotional healing is not just a matter of ‘letting all the suppressed emotions out’ all of a sudden, as if they had been locked away in an inner prison.
Emotional suppression means, part of the indigenous population within our inner world has been oppressed, persecuted and discriminated against for centuries. Emotions have been treated with contempt, disrespect, ridicule and abuse. They have been bullied and rejected. For hundreds of years they were considered outcasts. They were unwelcome, made to feel like they had no right to exist in the human world.
Their gifts were not recognised. They were dismissed as worthless at best, or depraved at worst. For hundreds of years, our ancestors have blamed every evil under the sun on the existence of emotions, while vowing to eradicate the horrible beasts!
Emotional Salutogenesis
The understanding of any single emotion is incomplete
unless its narrative history is grasped.
〰 Martha Nussbaum 〰
It should come as no surprise that the communication between us ~ the hosts of our individual human Consciousness (IHC) ~ and the sentient beings, who are the offspring of our own Sentience, has broken down.
Many fellow humans have difficulties communicating with their emotions. It’s such a common problem. It’s considered ‘normal’ and therefore rarely talked about. Many people admit that they are scared and/ or suspicious of their emotions.
What if our emotions are scared and suspicious of us? Wouldn’t that be understandable ~ after all the oppression, persecution, abuse, and threats of extinction they’ve had to endure?
Emotional trauma affects everyone of us to a greater or lesser degree. It is part of the historical trauma which runs through the veins of our civilisation. We are all ‘emotional-trauma-survivors’. We each carry our personal share of the legacy of discrimination against these instinctual creatures. It takes time to heal such a deep wound.
Recognition of this situation helps us to approach ourselves and our emotions with compassion. It helps to be told by ‘the experts’ that emotions are ‘good guys’ after all. But it’s only been a couple of decades. And emotions are still not fully understood, not even by ‘the experts’.
The knowledge of ‘scientific facts’ about emotions doesn’t make communication with them instantly light, fun and breezy. We still have to practice reconciliation. This relationship is still tender, fraught with apprehension and misapprehension. Our emotions and us ~ we’re only just starting to get to know one another. In order to do that we have to start meeting our emotions on their own terms.
Aaron Antonovsky offers a vivid image of the health — dis-ease continuum which shows all humans swimming in the river of life. Nobody can remain on the riverbank. The water is polluted in many places, the currents treacherous.
“There are forks in the river that lead to gentle streams or to dangerous rapids and whirlpools and the crucial question is: what shapes one’s ability to swim well?”
For the practice of Synchronosophy, I suggest to adopt the salutogenic model of health. Instead of discriminating between ‘good and evil’ emotions, and trying to allow only the ‘good ones’ their right to life, we can view our emotional experiences on a spectrum of emotional well-being between pleasure and suffering. It’s a continuum in permanent flux.
When we judge emotions as good or evil, we are effectively perpetuating the discrimination and suppression described above. Negative emotions end up being suppressed by what’s now known as ‘toxic positivity’.
How can positivity be toxic?
It happens all the time. Here’s an example:
You show a friendly face and upbeat behaviour socialising with strangers, while negative emotions are rumbling inside. As soon as you get home, the mask drops and the negative emotions seep out, either in ‘toxic’ behaviour towards your nearest and dearest, or against yourself ~ either in overt self-sabotage or through invisible self-destruction in your organism.
If you recognise this in yourself, please don’t worry! You are not the problem. You are doing nothing ‘wrong’. Our emotions are tied up in our common human history of emotional discrimination and suppression.
We have all been taught that negative emotions are evil and we should learn to get rid of them. Nobody realised that this is in fact impossible. That emotions ~ negative and positive ones ~ are a part of who we are. Indigenous natives of our inner world.
Now we need to learn to meet these scary creatures with compassion. It’s not easy in the beginning. But it does get better with practice! And it feels a hell of a lot better too. I promise.
Very few fellow humans truly understand emotions. Many of those who say they do, treat them as if they were ‘inevitable appendages of the human mind’ which can be controlled by either ‘mindful detachment’, or ‘positive thinking’, or some clever ‘cognitive reframing’.
How do you think the emotions feel about this?
How would you feel about this, if you were an unwanted emotion?
You ~ the unwanted emotion ~ are doing your job within the IHC, the work you were born to do, and get knocked on the head. Every time! — Not so great, right?
All of these attempts to ‘understand’ emotions are incredibly patronizing. They are forms of discrimination and suppression. In all these scenarios, the ‘rational mind’ is viewed as the one ‘in charge’ who has to learn to ‘control those pesky emotions’.
Some people still seem to believe that our emotions don’t notice. That they can be cheated. It will never work. Our emotions are the most sensitive creatures in the inner world. They notice everything!
What if our negative emotions are our symbionts? How about ignoring the dichotomy between good and evil emotions for a moment, and diving into the Inner Ocean of all emotions, in which we all swim all the time. Through peaks and troughs.
I’m not suggesting to ignore the differences between pleasure and suffering. Not at all. Knowledge of good & evil is as essential as ever. But we don’t need to suppress or avoid negative emotions. They are not dangerous. We are the ones who have turned them into inner dragons and monsters.
