said i was going to come bac to this thread along with the one in the Root section and build on thoughts and emotions
-Many people believe that emotions are the entity unto itself, separate from the mind. The literature is replete with authors telling their readers to "go with your heart, not with your mind." Another phrase one hears often is to "trust your gut". As we've seen in the African Languages, the "gut" and "heart" are the same words for "mind,intellect, thoughts." J.J. Maquet, in his article "The Kingdom of Ruanda," reaffirms this lack of dichotomy within the African ontological world.
These uncertainties regarding the nature of man indicate that Banyarwanda do not make any clear-cut distinction between the concepts of body and mind. Although they recognize parts in man, they prefer to consider the unit rather than its components [Forde, 1954:174]
As we can see here, we in the West often make distinctions where the African often does not. There was no dichotomy between the two and as modern science affirms, your feelings/emotions are a manifestation of your thoughts. In other words, your feelings/emotions are your thoughts: they are a maniestation of one's consciousness.
Your behavior is also a direct reflection of your thoughts. We organize these thoughts, into sounds, words and pictures. The renowned psychologists Dr. Amos Wilson has noted, in his work Blueprint for Black Power (c.1998), that words are vehicles of consciousness and consciousness is a pyschophysiological control mechanism. "It is a instrument of behavioral control. Through is states and levels, humans control their mental, physical and emotional behavior" (Wilson, 1998:89). How the conscious being actually behaves, for what express reasons, and to what end, reflect its state of consciousness.
Consciousness refer to a state of mind which includes varying degrees of awareness and which, depending on its particular organization and condition, both facilitates and sets limits on the ability of the individual to engage in various types of mental and behavioral activities. As Wilson further notes:
Wakeful consciousness is an active, goal-oriented, all-inclusive psychophysiological state of being. It includes the operational influence of conscious and unconscious processes as well as the behavioral repertoire and possibilities which can influence the mental and physical behavior of the consciousness individual. It encompasses and is largely characterized by fairly consistent ways the individuals tends to perceive, interpret, respond to, and behave toward stimuli based on past and current experience, prior conditioning, perceived knowledge, values, and intentions. These factors interact and coalesce to organize consciousness as an attitude, i.e. as a general and ongoing predisposition to behave in certain ways based on operationally available information, experience, abilities, skills, needs, values, and expectations; on a charaacteristic world-view and perception of the self (Wilson, 1998:86)
The bolded words above are meant to highlight the cognitive aspects o behavior. The types of behaviors we engage in correspond positively to our level of consciousness. Also, how we feel directly correlates to how we think: i.e., our level of consciousness. As noted earlier, to "think" is to "feel". Wilson reaffirms this as he notes:
To possess consciousness is to be possessed by consciousness. For consciousness "taes over" and represents itself in the body as feeling, emotions, tastes, values, intelligence and behavior. When relatively stable or consistent, habitual dispositions and tendencies which dynamically structure and are reciprocally structured by consciousness, incline the individual or group to act or react in certain fairly predictable ways. (1998:96)
Dr. Wilson reaffirms what the ancient Africans discovered early in human history: that is, that your emotions are reflections of your mind/consciousness. Therefore, there is no dichotomy between intellect and emotions. This is why jb (Egyptian), moyo (Kikongo), and mwoyo (ciLuba) means "heart-mind-intelligence-understanding". What types of emotional responses we have to stimuli is predicated on how we interpret the phenomena. The heart vs mind dichotomy is a myth imo because you can't have emotion without the mind. The "heart" works for the mind: it is the mind's message carrier and mouth piece.
Bernstein, et al. in their book Psychology (1991), supports the observations made in Wilson (1998). In their chapter on Emotion, they have the following to say:
The passionate nature of emotions does not mean that you have no control over them, however, because of their fourth feature: emotions arise in part from a cognitive appraisal of situation. Seeing a lion elicits different emotions depending on whether you thin the animal is a tame pet or a wild, hungry beast; your interpretation of the situation can alter your emotional reaction to it. Emotions depend not just on situations but on what you think about those situations, such as how you interpret their potential for threat or pleasure (Bernstein, et al., 1991:471).
