Chapter 6: The Military of Emotions

In the same way we command our limbs, dedicating roles to arms and legs, core and brain, chest and spirit. Our mind is channelling its entire capacity towards a specific goal; your composition of thought. We have trivialized thinking in a way that makes us have no distinction between the ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ meanings of ‘thought’. Thought is our life, we navigate and survive off our ability to sense and form a response. But a thought is also just one thing, usually needing a web of itself to connect to any meaningful conclusion or meaning. In turn, as minds expand outwards towards a deeper conscience with more experience and history; minds also retreat towards a shrinking mind, compressing itself down towards a single point.

Babies experience thought that are the most important thoughts they know, not will have. Their mind knows only to grow outwards.  Growing inwards would be to reflect on the space that is being made and has been made, which babies have no use for. Our first thoughts were emotional ones; our last ones will be as well but due to experience. Experience is the intensifier that creates the depth in our thoughts. It is the goal of the living, whether that be to seek meaning or to simply survive. But experience is a word that is also trivialized. When babies experience an emotion, a thought occurs and ‘experience’ is formed. An emotional attachment is then tied to the amount of experience ‘experienced’ the same way it was last felt. This is the first limb, trust.

Trust leads our action and can be broken down as a council of five beliefs or heads:

Justified trust is when you can expect something from someone or something will be in alignment with their being, as you know it to be.

Distrust but loved is loving while accepting the self-sacrifice or inviting change.

Neutral trust or toleration is your sense of security.

Distrust and disliked is putting justified trust in your instinctual decisions.

The victim of trust is when you can expect something from someone or something will be in alignment with their being, as you know it.

These five heads are the stamp of approval before sending out any response to the world. Trust carries the voice, guides it and takes accountability for the result. In chapter 2, I wrote about the ego’s ability to gain depth akin to your concept of self, concept of others and your world view. Your ego has the ability to command your ‘emotional limbs’ alongside your better judgement. This control is your involuntary thought. For the conditional lover, it’s also possible that their better judgement functions more as the secondary commander because the ego controls their trust. If the ego’s been hurt, trust takes accountability, the ego then responds to preserve its control on trust. Trust then, losing faith in itself, will lose a chance of growing inwards or gaining depth, becoming more reliant on the ego to dictate the truth.

The emotions under trust are your army. Depending on your experiences, it is the space for any emotions you’ve felt to show up and share the ‘experience’ attached to it. However, our emotions can be ignored by our own trust. This is to protect the ego which is weak to a few ‘warrior-like’ emotions within you:

Shame which attacks the ego’s main defence, Pride.

Guilt which maintains vulnerability with the controlled trust.

And Despair, which causes the feelings of urgency and pressures surrender.

These negative emotions function as ego stabilizers and letting them exist, questioning why they’re being felt and eventually remedying the cause is key. They push you to eventually address hard feelings or experiences and grow because they are the outcome of your sense of victimhood and sense of superiority. Shame and guilt are the feelings of your value being defiled, but whether it’s true to you or not is up to your reflection. They are your friends in your better judgement and your enemy if you’re moving from ego.

Confidence is the second limb that functions under trust. It is just two sides, a glass half full or half empty. To be confident is to see the value with flaws, to be unconfident is to solely feel an absence of value. While optimism and pessimism are more perspectives than feelings, the feeling of worthiness is the ‘bridge’ between the sides of confidence and the unconfident. Balancing worthiness allows you to know what is possible for you, allowed for you and good for you without believing it is specifically ‘for you’. What this means is not being pushed towards conceit from your worthiness, becoming arrogant or narcissistic, while also not rejecting blessings because of low self worth or esteem. Taking a once in a lifetime opportunity over someone else takes confidence but requires humility. Accepting help from someone in a time where you need it takes confidence but also requires assertiveness. Your confidence is delicate yet strong, a glass cannon. If your ego robs your confidence to use as its food, remember to speak to yourself with an open-mindedness that keeps you from becoming too detached from reality.

The last limb is satisfaction. To be satiated with life or to feel complete for a period of time. This feeling of peacefulness is when the light, positive and present parts of you are in a stalemate with the dark, negative and absent parts of you. A stalemate is not necessary in complete agreement but it is a moment of unity shared in a shared appreciation of an experience. For me, I can imagine my ego personified, sitting back at a distance, arms-crossed in contempt of joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust sitting among each other sharing in each others company. The ego is never left out, nor is it treated differently. It is loved the same way, unconditionally, even while it is keeping its distance to prepare for war again.