Friday, June 21, 2024
7 a.m. What is it that makes us respond emotionally to emotional stories? All of fiction, written, oral, visual, depends upon creating that response. How does it work? Why does it work?
Isn’t it obvious?
I can feel it beginning to be. Something about stories being closer than life.
Not quite, but that’s in the general direction. What happens to you, in 3D, affects you at second-hand, in a way. That is, you seem to interact with an external world, and the interaction has its effect on your mental and emotional life. So, the event happens, and it causes an effect.
You fall in love for the first time – or for the tenth. Your emotional world is transformed. The change is only indirectly affected by what happens next, except if it is punctuated or is truncated or is even reversed, and in any of these cases, a new emotional composition results. Maybe the results are permanent, but usually they are only temporarily permanent – that is, they are final in regard to the starting place, but they are only the initial stage of whatever follows.
I can’t tell if this is making sense of not. I have the feeling that what is clear as a feeling is not getting expressed coherently.
As usual, just persevere and it will come clear. Try restating, not worrying about accuracy in every point, but just getting the general drift.
Well, I think you were saying, our emotions are evoked by a situation, and a particularly charged situation can drastically affect our emotional default position, so that we see life differently. Then other events may reinforce or contradict or in some way modify that new default.
Good enough. And you see, the point is that the strong emotion results from events, and they don’t even need to be external physical events, though they usually are.
We have said that emotions are at the boundary between what you do and do not know about yourself: the line between known-you and unknown-you, in other words. That is why a sudden or extreme or permanent shift in what you know about yourself is likely to be accompanied by strong emotion, though you may mistake cause for effect.
But what causes that readjustment? Doesn’t it have to involve self-awareness?
We advise that you take some time during the day to consider that sentence. Weigh it, make sense of it, decide whether it squares with your experience of life.
Now, you watch an episode of NCIS that involves Gibbs revisiting his childhood home; interacting with his father; reliving childhood conflicts with others; finally, remembering meeting the love of his life when he was a raw marine. You don’t need to have experienced any of those situations to be affected by the story. In fact, if that were necessary, storytellers would be out of business. Instead, what is needed is that you project analogies. “This is like that, that happened to me. This is like that, that I felt as a result of similar circumstances. This is what I might have felt, if I had gone through that.” Et cetera. It is the drawing of analogies that produces empathy. (Or you could equally well say it is empathy that allows the drawing of analogies.) But is any of this a process of mental construction? Clearly not.
No, clearly not. A storyteller who leads you to consciously unpick his weaving, fails to that extent. It comes viscerally, or not at all.
That doesn’t mean that thought is never involved. Sometimes, as in reading Hemingway, you have to think hard to get inside the character’s head to figure out why he or she would do such a thing, think or feel such a thing. But the actual analogy will be not mentally drawn: It will be felt, emotionally, and immediately, and may also grow with your reflection about the story.
Yes. Take Island in the Stream, for instance. It is all about a father’s love for his children and his having to carry on living after they are dead. That wasn’t my experience, it wasn’t even Hemingway’s experience. But the true emotion did come across, because it wasn’t about the specifics but the emotion.
No symbolic statement can ever have the strength of a description of a tangible situation. That’s what drama does.
Now, notice. Drama, fiction, poetry, even fact-telling like biography or history, may convey the emotional truth mind-to-mind directly. That is, it serves in lieu of one’s own physical experiences. It is more direct, so may have more of an impact.
At the same time, your actual external life is usually far less dramatic, if only because it is always seen in a mundane context, and is usually a matter of slow-motion, rather than drama’s severe compression. Yet obviously your own 3D life experiences are in their way more real to you than drama. And of course if your life takes a dramatic turn – a tragedy, an ecstasy – it vastly overshadows anything drama can provide.
Feels like we haven’t quite come to the point here, but I can’t see what it would be.
Your mental life is far closer to real than your physical life. This is not a balanced statement, but close enough.
Which is more real? The physical life contained in instants of 3D time, or the mental life that is what it becomes, and never stops becoming, and is not confined to 3D instants?
They’re both real.
They’re both somewhat real, and the less tied to material circumstances, the realer. Naturally this will look inverted to 3D beings.
You are primarily energy patterns, and by “energy” we don’t mean electricity or anything physical. (Matter, we must remind you, is slowed-down energy. So to think that physical energy is less material than matter is to make a mistake.) The energy we refer to, some call spirit. It is the inflow into your lives that animates them. It is the local manifestation of the vast impersonal forces that are equally busy animating the universe. You are closer to being a local energy pattern – a flute being played by the divine breath – than you are to being a thinking feeling lump of animated matter.
Therefore, it is closer to contact you in spirit than in flesh. The contact comes in concentric rings:
- Most direct: unknown-other to unknown-you.
- Next, that same energy as it expresses in you as emotion, taking emotion to be the laminal layer between unknown-you and known-you.
- Least direct is this input filtered into your conscious categories and perceptions.
You see? Your conscious circle of awareness is the farthest away from the true life that exists beyond 3D. Your emotion registers the differences between conscious and unconscious content, the way an amplifier’s membrane reproduces sound by vibration. And beyond your emotion is this vastly larger part of yourself that functions most clearly, most intelligently, serving as your buffer, stepping down divine energies to the point that they won’t blow your circuits.
Given these truths, how surprising should it be to realize that drama – abstracted reality – should be a very effective way to convey messages from the realer you to the somewhat-real you?
And that’s enough for the moment.
This is very good. Thanks.