This is important to note in relation to our larger discussion. Those who feel that love is simply a "feeling" are ignoring the cognitive origins of those feelings. A feeling/emotion is an experience that one has after and interaction with a stimulant. If your emotions (your feelings) are determined by interpretations ----how you think of the situation ----then this has great implications for the kinds of emotions we have in intimate relationships based on certain actions that have or have not been taken.
There is an order of operations that must be respected in this process. James Arthur Ray, in his book Harmonic Wealth (2006:200-201), gives a simple logical sequence of what's going on
* Thought (You had an idea)
*Emotion (You created an energetic response and label to what you thought: energy in motion)
*Feeling (The marriage of your thoughts and emotions create a visceral vibration in body)
*Action (You did something about your thoughtd, emotion and feelings)
*Result (Voila: "Your wish is my command")
This text, in part, is about changing the way you think about wealth: i.e., what it is, how to obtain it, how to maintain it and grow it. Reviewing other literature on the subject, Ray also has come to the conclusion that emotions/feelings are the direct result of one's thoughts. His focus, however, is in changing the logic of one's thoughts so that one's actions (for obtaining wealth) coincide with one's new thought process. People get certain results because they habitually think a certain way.
So, if you want different results, you must interrupt your habitual way of thinking and create new habitual thought. You must think your way to new results. (Ray, 2006:201)
Jerry Waxler, in his article "How thoughts affect feelings" (2003), has the following to say:
Our thoughts have a profound affect on our emotions, and by learning how to think in our own best interest, we improve our emotional condition. We may not realize our thoughts affect our feelings. Most of us assume it's the other way around; that our feelings come first and our thoughts naturally follow. But a we watch the relationship between thoughts and feelings we begin to recognize that the influence works both ways. For example, our thoughts may habitually emphasize first and foremost the discouraging side of every situation, or compulsively predict a catastrophe at the end of every pleasant moment. Such gloomy thinking drags our feelings into the dumps.
Waxler further informs us as to how we can trick ourselves into thinking that it is others who are making us feel a certain way, when in fact it is our belief systems. In the passage to follow he supports the commentary from Ray (2006) on the effects of certain negative habitual thinking.
Elaborate trap of habitual thinking patterns: As we learn more aabout our thinking patterns, we realize our thoughts can trap us into strong negative emotions. For example, it is common to blame another person's behavior for our own feelings. We might say to ourselves that the other person "makes us depressed" or "upsets us". Cognitive theraphy helps us reframe our thoughts to realize that the other person doesn't magically control our feelings. We make ourselves depressed through our own beliefs.
When we look more closely at our beliefs about other people we realize that we often expect them to place us at the center of their world. We learned to think in these magical terms when, as children we believed we were the center of the universe, and we expected our parents to now our needs and give us what we wanted. These, and other childish beliefs, persist unchallenged into our adult life, continuing to disturb us, until we take the time to root them out and correct them.
For example, we may have formed the notion that another person is supposed to know what we want, and then is supposed to behave accordingly. This belief sets us up to become upset and troubled when the other person doesn't behave in the way we expected. By saying the other person upset us, we give all the power to the other person. Upon closer consideration we realize that we were upset by our own belief about the other person's behavior, rather than the behavior itself. When we look at it this way, we can find ways to reclaim control over our feelings.
Barrett, et al. (2007), in their article "Language as context for the perception of emotion", the authors suggest that language functions as a context in emotion perception. This is why it is important to understand, linguistically, what love is because our understanding of language and language concepts directly affects what types of emotional responses we will have to certain stimuli. Lets say if you were locked in a room with all of the lights out, but you could hear a voice feeding you information from a loud speaker, and that voice told you that a house fly was in the room, one would probably not react emotionally to such information. But had the announcer said that there is a grizzly bear in the room, then one might feel the emotions of fear, anxiety and/or distress upon hearing such news. This is because one understands a bear to be an animal that can cause harm, whereas a fly, although annoying, doesn't elicit fear, if any other emotion at all.
How you "feel" in a given society correlates to your core beliefs and values.
