The Dynamics of Emotion

Jared: Welcome to Delicate Fire. Today we'll be exploring the Aphorisms of Effective Choice by Forrest Landry. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments or head to delicatefire.com and join the Signal community. Be sure to like and subscribe and follow along. Thanks so much. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Hey Forrest, great to see you. So last week we spoke a lot about thoughts, feelings, emotions, and the distinctions and the flows and all these things. And you have this essay that you wrote on the dynamics of emotion, of really describing the flow of this energy, this energy in motion, and calling them specific things like love and fear and anger and frustration and depression as 5 kind of the categories of these emotions. Yeah, maybe just speak to this a little like what, more, what are, how do we define these? And what is it like? What, to give me like a felt sense of what these emotions are like.

Forrest: The main thing that's sort of the observation that we're making is that in the same sort of way that distinguishing between thought, feeling, and emotion sort of just makes practical sense. I mean, I'm not trying to assert that there is some sort of part of mind which is doing this and another part that's doing that. It's not like something that's really intended to be kind of an absolute model of everything. But that there's a kind of reason and rationality. There's a kind of regularity to the patterns of the relationships between thought, feeling, and emotion. And similarly, emotions have patterns too. Like, if we're talking specifically about emotions, we notice that they also occur in a certain pattern or certain regular way. And if we're trying to understand ourselves or our lives or our relationships, it's very, very helpful to know and notice what are the patterns of the, like, what are the dynamics of emotion? That's basically the question that we're asking. First of all, is there a pattern? Yes, there definitely is. And then the next question would be something like, well, what is that pattern?

And in this sense, to just give it a kind of model to sort of describe in just a basic sort of metaphorical sort of way, imagine that there's two energy channels. So from kind of this sort of value, spiritual sort of esoteric kind of inner subjective world, like the innermost subjective, like what we might call the unconscious or the subconscious, or just some sort of ephemeral, everywhere, always occurring kind of the place where you come from when you're talking about your deepest values. So let's just put all that in a box and basically say there is this constellation of there-ness from which our care emerges. And then there's this channel that connects to our mind, our consciousness in this moment as a person in the here and now. The unconscious is going on, but we have the conscious mind. We have the perception and the thoughts and the feelings and the emotions the way we normally describe it. And as we talked about last week, there was also this sort of physiological space of action.

So now there's a channel from this sort of unconscious to the mind, into here and now. And there's also this channel to the world through the body. So we could think of this as the vertical channel and the horizontal channel. The vertical channel basically goes from the dimension of what I care about, my values, to my mind in the here and now. And then from my mind in the here and now, horizontally into the world as expressions, as choices, as things that I do, things that I, the actions that I take in the world.

All right, so we've named these two channels, and now we have, using these channels, a sort of basis by which we can then describe the pattern by which emotions happen, because emotions as a flow from kind of this sort of care subjective dimension into the mind, sort of thinking, perceiving, kind of subjective in the present moment, and then expressed into the world. So emotions are essentially the flow through those channels. So then we could talk about now the degree to which those channels are open or closed to the flow of that energy. And what are the implications of that? Like, what does that look like in life?

Now, again, all of this sort of setup is for a reason, and it'll make sense in a minute. So just bear with me as I kind of lay all this out. Normally, both channels are open. We feel, we care, we express, we just do the things. Okay? But let's say in the flow of a given day, I perceive a potential for loss. Now, to just put this into a kind of story so that it becomes relatable. Let's say you're a parent and you notice your child is in a situation where there's something that's gonna fall on them or they're in the way of something that's gonna bump into them, right? And you will just perceive that as something that's just about to happen. And you care about, you care about your son or daughter or whoever's, you know, your child. Whatever role you're playing as a parent, you are going to move forward and probably prevent the thing from happening. You'll grab the whatever's falling out of the air, or you'll pull the child out of the way of being, you know, basically having some physical encounter. And this process of perceiving is essentially, as we mentioned before, it triggers a feeling of you care about that person. And this happens so fast. It's not like there's any consciousness of this occurring. It's just like this immediate perceive, feel, you feel the energy flow through the channel, flows from care into body, body into world. You reach out, you grab the child.

Jared: Yeah.

