Our Emotional Self
It is important to spend some time to discuss and examine our emotional selves. I doubt many would argue with the notion that emotional reactions to experiences play a significant role in their lives. They also play an enormous role in how our minds develop and learn while incarnate This makes learning more about our "emotional self" and its influence on and in our lives highly beneficial.
Everyone has a different point of view when it comes to defining the “emotional self”. For our purposes here we need to have a common definition and understanding of the term or, as I will refer to it, our emotional body. When I refer to the emotional body, I am referring to the aspect of our consciousness that, when incarnate, "occupies" the emotional sub-plane. We experience emotions using of this aspect of our awareness though we also use other aspects as well.
Emotions are sensations separate from our thoughts about and physiological responses to them. For example, it is the feeling of worry not the thoughts that about or related to why we are worried or the way our heart may speed, the knot in the pit of our stomach or our sweaty palms. Emotions range from what we refer to as positive to negative emotions. Examples of positive emotions are caring, sympathy, compassion, affection and devotion while worry, anger, jealousy, hate and malice are examples of negative ones.
When we experience emotions there are a number of things going on, as mentioned, even though we tend to group them all together. They appear to be one and the same as they are hard to perceive separately. This is why so many think that emotions are not caused by or arise from our own thoughts or believe they are purely physiological reactions. Some of what we will cover in this essay has been covered in previous ones; however, it is of benefit to revisit them in this one as they relate to our emotional self and its development.
The Basics of Emotions
There are three perceivable aspects to what what is commonly referred to as an emotion. They are the thoughts that gave rise to or activated it, the emotion itself and the physiological reactions to both. Emotions are the body of our emotional self in a similar manner to how our thoughts are the body of our minds. I have referred to them separately, and they are in that they are due to matter of three separate sub-planes, however, the three aspects are not truly separate from or independent of each other.
Our consciousness creates thoughts as it reacts to experiences. Thoughts are energy and hence their resonance leads to a sympathetic reaction in the matter of the sub-planes immediately "above and below" with the former being much less than the latter due to the relationships between sub-planes. The sub-plane "below" the mental sub-plane it is the emotional one. The emotional matter manifested or activated is intrinsically linked to and the thought(s) that gave rise to it.
One could say that the thought that activates or creates an emotion is present in it. Emotional matter has a similar relationship with matter of the physical plane via the etheric web (this topic is beyond the scope of this essay). A simple example will illustrate this relationship.
Let us say that I am sensitive to and do not like it when someone says a particular word or words about me. This sensitivity is based on thoughts I have created over time. When they are activated or triggered there are secondary reactions in that other connected thoughts are also triggered. Included in the connected thoughts would how I have come to react to it. We refer to this is an A/R set (action-reaction set).
Now, if someone says the "offending word(s)" thoughts I hold that deem it offensive are activated/triggered. This reaction activates other thoughts such as "I don't like this" or ones that take the use of it as a threat to my view of myself and so on. These thoughts then activate emotions related to it such as anxiety, nervousness or perhaps even anger. The same process occurs with thoughts whether they are ones we are conscious of them or not. This is what is occurring when we can find ourselves reacting emotionally to an experience or even our own thoughts but have no idea why. Such reactions can become quite strong and the emotions hard to deal with.
The combination of both the activated/created thoughts and emotions that are subsequently activated or manifested can trigger parts of the brain to react. The amygdala may be activated triggering the fight or flight mechanism. Adrenalin can get pumped into my blood stream leading to physical sensations such as sweaty skin, a flush in the chest or a knot in the pit of the stomach. This triggering can also occur in the opposite direction as our bodies do have some built in mechanisms that can activate emotions that in turn activate thoughts.
Everything is energy including our emotions. We do not typically see them in a visual sense, we feel them be it the emotion itself or the physical reactions to it. We have the capability to create and respond on all emotion levels; however, we may not experience or be aware of emotions we have infrequently or have not enabled (by having thoughts that manifested them) or those that are blocked or filtered by thoughts we hold.
It is our minds that are the gatekeeper. In a very real way it controls what and how we perceive and react to what we experience. As mentioned, we do not generally see the energy of the emotions our thoughts activate. We feel them and then our rational mind labels and classifies them. It also decides whether or not we need to be conscious awareness of it based on our reactions to previous experiences.
It is also common for people to misinterpret and mislabel their emotions and even to ignore them as if they do not exist at all. This can occur for many reasons such one lacking the language to express it or as part of a defense mechanism. Further, physiological mechanisms can create emotions that we feel as real, which can mask or hinder our ability to sense our true emotions clearly and distinctly.