More on this after the weekend. #Gamebred
-Many people believe that emotions are the entity unto itself, separate from the mind. The literature is replete with authors telling their readers to "go with your heart, not with your mind." Another phrase one hears often is to "trust your gut". As we've seen in the African Languages, the "gut" and "heart" are the same words for "mind,intellect, thoughts." J.J. Maquet, in his article "The Kingdom of Ruanda," reaffirms this lack of dichotomy within the African ontological world.
These uncertainties regarding the nature of man indicate that Banyarwanda do not make any clear-cut distinction between the concepts of body and mind. Although they recognize parts in man, they prefer to consider the unit rather than its components [Forde, 1954:174]
As we can see here, we in the West often make distinctions where the African often does not. There was no dichotomy between the two and as modern science affirms, your feelings/emotions are a manifestation of your thoughts. In other words, your feelings/emotions are your thoughts: they are a maniestation of one's consciousness.
Your behavior is also a direct reflection of your thoughts. We organize these thoughts, into sounds, words and pictures. The renowned psychologists Dr. Amos Wilson has noted, in his work Blueprint for Black Power (c.1998), that words are vehicles of consciousness and consciousness is a pyschophysiological control mechanism. "It is a instrument of behavioral control. Through is states and levels, humans control their mental, physical and emotional behavior" (Wilson, 1998:89). How the conscious being actually behaves, for what express reasons, and to what end, reflect its state of consciousness.
Consciousness refer to a state of mind which includes varying degrees of awareness and which, depending on its particular organization and condition, both facilitates and sets limits on the ability of the individual to engage in various types of mental and behavioral activities. As Wilson further notes:
Wakeful consciousness is an active, goal-oriented, all-inclusive psychophysiological state of being. It includes the operational influence of conscious and unconscious processes as well as the behavioral repertoire and possibilities which can influence the mental and physical behavior of the consciousness individual. It encompasses and is largely characterized by fairly consistent ways the individuals tends to perceive, interpret, respond to, and behave toward stimuli based on past and current experience, prior conditioning, perceived knowledge, values, and intentions. These factors interact and coalesce to organize consciousness as an attitude, i.e. as a general and ongoing predisposition to behave in certain ways based on operationally available information, experience, abilities, skills, needs, values, and expectations; on a charaacteristic world-view and perception of the self (Wilson, 1998:86)
The bolded words above are meant to highlight the cognitive aspects o behavior. The types of behaviors we engage in correspond positively to our level of consciousness. Also, how we feel directly correlates to how we think: i.e., our level of consciousness. As noted earlier, to "think" is to "feel". Wilson reaffirms this as he notes:
To possess consciousness is to be possessed by consciousness. For consciousness "taes over" and represents itself in the body as feeling, emotions, tastes, values, intelligence and behavior. When relatively stable or consistent, habitual dispositions and tendencies which dynamically structure and are reciprocally structured by consciousness, incline the individual or group to act or react in certain fairly predictable ways. (1998:96)
Dr. Wilson reaffirms what the ancient Africans discovered early in human history: that is, that your emotions are reflections of your mind/consciousness. Therefore, there is no dichotomy between intellect and emotions. This is why jb (Egyptian), moyo (Kikongo), and mwoyo (ciLuba) means "heart-mind-intelligence-understanding". What types of emotional responses we have to stimuli is predicated on how we interpret the phenomena. The heart vs mind dichotomy is a myth imo because you can't have emotion without the mind. The "heart" works for the mind: it is the mind's message carrier and mouth piece.
Bernstein, et al. in their book Psychology (1991), supports the observations made in Wilson (1998). In their chapter on Emotion, they have the following to say:
The passionate nature of emotions does not mean that you have no control over them, however, because of their fourth feature: emotions arise in part from a cognitive appraisal of situation. Seeing a lion elicits different emotions depending on whether you thin the animal is a tame pet or a wild, hungry beast; your interpretation of the situation can alter your emotional reaction to it. Emotions depend not just on situations but on what you think about those situations, such as how you interpret their potential for threat or pleasure (Bernstein, et al., 1991:471).