Forrest: So if I perceive the potential for loss, i.e., them losing the sense of being okay, basically, or if the hazard is greater, my losing the child, like maybe the child will be hurt to such a degree that they die, then in that sense, the impetus to trigger a flow of energy is going to be enormous. When the channels are open, I'm just in a free state of love. I'm in a state of openness. I'm in a sense of enabling choice and so on and so forth. It's just a natural, relaxed engagement in the world. We're having a conversation or we're just going about our lives, we're having breakfast, whatever. But if I perceive a potential for loss, what I notice is this flow of energy directly towards the core of self. So that vertical channel has a huge amount of energy flowing from my care into the center of gravity of my body. Like it lands in my body. There's a tremendous amount of energy flow from this subjective, deep subjective into my immediate physiological being. So the vertical channel has just taken a huge amount of energy through it. And how do we experience that physiologically? Well, there's an adrenal phenomenon where your body itself is all of a sudden activated. You feel it in your gut, you feel fear kind of in the middle of your body where your center of gravity is. So if the center of gravity is the place where that vertical channel kind of terminates, then in effect what you're having is this very strong move yourself, do the thing. And that energy we call, we have a name for it. It's called fear. So fear is when the ever-present ambient love is converted into a focused within self to enable oneself to act. That's what fear is.

Now, so that's the first motion from love to fear. So love is the first energy, it's the first emotion, and fear is now the second one. And there's this classic aphorism: love is always stronger than fear. Well, the reason for that is because where does the energy that is the source of the fear come from? Well, it comes from your care. It comes from your love. If you didn't love, then you wouldn't care, and therefore there'd be no energy in motion, and therefore there'd be no fear. It's that simple. So in this sense, we have this now moment where our fear is essentially an activated energy to enable us to act because of the perception, the perception of the possibility of the loss of the well-being of a person we care about deeply.

Now, say for example, that for some reason, maybe I'm on the porch of my house and there's a nice big long lot, you know, yards, 100 feet. And then there's a street and my child is in the street and there's a car coming. I see a bus coming and the person is going pretty fast and I can tell they're not really looking where they're going or something, or there's a corner and they're blind. Maybe there's some barrier where they can't see around the corner and I can see that they're going and I basically run into the child. And at the same time on the sidewalk, my neighbor happens to be like right there. They're walking their dog or something. And I perceive this situation. Now at that moment, there's first of all, the perception of care and there's a perception of I'm too far away to do something. Right. So rather than my own fear being the energy, right? So there's going to be the fear of shit, right? Then there's going to be the perception of I need that person to get my child out of the street. Right? So imagine, for example, that between the vertical channel and horizontal channel, there's now a mirror. It's right at my solar plexus, near my center of gravity. That's going to now direct the energy into the horizontal channel.

Jared: Interesting. Wow.

Forrest: So, you know, there's now this huge flow of expression, like there's a tremendous amount of force towards me, but rather than it landing in my body, I'm now going to immediately redirect that energy into the world, right? Like a lot, intensely, right?

Jared: Right.

Forrest: And we're trying to get something to happen in the world. So my getting enabled by that energy ain't gonna do a damn thing. I need to move that energy into the world to get the world to do something.

Jared: Right, right.

Forrest: Or someone in the world to do something.

Jared: In the world. Yeah.

Forrest: Okay. That's anger. Anger is essentially a very strong energy flowing from self to world sourced in fear. Typically speaking.

Jared: Yeah.

Forrest: So in effect, if someone is, if you experience somebody as being angry, and you're wondering what's going on, you can ask, what are they afraid of? And the next question, even deeper, what are they afraid of losing? Then you'll have the chance of maybe understanding what's going on in that moment and how to navigate that situation. But if you don't ask those questions, either as the person being angry or as the person watching someone else be angry, you're not really gonna understand what's going on.

So the process of trying to get the world to do something. Like you're now yelling at the neighbor, get my child out of the street. Like you're basically wanting them to pay attention. Maybe they were the caretaker for the day or something like that. At which point you have legitimate reason to be concerned because they should be paying attention and they clearly weren't. And so now you're really upset about it.

And again, it's not just a specific situation that I'm describing here. I'm just using this as a way of conveying the overall schema of vertical channel open with a lot of energy flowing into it because of a perception. A perception triggers the openness, which is a feeling, which sends a huge amount of energy into a place to enable, but not this place because another perception opens the channel into the world. The perception, feeling, channel open into the world, and now the world is essentially receiving a lot of energy and we call that anger. And so that is the second motion.

Now, I want to switch metaphors a little bit because otherwise this would become kind of unhappy. Say for some reason the world was not responding to your very, very adamant and sincere request, right? So you're sending a lot of energy into the world and for some reason or other, the world is not responding. So there's a whole sense of energy trying to flow into the world, but no change is occurring. And that energy is blocked. It's trying to create change, but it's not resulting in change. So that sense of energy flowing into the world and not accomplishing anything, creates a sort of backing up, a kind of pressure of you're trying to push water into a pipe and the end of that pipe is capped or the valve is shut or something and it just can't get out. So what happens? Well, the pressure builds up. And so in any situation with like this sort of scenario, you really have only two choices. Either keep trying to push energy into the channel until the channel explodes, or stop doing that.

