[Nmoitmzr]

i love it! more, more!

one thing i like about your theory is that it fits so nicely with all the wisdom i have been blessed to learn from native american elders. from that viewpoint, even the earth goes through emotions. the earth goes through periods of deep silence when there is little activity in nature, and most plants and trees sleep for months on end. we call it “winter,” and i am told by native american wisdom that it is a time of rest and turning inward for contemplation. during that “depression” of winter seeds lie in the soil, resting and gathering strength for their explosive new growth come springtime. emotions are natural

two facts are clear about all emotions.

(1) they are part of our most basic bio-engineering equipment, put there to deliberately help us survive in our natural environment.

(2) human civilization is an artificial environment, so different from our natural environment that our emotions are often a misfit with today’s environment. that means, in short, our emotions can easily become a problem, either to us or to someone else. but the problem is not with emotions, per se. the problem is with the misfit with the civilization we have created together.

one way our human emotions can become a problem to us happens when we sit in harsh judgment on them. if we criticize ourselves (or others) for being angry, for instance, we are missing the point. if anger is a deep habit and gets in our way, there is a time and place when we learned that habit of anger, and we are best served by figuring it out and "un-learning" it.

in a nutshell, we are most apt to come down on one side of the fence or another: we see our emotions as our enemy, or we see our emotions are our friend. in the fundamentalist christian community where i grew up, we were all taught that anger is a "sin" and will send you straight to hell. nonsense. in fact, anger is the natural product of brain chemicals called "norepinephrine" and chemicals produced by the adrenal glands. if there is a person somewhere without *any* anger at all, the creator must have forgotten to give them adrenal glands and to put norepinephrine in the brain.

of course anger can become a problem. that's obvious. what is not so obvious, in modern civilization, is that anger can also be a solution. i have a sheet of paper taped to my wall with a quote by someone named neese (i have only a partial citation, since i got it in a book on famous quotes), with the date 1991. it says in big, bold, letters:

"anger prevents exploitation."

what does that tell us? i urge anyone to think carefully when someone tells you that you must not be angry. what is that person’s agenda? in the fundamentalist church where i grew up, the agenda was plain and obvious – “control.” the problem is, the instant you begin to think you have control over another person, in that same instant you become that person’s slave. it is that much of a delusion.

one thing that has always deeply puzzled me in "new age" circles is the extreme discontinuity i see between the two common statements: "don't judge," and "anger is a ba-a--a-ad emotion."

i would like for someone who knows to tell us what the loo says about judging, because i am new to it and i do not know. what i do know is that my studies of qabala tell me that the entire purpose of being in the 3d physical plane is to learn “judgment.” that is an old term, and my understanding of it is, to learn how correctly to make distinctions between one thing and another. the key is to make distinctions “correctly.” deciding that x person or y group of people are the cause of all my problems is not a correct distinction. rather, it is paranoia, of the type that david describes on his site (don’t have the citation, sorry). if you don’t judge at all, how then do you figure out the difference between northbound and southbound when you get on the freeway? anyone who says, “ah, it doesn’t matter, because all freeways are one anyway – i’ll just go this way!” will learn very quickly – and probably in the next dimension - that it does matter!

sorry for going on so long, darlyne, but good clear thinking gets me excited. yes, is an emotion. no, i shall not let it control me - or i might never stop writing.

great post – thanks!