1.2 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts {adv}  (Page 24/74)

So how do you know what you are feeling is real, if your thoughts and what you believe about the stimulus can change the feeling so much? Your thoughts are probably going to be accurate, however, and thus they are going to enhance a certain truth about the stimulus. An example of them not being accurate would be a delusion in a romantic relationship, someone thinking their mate is good at something significant, and that might raise their appreciation for that person. It might be that that only changes their view a little, that at the unconscious level you respond to how that person really is because your feelings know if that other person actually has skill. That is why it is important to identify if the feeling you are feeling is really real, if you can really feel it. Things that aren't as related to reality aren't going to be as significant as more important details. For instance, someone being a fast runner might not be as important as them being a good person. You should try to identify what qualities cause which emotions in you, and if that person really "radiates" those qualities or they aren't present at all. Like the fast runner might have a different physical presence, or they might not. Emotions should be accurate and true.

A way to test that would be to say, "what feelings does this cause me directly, not what feelings happen when I think about that thing". You can compare the feeling you get in the presence of the stimulus to the feeling you get when you think about it. When you think about it your thoughts are going to have a greater influence because you are thinking. You could also test and say, "If I thought this, what feelings would this generate in me, versus thinking that or (even better) nothing". You can say to yourself, "I am open-minded, I am going to accept the feeling this causes in me, I'm not going to let my thoughts control what the reality this is presenting is". Also, asking yourself if you really care about the stimulus might have an effect. That would be you influencing your feelings to feel less about somehing that might have otherwise generated a lot of emotion. Some things might seem exciting, but not be exciting in reality, so at first you might get into it and feel a lot of false shallow feelings, but you could recognize that those feelings aren't deep or real, you can choose to not care about them and they might go away. Remember that caring about a feeling or emotion intensifies it (that probably happens becuase you are changing how much attention you are paying to that feeling, remember thought is a period of high attention on something).

Life occurs in sharp spikes

Life occurs during the brief periods of time when people are actually paying attention, in spikes.

People need to pay attention to things in order to keep their minds alive and active. They need to pay attention to little things all the time. That is why spikes occur, when people refocus their attention on little things over and over it occurs as a spike, because the new object needs to be processed as a whole and this processing takes energy in the form of a “spike”. [The key thing there is that the object needs to be processed as a whole. You pay attention to lots of little things all the time, but you only pay attention to complete things infrequently, so infrequently that when you actually do pay attention, it occurs as a spike.]