But the effort to try to push energy into the channel with the channel not responding, that has a name and it's called frustration. So frustration is essentially when the channel to the world is blocked and then there's now an accumulation of energy in your interior trying to get something to happen, but it's not happening. That is the essence of frustration. So that's the next move. And as you well can appreciate, if the energy's going into the body to try to enable the body to act, but it can't because you can't do anything, then over time, eventually at some point or another, your body basically says enough's enough. I can't deal with all this. You can pump adrenal or cortisol into your system as much as you want, but at some level it's causing fatigue and damage rather than actual anything.

Jared: Right.

Forrest: So before you burn your body out, blow your body up, you're going to basically close the vertical channel too. And so there's a sense in which in this, in the care, in the spirit, there's a sense of nothing can happen. I'm powerless. And you don't feel any energy. You don't feel any enablement. You don't feel that there's any possibility of it being any different. And this has a name, it's called depression.

So talking about the vertical and horizontal channel, we now have distinguishing characteristics for the 5 emotions. And I can name this thing called grief after that. But let's first of all look at it as vertical channel, horizontal channel, open. That's love. Vertical channel with strong flow. That's fear. Vertical and horizontal channel with strong flow. That's anger. Vertical channel flowing, but horizontal channel closed and blocked. That's frustration. Horizontal channel closed and vertical channel closed, no flow. That's depression.

So you can see why it was important for us to set up this channel notion, because now it has a very clean way to describe the sequencing of love to fear to anger to frustration to depression. And grief is essentially the unwinding of that. So if you are in depression, you do grief in the sense of finding another way for you to have hope, finding another way to process the frustration, finding another way to process the anger, finding another way to process the love, right? To have care, but in a way that can be fulfilled.

Jared: Right.

Forrest: So it's not that you don't care about the thing you used to care about. It's just that you know that you can't manifest that. So you might as well manifest the care that you can. And the grieving process is kind of how we come back to that. So it's kind of like grieving is the unwinding of the dynamic of emotions so that we can come back to love. And in this sense, we've now characterized the named emotions, love, fear, anger, frustration, depression, and that's it, right? Grief is a process of unwinding those, but it's essentially the sort of thing here. I'm not treating it as an emotion itself so much as it's a process of navigating emotions.

And feelings are all of the other qualities. So there's an infinity of feeling names the same way there can be an infinity of thoughts, but emotions, they're finite. There's 5 of them. And that's it. And so in this sense, we've not only named the emotions, but we've actually structurally described the dynamics of them, the pattern of the flow of them. And therefore we now have a way of recognizing where are we on this schema, right? Anytime an emotion's coming up, like if you feel fear, it's because love was already strong. And in this particular sense, if we're treating love and care as more or less equivalent, they're basically the same. Then in effect, what we're essentially saying is that all emotions are signals to self, to you having the emotion, that something important's going on. Something that matters is going on. Something you've— the relevance of the perception has resulted in the response of these energy emotions. And so in this sense, we are therefore able to not just recognize that emotions are signals of meaningfulness and therefore important to pay attention to.

Now, this isn't to say that anger is a justification for some actions you may take, but it is to say that there's a validity in the energy. There's a validity in the feelings. There's a validity in the perceptions that triggered all this in the sense that your care matters, right? Your love matters. So this therefore means that, you know, you want to make choices on the basis of love because otherwise the more unconscious of that, the more you're going to do something that might not actually be responsive to the love, in which case, you know, it's not getting you what you want. It's not getting you essentially the outcome of care manifested.

So in this sense, as we add layers, the more that we get farther from love in the dynamics of emotion, then we are basically saying, yeah, there's increasing degrees to which we are less conscious of the love at the root.

Jared: Right.

Forrest: So sometimes a depressed person just has lost touch with their original sense of care. They just feel disempowered.

Jared: Yeah.

Forrest: And so in effect, there's a notion here that by recognizing this sequence and sort of accounting for the fact that like those first transitions, like we now know that these transitions are regular. Like we now basically can say emotions are not random. They don't just arise out of nothing. There's a biological basis for the way in which this works. There's a kind of spiritual basis by which all of this happens. It's a way in which the unconscious and the conscious are interacting.

So in this sense, what we are therefore wanting to just pay attention to as we kind of start to recognize that these are worthwhile signals of it matters, it's meaningful. And moreover, that they flow in these patterns is that to some extent we want to account for the temporal elements as well. Like how quickly does this happen? The transition, the first move from love to fear and then from fear to anger, the first two moves can happen faster than a person's awareness can track. So in effect, you can flip from love to fear to anger, or from love to fear, and all of a sudden be feeling afraid and be like, oh wow, what happened? I'm, why am I feeling all this anxiety all of a sudden?