Everyone has a different level of emotional awareness. If we are emotionally conscious we would be able to identify every emotion we are experiencing though few can do this consciously. The inability to recognize one’s emotional state makes life more challenging. Think of the times when you may have been angry, perhaps lost some self control. Did you notice it the instant the anger started or as it grew or even that you were angry or did you only notice it when it was so strong as to be undeniable? I would suspect that perhaps you did not, as anger generally starts with small things and builds from there.
When we are not active observers, we often miss the gradual build up and may not notice how strong our emotions have become until something triggers us to express them. Even then, we may not actually realize it. I have met many an angry person who denied they were angry at all.
What helps us become more aware of our emotions is to think/see of our emotional body as the part of us just like how we view our physical body that is able to express energies we call emotions: what we feel, what we are able to feel, the totality of our emotional capabilities. At this point, I will make a clarification with respect to love. Love is a misused word. Love in its essence is not an emotion. It is also unconditional and undirected at anyone or anything in particular. It is comprised of energy of subtler energy than that of thoughts, emotions or bodies and comes from within (from our higher self).
This energy can flow naturally or be directed from within, which leads to what we experience as "being in love with someone or something" though in this form it is also affect by our thoughts, which is why it comes with conditions (I love this or you and not that or someone else).
A common term, which I have used for the emotional body is the astral body. It is with our astral body that we experience the vibrations referred to as emotions. These include a range of emotions from the lowest or densest, such as malice, deceit, anger, jealousy and greed to the least dense and most vibrant such as of sympathy, devotion, affection and compassion.
Our emotional body starts to form prior to birth and changes with every experience we have. Its development is at its highest rates during the early years of our life; however, any periods with strong emotional, mental/causal or spiritual energies will have a similar effect. It develops as a result of the thoughts we create as we react to our experiences. The nature of the thoughts we create and hold determine the kinds of emotions we create and hold. Except in the rarest of circumstances, we are all born capable of having and expressing every emotion.
Between our consciousness, our true self and our emotional body lies our rational mind. It is, if you will, our soul’s interface when we are incarnate. While we may feel emotions, our thoughts around them come from our rational minds programming. Throughout our lives our rational mind has experiences and reacts to them and our emotional bodies reflects them. It reacts to experiences and the thoughts we hold change. In doing so it can allow, enhance, or block certain emotions from our conscious awareness.
The foundation of our minds and emotional body are developed during the early years of our life. They form the framework for how our rational mind deals with emotions for years to come unless we do some personal growth to change it. This framework is typically the source of long-term patterned responses to experiences (mental thought patterns are A/R sets).
All of our vehicles start to develop prior to birth; we just do not enter or take "possession" of them until we take our first breath. Genetics determines our physical makeup and our true self sets the "energies" it will put down into an incarnation. The thoughts and emotions of those around us while we are in the womb our add to the mix. It is via the latter that we pick up family, cultural and even historic influences all of which contribute to our our developing mental and emotional/astral bodies.
From conception on, the energies in our home, where we go, of those who raise us and our friends and our reactions to experiences influence the the development of our emotional body. Of these influences our reactions to experiences are by far the most influential. Naturally, the rate of emotional body development diminishes as we get older and begin to work with it more. We can and continually do change it though we tend to not notice or realize it.
Early on we do not exert much conscious control over the construction of the basic framework of our emotional self at birth. We also do not have much control over the experiences we encounter or our reactions to them during early childhood. These are the years that most of us do not remember, save as snapshots or rare flashbacks as our experiences went into creating the foundation of our rational mind in all its complexity as well as that of our emotional body. It is upon this foundation that we move forward modifying and further developing them throughout our lives. It is through awareness of what we think and feel in the moment that we develop our ability to explore and work with them more directly. If we do not do this then we tend to learn by accident and are at the mercy of the whim of the momentum of our life so far.
Our Emotional Bodies Development
Our emotional self, or astral self is not static. It changes with every experience we have. How it changes depends on the emotions our mind creates as it reacts to our experiences and other influences from within and without. Thinking in terms of the emotional development there are three things we can take away from this. The first thing is how important developing the quality of our mind is to the development of our emotional body. Better constructed minds have thoughts that, for example, promote the ability to focus conscious attention and enable good reasoning and fewer coarse, contradictory or false ones.
The second is that the strength or power of emotions is mostly dependent on the how the mind reacts to experiences. How it does is dependent on how it has learned to react to them. The other is how common an experience or influence as common reactions and actions will reinforce existing thought forms and emotions. The result of this is that both become more resilient to change. Fortunately, no matter how set our emotional makeup may seem to be it is possible to change it.
We are capable of expressing all emotions. However, even though the possible permutations and combinations are essentially infinite we typically experience a narrow band of them during a particular life. If you are unsure of what I mean simply think about the different people alive today, and the virtually uncountable spectrum of emotional makeup and unique life experiences each person has. By contrast, each of us only experiences a few of them.
