The Laws of Emotionality - Humankapitalgruppen

Hjem / Nyhetsarkiv / Nyheter 2004 / The Laws of Emotionality

The 5th Step

The Laws of Emotionality

It is not to do with people becoming nicer or more moralistic, the change is not normative. It is to do with discovering that the laws of emotionality function quite differently from the laws for the physical. What the laws of emotionality and physics do have in common, however, is that they are laws of nature; they are something one discovers, not something one adopts. They are not something you can be for or against, they are something you understand or do not understand. It is to do with developing new understanding and new skills; it is to do with being more able, not nicer. The effect will, however, according to the picture of the future scenario sketched out in this book, be happier people. For, on step 5, feelings are not something one has, they are something one does.

The 1st law of emotionality

The first law of emotionality may be formulated as follows:

You can yourself create as much emotional matter and activate as much emotional energy as you wish. The more emotional energy you give away, the more you get..

The more you give, the more you get that is a major property of the emotional, in sharp contrast to the physical. It is most clearly demonstrated in relation to the material aspect. If you have 10 liters of petrol and give away 5, you have only 5 left. Or you can convert the 5 liters to energy: you drive your car 50-60 kilometers and have only half left of the 10 liters you started with. However, for emotional matter, in the dream world, this inherent orderliness is not valid. You are completely at liberty to create all you want. There are limits of course as to how interesting this dream matter is but the emotional energy, on the other hand, is very interesting indeed. The point is we have unlimited access to emotional energy!
    It is understandable that it took a long time to discover this. The pedagogical effect of the concretely physical is formidable. The experience of having 10, giving away 5 and being left with 5 is crystal clear for us all. The pedagogical effect of our early childhood experiences is also fundamental in all of us. As children, particularly as small children, we are totally dependent on adult help and on the attention and love we can obtain; in other words, on their emotional energy. Moreover, it is these feelings that make them give us the physical things we depend on such as food and clothes. These two formidable pedagogical effects, the properties of physical material and the childs emotional dependence on its parents, are the basis for historys greatest wrong conclusion.
    It works almost in the same way as training elephants. An adult elephant can be tied to a small peg using no more than an ordinary rope around one foot. This is possible because the elephant, whilst it was still small and had not yet gained its enormous strength, was bound by this leg with heavy chains to sturdy posts. It has learned from experience that when it is bound by one foot, it is not possible to break loose. For that reason, it thinks things are still like that.
    Fleas can be trained in the same way. As adults they are capable of jumping several meters in the air but, if they grow up in a box with a lid, they learn they can jump that high, but no higher. When the lid is removed, they continue to jump as high as they have learned is possible.
    Until today, we have lived predominantly in accordance with the fallacy that emotional energy is limited and that we must secure it from our surroundings. This fallacy has hindered us from seeing that we can find the source of all the emotional energy we could wish for in ourselves. Moreover, this source is such that the more you ladle out, the more streams in. It is a through-flow. If you make the openings larger, more comes out and more comes in.
    The emotional, plainly and simply, is not in limited supply, in terms of neither good nor bad. In contrast to the physical, the emotional is unlimited. It has no fixed shape and no fixed limitation. We can limit it by believing it is limited but, in itself, it is without limits.
If anyone should doubt this 1st law of emotionality, there is only one way to investigate it: try it out in practice. Here no-nonsense empiricism rules: experience, experience and yet more experience.
    In the emotional field, then, completely different laws than those to do with the physical prevail. In your fantasy, you can create as much emotional substance as you desire; there are no limitations anywhere but in yourself. In the same way, there are no other limitations to emotional energy than those which are in yourself. Development, of course, is about removing these inner limitations. It is about creating an entity, an individual, capable of standing on its own two feet, and capable of creating and using its own emotional energy.
    What then happens is the end of the control dramas, the family control dramas, the political dramas and the economic dramas. When we discover the fallacy, the game ends of its own accord. Strictly speaking, it is not a fallacy (hence the inverted commas, as a kind of rhetorical trick); it will not be a fallacy until we have developed our consciousness far enough for us to be able to objectivize the emotional. Not before that stage are we able to take control over our own emotional life; only then can we begin to use and control our own emotional engine.
    We will come back to how the interaction between people will take shape when they have learnt to make use of the laws of emotionality.

The 2nd law of emotionality

The second law of emotionality may be formulated as follows:

You can form whatever you want from emotional matter and activate whatever type of emotional energy: bad or good, positive or negative. But you are yourself formed from what you form, activated by what you activate, and receive what you send.