This is important to note in relation to our larger discussion. Those who feel that love is simply a "feeling" are ignoring the cognitive origins of those feelings. A feeling/emotion is an experience that one has after and interaction with a stimulant. If your emotions (your feelings) are determined by interpretations ----how you think of the situation ----then this has great implications for the kinds of emotions we have in intimate relationships based on certain actions that have or have not been taken.
There is an order of operations that must be respected in this process. James Arthur Ray, in his book Harmonic Wealth (2006:200-201), gives a simple logical sequence of what's going on
* Thought (You had an idea)
*Emotion (You created an energetic response and label to what you thought: energy in motion)
*Feeling (The marriage of your thoughts and emotions create a visceral vibration in body)
*Action (You did something about your thoughtd, emotion and feelings)
*Result (Voila: "Your wish is my command")
This text, in part, is about changing the way you think about wealth: i.e., what it is, how to obtain it, how to maintain it and grow it. Reviewing other literature on the subject, Ray also has come to the conclusion that emotions/feelings are the direct result of one's thoughts. His focus, however, is in changing the logic of one's thoughts so that one's actions (for obtaining wealth) coincide with one's new thought process. People get certain results because they habitually think a certain way.
So, if you want different results, you must interrupt your habitual way of thinking and create new habitual thought. You must think your way to new results. (Ray, 2006:201)
Jerry Waxler, in his article "How thoughts affect feelings" (2003), has the following to say:
Our thoughts have a profound affect on our emotions, and by learning how to think in our own best interest, we improve our emotional condition. We may not realize our thoughts affect our feelings. Most of us assume it's the other way around; that our feelings come first and our thoughts naturally follow. But a we watch the relationship between thoughts and feelings we begin to recognize that the influence works both ways. For example, our thoughts may habitually emphasize first and foremost the discouraging side of every situation, or compulsively predict a catastrophe at the end of every pleasant moment. Such gloomy thinking drags our feelings into the dumps.
Waxler further informs us as to how we can trick ourselves into thinking that it is others who are making us feel a certain way, when in fact it is our belief systems. In the passage to follow he supports the commentary from Ray (2006) on the effects of certain negative habitual thinking.
Elaborate trap of habitual thinking patterns: As we learn more aabout our thinking patterns, we realize our thoughts can trap us into strong negative emotions. For example, it is common to blame another person's behavior for our own feelings. We might say to ourselves that the other person "makes us depressed" or "upsets us". Cognitive theraphy helps us reframe our thoughts to realize that the other person doesn't magically control our feelings. We make ourselves depressed through our own beliefs.
When we look more closely at our beliefs about other people we realize that we often expect them to place us at the center of their world. We learned to think in these magical terms when, as children we believed we were the center of the universe, and we expected our parents to now our needs and give us what we wanted. These, and other childish beliefs, persist unchallenged into our adult life, continuing to disturb us, until we take the time to root them out and correct them.
For example, we may have formed the notion that another person is supposed to know what we want, and then is supposed to behave accordingly. This belief sets us up to become upset and troubled when the other person doesn't behave in the way we expected. By saying the other person upset us, we give all the power to the other person. Upon closer consideration we realize that we were upset by our own belief about the other person's behavior, rather than the behavior itself. When we look at it this way, we can find ways to reclaim control over our feelings.
Barrett, et al. (2007), in their article "Language as context for the perception of emotion", the authors suggest that language functions as a context in emotion perception. This is why it is important to understand, linguistically, what love is because our understanding of language and language concepts directly affects what types of emotional responses we will have to certain stimuli. Lets say if you were locked in a room with all of the lights out, but you could hear a voice feeding you information from a loud speaker, and that voice told you that a house fly was in the room, one would probably not react emotionally to such information. But had the announcer said that there is a grizzly bear in the room, then one might feel the emotions of fear, anxiety and/or distress upon hearing such news. This is because one understands a bear to be an animal that can cause harm, whereas a fly, although annoying, doesn't elicit fear, if any other emotion at all.
How you "feel" in a given society correlates to your core beliefs and values.
More on this after the weekend. #Gamebred