Our emotional makeup is essentially a reflection of our astral body, that aspect of us that is comprised of energy of the astral sub-plane. Our emotional body is not synonymous with our emotional state. The former includes all our emotions and the latter reflects moment-by-moment experientially based reactions. Our emotional makeup and the nature of the experience determines the reactions we have to it. The nature of our reactions to that experience determines the astral or emotional energy generated by it. Our astral body gradually changes as we experience different emotions. How much it changes depends on their strength and duration. Of course, the programming of our rational mind plays an important role in this dynamic as it is what manifests and activates them.
When we are born, our emotional/astral body is mostly pristine, as is our mind. Early experiences lead to thoughts that manifests the emotions that mold and modify our emotional body. These experiences also contribute to the formation of the initial framework for the way the rational mind will handle emotions. This is an important concept to remember. Our emotional body, like our rational mind, is “programmed” not only by our inherent capabilities, but also from our experiences and responses to them.
Few would question that the home environment affects us, though most fail to recognize the extent to which this occurs and the power of the patterns that prolonged influences create. As we get older we tend to accept who we are without questioning it much. We should spend some time asking ourselves why we are the way we are both emotionally and mentally though few due. This is in part due to our collective ignorance towards what we are and how our awareness functions.
We do not consciously remember every experience we have and our responses to them, but that knowledge is within our minds and emotional bodies. Access to our memories of them can be difficult due to physical a variety of reasons. The list of reasons includes mental impairments, our rational mind determining they are not relevant and so they gradually become buried in our minds or we create thoughts related to fears or fears, blocks and filters obstruct them. However, difficulty is not the same as impossible.
A lifetime of experiences and reactions to them have molded us into what we are today. Likely, the most significant way that our emotional self or astral bodies change is in the relationships we have with other people as well as ourselves. We are not blind to the feelings of the people around us or our own, though we tend learn to be. Our rational minds have can develop excellent filters and blocks to our perception. This is also true of what we notice around us, and what we allow ourselves to sense from others.
Children are keenly aware of feelings. They notice when what is spoken do not match the feelings perceived. They usually do not know that they are not the target of the feelings they perceive as this is a skill developed through experience. In such cases, the conflicting information can lead the child to distrust, and create false impressions.
The young rational mind continues to program itself based on experiences. When there are gaps such as where there are no previous experiences to draw from, the mind infers or extrapolates from any experiences that could possibly explain them. If the mind is immature or lacks good reasoning skills (these skills are also thoughts) it may even create a thought that has at best only a very tenuous relationship with the experience. The result being that the rational mind creates virtual thought structures that act just like any other thought structure. This process is how we integrate our experiences and create new thoughts, a very important concept to remember.
The rational mind creates thought constructs based not just on the experiences themselves, it also uses the influence of other thoughts and experiences we have had. It also associates its perception of the emotions and feelings we have with the thoughts as we experience them. Over time the thought constructs form the foundation of our rational mind, this in turn essentially controls how and what we think. It affects our reasoning skills, our ability to deal with emotions and as a result has a significant affect on our relationships. If we have enough negative experiences, it creates distance and separateness between people. It is common for people to make light of this fact, that is their right, it does not make it correct.
During our first few years we build our conscious awareness of phenomenal reality through our experience. Our rational mind develops based on our reactions to them. It is very much like an incredibly complex piece of software that is being developed or constructed as we grow though most of us are not consciously aware of it. We do not realize that our mind is self-modifying. It changes continually as we move through our lives though the amount of change diminishes steadily as we get older unless we actively learn and grow along the way. The major contributors to how the rational mind develops are our reactions to our experiences, which creates thoughts, and the emotional reactions that arise from them.
During the early development of our rational mind, the experiences themselves are in a way lost or appear absent as they become part of the program itself. The experiences we have and our reactions to them are most significant during the early years of our lives. They become foundation elements for our personality and can be a challenge to work as the childhood memories are hard to access as is finding the thoughts and emotions we have manifested over the years. The challenge is made harder by all the filters and blocks we built into our minds as they modify our view of things and can even change facts into fiction.
I will stray a moment to include a brief discussion regarding the role filters and blocks play in our emotional development. Our minds create them based on our experiences. A prime source of them arise when we experience strong emotional reactions or trauma or through repetitive activities or thoughts. Remember the rational mind is our interface to the “real world”. Some of our minds reactions could be referred to in part as defensive or coping mechanisms.
Our fears, our prejudices and judgments and so on lead to the creation of blocks and filters. For example, people generally filter out the suffering of others for a variety of reasons unless it affects people we know and care about, it is newsworthy or the issue is one we already feel strongly about. Blocks are responsible for creating areas, or ideas that people will not look at.