Now we must learn to recognise and rehabilitate them as who they truly are. Living sentient beings, making vital contributions to our inner life. We can learn to communicate and interact with them in constructive ways. We are called to practice surfing the waves of our Inner Ocean.
The Tones of Inner Sentience
Where you feel the most, you know the least what to say.
〰 Annette von Droste-Hülshoff 〰
The Noctarine shows a set of 8 vital organs of Consciousness ~ the basic anatomy of the organism. In the living system, all these 8 Faculties are active all the time.
Each of our Faculties (including the voluntary ones) have autonomous properties, meaning these are not under our voluntary control. Through their autonomous property every Faculty also affects all the others. This permanent interaction of autonomous properties generates a living pulsating Web of Consciousness – the physiology of the organism.
In chapter Chapter 11 I have introduced the 8 Functions of the vital Faculties. Functions are an autonomous property, provided by the Body. The 8 key words in the table below show the basic Function associated with each of the Faculties.
In Chapter 12 you have met the 8 Essences of the vital Faculties. Essence is an autonomous property, provided by the Soul. The 8 key words in the table below show the Essence of each Faculty. (Definitions are included in the Glossary of Synchronosophy part 1)
In this chapter I am introducing the autonomous property provided by the Instinct, called Sentience ~ the ability to sense and feel things. Being sentient makes us alive ~ as opposed to a statue cast in concrete.
When humans are ‘detached from their emotions’ those emotions don’t go away. They withdraw into the inner wilderness and become potentially destructive. The human organism can continue to function physically and mentally (in a limited way) even when emotionally detached. But without a healthy interaction with emotions the organism is in danger to degenerate, mentally and physically.
The 8 Tones of Sentience, as expressed by the 8 Faculties are designed to facilitate our communication with our emotions. (Definitions of all new key words shown in the table below will be included in the wordcast Glossary of Synchronosophy part 2).
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum says, “The understanding of any single emotion is incomplete unless its narrative history is grasped and studied for the light it sheds on the present response.”
Since we have been collectively and individually detached from our emotions for so long, it takes time and practice to get in touch with them, to grasp and study their narrative histories and fully understand their messages. (We’ll get to that in the practical parts of Synchronosophy.)
Just after finishing the final draft for this chapter I read the following comment from Kimberly Warner on one of my wordcasts on Symbiopædia: “while listening to a podcast about the future of neuron-technology, they discussed how the process of writing might someday simply happen through sophisticated tech that ‘reads’ our thoughts. This feels so wrong to me... I've often said that in my own writing process, my fingertips are doing the thinking. I often have no clue what I'm about to write until the tap, tap, tap starts to happen and my fingers reveal. If that process is bypassed, I worry that human creativity will lose something sensual, sentient and well... symbiotic.”
This observation, which reflects the experience of many creative writers, captures the natural sentient synergy of all Faculties. I’m confident future neuron-technology will enable us to type up a shopping list without touching a keyboard. Creative writing, however, must remain in our own hands.
Missed the earlier chapters? Click the links
The Rootstock of Synchronosophy
Chapter 1 The Mycelium of Synchronosophy, Chapter 2 Sub-Soil of Synchronosophy, Chapter 3 Nutrients for Synchronosophy, Chapter 4 Adjustments to an Unnatural World, Chapter 5 Loss of Self and Identity, Chapter 6 The Destructive Trail of Trauma
The Heartwood of Synchronosophy
Chapter 7 Emotional Messengers, Chapter 8 Love Thyself, Chapter 9 The Birth of the Noctarine, Chapter 10 Subjective Experience, Chapter 11 The Inner Wilderness, Chapter 12 Polarity and Wholeness
Thank you, Veronilka, for another excellent essay on what I believe is important ideas on making us more Human. I am especially glad to read about the necessity of our Emotions, which need to come out of the closet. All of them.
I have been fighting a lonely fight for 30
years, after my own personal awakening through writing and reading, saying our Emotions are part of who we are. We should not fear or manage or bury them (only to resurface), but appreciate and understand them. Our society still has a long way to go to accepting Human Emotions, and seeing how they are essential to us.
And if health is on a continuum, and I agree it is, the suppression of one aspect that makes us Human explains a high degree of mental dis-ease in our society.
What an important chapter, I had so many thoughts as I read this, and found myself wishing Substack had an internal notes function so I could highlight and comment right into the text!
I thought about my mom quite a bit throughout. She became a therapist herself because “I didn’t understand emotions and wanted to know why humans have them.” My brother and I always scratched our heads at this Spock-like proclamation, as if our mom could only experience/understand emotion through some cognitive function. Now, later in life, we’re pretty sure she (and other family members) have high functioning autism and she was legitimately not able to connect to another’s experience through empathy. In a strange way, this may’ve made her an even better therapist but often made a sense of feeling “seen” as her daughter a bit muddy.
As someone whose entire experience of life is watery and sensual (thank you for identifying the many beyond the big 5!) I wholly embrace emotion as vital to saludogenesis!