Similarly, when we become conscious of why we're afraid, it's no longer anxiety. It's just fear, right? So anxiety is like, I'm feeling this energy of fear, but I don't know why. What am I afraid of losing? What's really going on here? Well, if it's kind of a biological origin for anxiety, it's like you're afraid for your life. Right? Or there's something really off. There's something wrong. And you probably want to figure that out, right? It's kind of important. Your body's telling you, hey, pay attention. That's what anxiety is. But your body can't necessarily just walk up to you and knock on the head and say, hello, by the way, you haven't had enough vitamin D for a really long time. And by the way, now, like, close to suffering for that in major biological ways. Your body can't do the verbal communication with you. It can alert you through the anxiety or maybe the anxiety is because of something that you saw, but you didn't realize you saw it. And therefore, if you see big scary monster, you know, I'm afraid because of big scary monster.

So in this sense, if the transition from love to fear is really fast, you might have to unpack why am I having this experience right now? Similarly, if you get to anger really fast, which can happen, you can flip from love to fear to anger in milliseconds, like really, really faster than thought. Again, you have to sort of diagnose, why am I so angry right now? Now, part of you is probably going to know. I mean, it's not like you didn't have some perception. So in effect, we don't think emotions are reasonable because we flip through the sequence too quickly for us to notice it most of the time. But now that you know the pattern, you can then begin to sort of, what did I see that pissed me off so much? Or what was I thinking that triggered this? What are the feelings that are, what are the qualities of this experience? What does it remind me of? When was the first time I felt this way? Right? Those are all important kinds of therapeutic questions to navigate one's own state.

Similarly, when we're looking at the transition from anger to frustration, and frustration to depression, those can take a really long time. So long, the transitions are so gradual that we don't notice them. It's kind of like the boiling frog and the temperature changes slowly, so it never jumps out because there's no moment where there's a difference that becomes noticeable because it happens gradually. So in this sense, the transition from love to fear and fear to anger is too quick to notice. And the transition from fear to frustration and frustration to depression is too slow to notice because it maybe takes months and you just forget that you used to feel any other way.

Jared: Yeah.

Forrest: So for most people, it seems like emotions just don't make sense. But really they do. And once you recognize this pattern, once you know this sort of dynamic, life will just make a lot more sense. It'll just work better and you won't treat emotions as some random weather thing that just happened and there's no reason for it. It'll be like, yeah, there's a reason and it matters and I want to account for this. Like in the same sort of way we're talking about the intellect needing to account for the instinct. This is that happening. Like right now, our conversation of helping people to trust and to process their emotions as being valid sources of relevance indication, valid sources of energy, reasonable conversions of perception and action. Obviously it can't just be that. You do need to sort of recognize what's going on and respond on the basis of what's happening. And this fits if it's unconscious anger, if it's conscious passion.

Jared: Yeah.

Forrest: Right. So in the same sort of way, we could talk about unconscious fear as anxiety and conscious fear, what I'm afraid of as just the word fear. Similarly, I can talk about anger versus passion. Passion is energy flowing into the world, but I am really in touch with the basis of love, which drives it. And that's just way better, right? So in this sense, there's a notion here that from this model, we're seeing that there are these adjacent connections to things that we all experience and that by recognizing them, we could start to unpack the subtle difference between anger versus fury, for example. Fury would be like, there's so much compression all the way around that there's only one direction that that energy can flow out and it's tightly confined to just that one thing, which it just blasts out of the water, basically, right? So now we could talk about compression associated with energy flow, right? And what does that mean? Or we can extend the metaphor to talk about envy or jealousy and what are the dynamics by which this thought, these feelings couple into this emotional sequence to create, as I said, a kind of anger response, for example.

Now, to the degree that we're naming and distinguishing thoughts, feelings, and emotions, it becomes easier to therefore see the connection between specific perceptions or thoughts, specific feelings and memories and qualities, and specific emotional dynamics, and therefore be able to, in a kind of overall holistic sense, be whole in our response, therefore more healthy in our process. So the cognitive dimension is important, but it's certainly not the whole thing. But without it, you're kind of stuck. You're lost. You don't really, it's like this stuff feels like it's happening randomly. And for most people in the world, never having received this, just kind of heads up, right? Like, where in school is going to somebody learn this, which we just did. This to me should be something that people learn in grade school, honestly, like literally maybe in kindergarten or first or second grade or something, that's an opinion. But it's hard for me to see that this wouldn't really be helpful to even children. And certainly for most adults walking around kind of just muddling along as best they can, it would have been great if they'd gotten a clue, but really without like just putting the pieces together, there's just no real way in which anybody would see this. So therefore, you know, this dynamics of emotion is actually pretty important and maybe one of the main things that really provides a lot of value to the teaching of the metaphysics.

Jared: Thank you, Forrest. I'll see you next week.

Forrest: All right, great.

Jared: This was Delicate Fire. Thank you so much for joining us, where we explore the aphorisms of effective choice. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments or head to delicatefire.com and join the Signal community. Please like and subscribe if you want to follow along. I look forward to seeing you next week.