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VISIONS AND HALLUCINATIONS

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Search activities

Reducing and controlling emotions

Category: Actions

Type

Voluntary

Introduction and description

I could have called this suppress the Emotions, but it would not have conveyed correctly what is being aimed for here.  It is the quietening of Emotions – an attempt to remain calm at times of crisis, no sudden outbursts of panic, anger, frustration, jealousy, fear,  - moderation and not repression or total suppression.  Reduction of intensity.

In the end each Emotion has to be taken as it comes and behavioural control used to moderate its effects.

 

Background

Helping to temper the effect of overload techniques

If you are familiar with the generic section on How spiritual experience works, it will be obvious why suppression of Emotions is needed in order to obtain spiritual experience within this Suppression category, but what may not be so obvious is the effect Emotions can have on spiritual experience obtained in other ways.

If we use any activities - Overload or Suppression - designed to temporarily deactivate the Memory then we may also deactivate Learnt function.  If we deactivate Learnt function then we deactivate behavioural functions, as these are Learnt functions.

If we deactivate behavioural functions there is nothing to temper our emotional response during a spiritual experience, raw Emotion will get through.  And sometimes that raw Emotion can be utterly overwhelming to someone used to behaviourally controlling their responses.  We may cry, wail, wring our hands, laugh uncontrollably, pout in frustration, shout in rage.

There is thus every reason to practise, on a day to day basis, to temper the emotions and keep them calm, so that if we do provoke a spiritual experience accidentally or use another technique, the results will not be so ‘violent’.

The link with relearning

The activity of Relearning is part of the spiritual path.  It is not an activity that provides a spiritual experience, but one which aims to progress you on the path.

But there is a link between Relearning and the Reduction of emotions, because, as part of this process, one learns how to channel potentially destructive processes so that they become constructive ones.  In other words, one does not use suppression, one uses conversion and the processes by which one converts the energy of any function may help in controlling emotion.

"Anger is like gasoline. If you spray it around and somebody lights a match, you've got an inferno. [But] if we can put our anger inside an engine, it can drive us forward.”  Scilla Elworthy

Method

There are a whole raft of useful techniques that can be used to keep you calm in the face of Threats.  

There is the catch all and very simple technique that simply requires you, whenever a Threat appears, to take a deep deep breath, count to 20 and say to yourself ‘calm down, calm down’.  

Think before you act.  

Reflect before you speak. 

It also helps of course to use the activities of Reducing threats and Reducing opportunities this then minimises the input from Perceptions that may trigger high Emotion.

But high Emotion can also be generated by Memories, thus if we also use all the Memory cleansing techniques such as Expunge demons these too should help.

But there are a number of techniques that can be used as well to help in achieving this end: 

  • Avoiding conflict - what one is trying to do is avoid any conflict by not responding to aggression or provocation.  It can perhaps best be summarised by the expression  ‘turn the other cheek’  if you do this it avoids the build-up of aggression and thus the increase in intensity of emotions - meekness’ in response to acts of provocation
     
  • Courage - Courage is an act which requires us to conquer our more instinctive Emotions and to suppress emotions of fear.
  • Being comforted - This is the first stage of removing Emotional pain.  You need to comfort the child in you that is crying out because it is hurt, or find someone who is genuine enough and empathetic enough that they do it for you.  The emotions are calmed by the presence of someone who is capable of understanding  why you have that pain and does not by their actions or words deny that the feeling is real, genuine and debilitating. Once the comfort has been provided, you can start on the actual solving of the problems – try to find ways of doing something about it.
     
  • Patience in response to frustration
     
  • Friendship and companionship - friendship and companionship reduces the threat of isolation and the fear of being alone.  Thus by caring for each other – forming small communities via the Internet or within your neighbourhood, or via a group with shared interests or even via work,  you take away a threat and a very significant threat
     
  • Peacemaking and diplomacy in response to aggression.   Peacemaking and diplomacy are both the resolution, without hurt, of conflict and aggression, both threats.  It is an action which can be used in the face of anger
    and aggression from another or others at a personal and group level.  It should be used by nations, it works extraordinarily well to reduce emotions.
     
  • DON’T HURT – by not hurting others, we avoid all the emotion that comes from conscience or retaliation or seeing the effects of our actions
     
  • Crying – would appear to be an act of high emotion, but it is not. Crying releases tension.  It is a major trigger to the parasympathetic nervous system, it promotes relaxation and release.  We should do it far more often than we do.

How it works

It may be helpful here to open the Model of the Mind and to have read the generic description of How spiritual experience works.

Reduce the Threats and reduce the Opportunities and you reduce the Emotions.  Reduce the Memories and you reduce the Emotions.  Hopefully the final act of teaching yourself deliberate calming techniques will then be the final means of quelling the Emotions. 

These Emotions will be fed through to the Perception system.  From there the function works via the suppression of Will, for with nothing to worry about the Will need make no decisions and the Composer can take over.

Advantages

  • Very useful in any context it provides peace of mind
  • Good for your health
  • Free, legal
  • Very effective  - the road to nirvana

Disadvantages

  • It is often difficult to balance between repression and simply moderation
  • Hard very hard

Observations

It worked for Jesus it worked for his disciples, it worked for the Buddha, it worked for Confucius and the writers of the I Ching, it worked for Plato and Socrates.  All martial arts communities are formed around this – for example Qigong -  and Shinto was also based on this, it worked for Lao Tzu,  Zen Buddhism relies on the same principles either the conversion or the  suppression of the passions into positive, loving activity   …..

Zen Buddhism:
"The passions are the Buddha nature and the Buddha nature is the passions".

here are some more....

Related observations