Where to begin with this one?
As information enters into our system from the world 'out there', it goes through different screens of perception. This is the natural 'checks and balances' order. Every life form to ever exist had to do two basic things - get food, procreate. This is fundamental to biology. The first single celled organism did this, of which grew the great tree of life that we see in all its rich diversity and complexity. This is hardwired into our DNA which contains the entire history of said tree of life within its code. Our biological ancestry and all the karmic history of these previous lives are a written story, intertwined in the endless strands of genetic information found when unraveling a single DNA structure from one cell.
And we are made up of 50 trillion of these cells.
Think about it - the human being is just a colony of cells, functioning together harmoniously with some incredibly energetic forces holding them in sync. And these cells are communicating constantly, eavesdropping on our thoughts and feelings, receiving messages from our consciousness about what to do and when to do it. All their quantum functions are important to the whole ship to run smoothly. The 200,000 chemical reactions that take place in one cell every second are all doing a specific job to keep things in order.
As life emerged from this single celled ancestor and gradually grew into multi-cellular organisms, these lifeforms had to slowly develop ever more complex ways of responding to the environment. Initially it was not much more basic than perhaps just being more aggressive in their quest for food energy. But over time it developed into increasingly elaborate situations that the lifeform could adjust to and evolve from. These responses to the environment are called e-motions, or energy in motion, and the two basic ones are love and fear. The first cell had to love, or be expansive in order to take in energy (search or obtain food/mate)... Or it had to fear, or be contractive and remove itself from possible danger and conserve energy. Expanding and contracting, just like a breath, just like the whole rhythm of the cosmos....
As these emotions developed under these two base movements life could take (love and fear), we could have different responses, which could alter outcomes, which could further evolve our genes, etc etc. Now as human beings, we have an incredibly diverse array of e-motions to be experienced, because the fortune we have to be such complex beings. These e-motions are designed to give us information about the environment and how to respond, they are filters to that help us to apply our own rules to govern our living. After all, every lifeform is and always has been responsible firstly for itself.
If something in the environment triggers fear, the e-motion of fear kicks my system into response mode to get energy moving in the direction of safety. I contract away from the stressor. If I am exposed to love, on the cellular level my body feels expansive and the cells in my body are able to take in nourishment easier, more readily as they are receiving the signal that everything is okay and they can repair, rebuild and evolve as Nature intends.
The information coming in must pass through the initial stages of emotional filtering to screen for immediate threat. If the environment is safe, then we can move on to more advanced filtering. This is actually seen in psychology when studying the developmental stages in a child. I cannot recall the exact research at the moment but we see as children develop into adults they require critical and foundational stabilizing platforms for additional growth to occur. If basic needs are not met, a child will never learn how to read or write. Their nervous system functions in these orders of processing, and no energy will be expended towards 'higher learning' if the first test of the nervous system is not passed. The nervous system, as part of our amazing biology, its job is to scan and pick out all the necessary information from the external environment to make a decision and it is doing this constantly. On micro levels with incredible speed, but also on a macro level in terms of developing our personalities.
We will call any experience that a person could have 'a happening'; within the realm of our current possibility, of course. With the 'trickle up' effect taking place, as received by through our senses by the energetic aspect of us (known as the nervous system), we end up having various feelings about 'the happening' that took place. If we re-act to these emotions, they end up molding and shifting 'the happening' into an event that is similar to recent ones or memorable ones in our lives. The emotions are just there to feel, but we have a very strong tendency to store memories about experiences with strong emotional attachment to them. This storage of memory served a purpose evolutionarily because it teaches us what to seek to survive and what to avoid to survive. Only if we don't pay attention it will hijack our present moment experience and shape it around past events.
This is how a personality is formed. We have experiences, we have feelings and thoughts about them, we store them, and then we develop proclivities to re-live events, characteristics, or patterns because we are attached to some and avoid others. It is just information filtering up through our orders of consciousness.
How is this all relevant? In a further post I will discuss these orders of consciousness in more detail but for now, we just pay attention to our own thoughts and feelings about things. Can we not cast judgment, so as to leave less of an imprint on our nervous system, giving it a bit more space to operate? Can we take note of our emotions but not re-act to them, giving us a chance to live a new life entirely since we did not re-act an old one out?
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