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track your feelings!
'By the term 'emotion' I mean the intense, localized affects that arises from the fulfilment or the frustration of individual needs and interests. This is the domain of joy, love, surprise, satisfaction, zest, fear, grief , anger and so on'.
And by the term feeling he refers, 'with special usage, to the capacity of the psyche to participate in wider unities of being, to become at one with the differential content of a whole field of experience, to indwell what is present through attunement and resonance, and to know its own distinctness while unified with the differentiated other.' And he explains that 'this is the domain of empathy, indwelling, participation, presence, resonance and such like'. Others like Lawrence Hyde, John writes, made a distinction between the more intense and agitated character of emotions and the creative aspect of feeling by which 'we place ourselves in communion with what we find outside ourselves'.
Though there is certainly quite a distinction between the two, it also is not that easy, that we need to feel ashamed by not observing that difference immediately in practice. Still, especially in practicing non violent communication, it is important to base your expressions on what is really going on inside. And not what is simply nothing more than 'a thought'. Which is quite close if not the same as a worded feeling. CCI is specified in monitoring what is going on inside. A quick check shows six seconds (http://www.6seconds.org) an USA non profit organization for bringing emotional intelligence into practice. On that site click 'free resources' and click on 'what am I feeling?' and start with clicking the face that shows the kind of feeling you have now. You have a choice between mad, glad, sad and scared. This so called 'Emotoscope' is also available on Facebook. It is just to try out! niek (04-07)
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consciousness is in!
At the same time the NRC weekly, a supplement of the daily paper NRC Handelsblad, reports about the research practice with patients in coma, since 1997 of the Belgium neurologist Steven Laureys, born in 1968. He too is looking after how to define consciousness and what makes us to be conscious of whatever. Philosophers make clear, the magazine says, that we never will know what consciousness really is. He doubts. In 41% of the patients, qualified as being vegetative and unconscious, the diagnose was incorrect. And he says that we now become more and more the tools to give an answer on these questions. He refers to those, because he had those questions himself already in his youth. And those questions are related with the big scientific questions of today he says: about the Universe and the human consciousness.
At the same time, the VPRO radio and television broadcasting magazine in the Netherlands, reports about an interview with Daniel Dennett, an American philosopher, specialised in the human brain, on board of the Beagle, a sailing vessel (the city of Amsterdam) making the same trip as Darwin did around the world. In this article he makes clear how we (human beings) learn from trial and error, so from the bottom up engineering. What happens, he calls are ' mechanical processes', like neurons transmitting information or not. And if not, that has its consequences. Again it is this bottom up hierarchy that offers the possibility to construct a mechanism that is able to react according to the circumstances by trial and error. And that is the essence of our being free. By inventing the phenomenon of languages to communicate, the human being became free of the slow process of genetic evolution. The magazine says. And we gained the insight that we can make choices, because by trial and error we have some knowledge of what we should do! Or not!
niek (04-07)
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