The mental foundation we build during this early years becomes full of links and connections. Certain colours, smells, sounds, situations, or appearances can affect us before we have a chance to think about it. Few realize that “automated programs” in our rational mind control most of our reactions to experiences. Before we even have a chance to think about it our rational mind interprets our experiences based on how we have programmed it to do so. We tend to only become consciously aware of it only after our rational mind has pre-processed it (we will look at this in more detail in later essays).
Our bodies also play a role in our emotional reactions. The mind conscious stream is significantly based on the view of phenomenal reality created by the brain through its processing of sensory and other inputs. This is done by the limbic system. We are all familiar with the consequences of one of them, the amygdala, that processes the fight or flight mechanism. This mechanism is still fairly strong in many and comes into play if the mind interpret an experience or some element of it as a threat. It does not have to be an actual threat to our physical well being as we can fight ideas too.
In the case where an experience that led to us being bothered or harmed in some the mind will note all aspects of the experience and try to determine what it the signs of potential problem(s) were and how it will deal with similar situations in the future. If our reactions lead to fear it will determine whether a situation requires fight or flight. The validity, benefits or even "rightness" of our choices that lead to being frightened does not factor in. The mind will follow this same process even for experiences that lead to pleasant outcomes though in this case will use a different aspect of the limbic system.
Most of the minds processing occurs very quickly with most of it being at the non-conscious level. The signs could be in any or even many aspect of the experience from the choices made, what was going on the time or even before that may have led to it, thoughts about it, the time of day, who was present and what they did, said or looked like and so on. Once established the set of signs that scared us may become a trigger and combined with our reaction is an action-reaction set (A/R set).
The stronger the emotional reaction we had at the time it was created the more likely it will be activated in subsequent experiences where we encounter the same signs or triggers. If the situation arises again the A/R set could be reinforced or it could be modified if in the interim we have learned a better way of dealing with the situation that does not lead us to become fearful.
The experience that leads us to be fearful does not have to be one where we feared for our person or possessions. It could be even be an idea that threatens other ideas we hold or our ego. We rarely remember precisely why something scares or makes us uncomfortable, save for things like obvious physical threats as we tend to be unaware of most of our A/R sets. This leads to situations where we feel uncomfortable but cannot explain why and we can struggle to get comfortable again. In the meantime our minds can come up with all kinds of reasons why that are not necessarily accurate. We may try to let go of the discomfort, which may work for a time; however, it will continue to resurface and remain unresolved as we do not know the actual reason for or the cause of the feeling.
The wonderful news is that while we may feel there is no way to deal with our non-conscious responses nothing could be further from the truth. They can be very difficult to change and require a great deal of effort to reverse, however they can be with effort and the right kind of assistance from without and within. Indeed the realization that we really had little conscious say over how our reactions have developed over the years and that they are changeable can bolster our confidence. Once we know they are within our control we can learn to deal with them. Also, despite what some might think we do not need to feel guilty for what was beyond our control or what we did not know at the time. What matters is taking responsibility for them when we know and are able to do better.
It's Daily Intake
Each day we get up, go about our lives and (for most) go to sleep at the end of the day. During that time, we can have have literally hundreds of thousands of thoughts each day, the vast majority of which occur below the conscious level or on the border between our conscious and non-conscious mind. They affect us moment by moment, even though we are typically unaware of most of them.
We have positive and negative experiences, encounter issues and learn from them regardless of how we feel about or perceive the outcome. We have feelings about what we think, and think about what we feel. Thoughts and emotions entwine and we change as a result of both. The more frequent certain types of experiences happen the stronger the influence they will have on our thoughts and feelings. What we often fail to recognize is that these influences can and do have on us on a continual basis. Any influence that continues becomes part of our personality. If it is strong enough and perpetuated, it can become part of our individuality.
Think about what it is like when you are in a car driving down the highway and enjoying the ride. Do you notice any detail of the scenery outside? Unless something noteworthy is outside you do so only if you make an effort to pay attention. Even then, with everything going by so fast, you cannot make out much detail. To do that you must stop the car and look.
Life is the same way. When we go on cruise control rather than being more mindful moment by moment we continually create mental and emotional junk. They do not just vanish when we are not thinking about or feeling them. If we continue on this path they become excess baggage that will eventually act like a mental and emotional cage. We will examine our thoughts and the emotions they give rise to in other essays both in the core curriculum and the General Writings section. For now what is important is that you try to be more mindful and use your new understanding of the relationship between our thoughts and emotions to make better choices. If you do so you will notice positive results. Just be patient with and avoid judging yourself when you miss and opportunity. We are all works in progress and no one climbs a mountain in a few steps.
Primary Influences On Our Emotional Body
© 2009 Allan Beveridge
Last Updated April 27, 2021