The amount is cost-free, the character is not. If you love, you are filled with love. If you hate, you are filled with hatred. This is not anything of a moral character, it is the character of natural law. The laws of emotionality are not something you can have a position on or adopt, they are something one discovers. It is not possible to break them but it is possible to understand them and use them, such as we have learned to make use of the laws of nature.
In the same way as physical power, emotional power has both positive and negative poles, but there is a big difference. In the physical world, the two poles, with force and opposite, equal force, are determined by nature. This is a consequence of the physical being something of a given shape, a consequence of the dualism between the whole and the part. These two poles, up and down, out and in, plus and minus, are central characteristics of the physically manifested. Where emotional phenomena are concerned, there need not be two poles; we can choose one of them. Here too, our experience from the physical world, with its enormous pedagogical strength, stands in our way. Not least, our experiences of physical, bodily pain act as an obstacle. We cannot choose not to have physical pain. We can learn to live with it, tolerate it, even cultivate it, but physical pain is nevertheless something negative. We then transfer these experiences, from the physical field where they belong, to the emotional where, in this way, they make a dramatic, extremely effective and long-lasting guest performance.
It is only when we have managed to objectivize both the physical and the emotional that we can see that the transference from the physical to the emotional is wholly unnecessary. The emotional world has a way of functioning that is quite the opposite of the physical in a decisive area. The physical material aspect is heavy and substantial, the experiences we reap there, correspondingly so. A stone is a stone unless you smash it with a sledgehammer. But in the emotional world, in the world of dreams, the material is transient. At any time, you can turn a stone into a butterfly.

The 3rd law of emotionality

Emotional energy can change its character and strength but this is often a far more demanding process than changing or reinventing emotional material. Most likely it is possible to turn powerful hatred to powerful love, but it is an extremely demanding exercise. This is particularly difficult with old, ingrained, collective patterns as in the Middle East, Northern Ireland and the Balkans. It is possible to put a lid on them (the UN attempts to play the old empires role in this field), but they live under the surface and rekindles when the lid is removed.
    Most people have experienced it works like this individually too. In the long term, it seldom does any good to repress feelings. Fighting ones own feelings may lead to the symptoms being removed, but opposition will most often strengthen a particular emotional energy, not weaken it.     What is special about the emotional is that we ourselves create, individually and collectively, its shape, color and content. When we first have created it, a cruel picture of the enemy, for example, we simply supply it with further energy by fighting against it, by devoting attention to it, by keeping it within consciousness field of attention. The method is to shift the field of attention and create something new which we like better.
    This is exactly the opposite of what prevails in the physical field. Faced with a physical challenge, it is of no use to turn away and pretend nothing is wrong, to stick ones head in the sand and dream.
    The third law of emotionality may be formulated as follows:

You can cultivate the positive by paying it attention and shrink the negative by turning your back to it.

If one is first carried away by strong feelings, particularly negative ones such as anger and fear, there is not so much one can do other than hold ones reactions within acceptable boundaries and hope it soon goes over. On the other hand, one is able to work systematically in advance and actively cultivate the emotional energies one wishes to use. In the course of centuries past, we have learnt to objectivize the physical; we no longer think we can make the weather gods happy by giving them gifts we had been pleased with ourselves. It took a long time, but we learned in the end that sun and rain do not function emotionally. Now it is the turn for something else to be objectivized: the emotional. We have long been making the opposite mistake of our forefathers we have been transferring our experiences of the physical to the emotional, among other things by believing that the emotional is a limited commodity we must secure from other people.
    The 5th step is concerned with teaching us to create an emotional world on the basis of rational choices, to cultivate the emotional, to create an emotional technique, such as we have done with the physical. Therefore we have to begin by observing how differently the emotional world functions compared with the physical. A principal element in this is that we can ourselves determine the form and character of the emotional. It is possible to choose away the evil and the negative; it is possible to cultivate the good and positive alone.
    The historic role the battle between good and evil has played in the evolutionary process, has been connected with the creation of Self. On this so physically beautiful planet, the Self, as an independent consciousness, has been developed with the help of the drama method. But with the wholly independent and conscious individual, this bittersweet birth process is finally behind us. We can put the dramas behind us. The time has come to discover and employ the laws of emotionality.
    When we have discovered this, it will become just as foolish to use physical methods on the emotional as it is to use emotional methods on the physical. It takes time to learn the skills, both for the physical and the emotional plane, but the acknowledgment that it is so has the character of an ah-ha experience when one is ready for it. And when the acknowledgment has been made, it remains. The acknowledgment is an integration, an operationalizing of a rational insight. It is not something we have invented, it is something we have discovered.

(Extract from chapter 10 in "The 5th Step" by Dag Andersen.

Translated by Tonje Gotschalksen & Neil Howard

Since moving to Norway from his native Britain ten years ago, Neil Howard has been working as teacher of English and translator within both the public and private sectors. In the same period, Norwegian Tonje Gotschalksen has been pursuing her dual career as interpreter and writer-director.