The Philosophy of Psychology

When most people are young, they are bright and more clear minded (having much fewer emotional barriers and inhibitions to confuse them).  But as we get older, we accumulate garbage in our psyche.  Each time we do something that creates guilt we’re adding to the garbage (assuming we don’t clean it up).  Then, after many years, the garbage starts to overflow.  This is when we can’t ignore it anymore and we’re compelled to do “something”.  Many people just pursue their escapes that much more zealously (work, alcohol, drugs, religion, aggressions, passiveness, and basically anything out of moderation).  They don’t want to open the “pandoras box” of garbage in their psyches. 

A few, however, will try to understand what is really going on.  We (the few) are searching for a real solution.  Ironically, when we were younger and more clear, and the challenges less severe, it was too easy to ignore and avoid stress, guilt and other garbage.  But now… now we have the motivation to *really* understand ourselves and work with ourselves, but at the cost of so many years of negative conditioning, with so much accumulated garbage to clean up.  The only thing to do is to kick yourself in the butt and clean up whatever it is that is getting you down right now. 

But, here’s where most people will clean up the bare minimum, get some relief, and stop… until next time; again cleaning up the bare minimum, and so on.  This is getting stuck in the “comfort zone”.  It actually ends up being an emotional roller-coaster that goes absolutely nowhere.  Instead of coasting after each success (back down into misery), the boost we get from cleaning up our garbage should be used to seek out and clean up more garbage.  It’s a matter of self-awareness;  of being aware of any negative feeling we have in order to understand why, and to resolve it.  And the more we resolve, the greater the challenges we will become aware of.  It’s always something we don’t want to do.  Something we may think we can’t face.  But that is precisely what makes it so exciting and vital.

In a recent conversation somebody asked a lady how she would feel if a stranger came up, called her a bad name and walked away.  Would it make her feel good or bad?  She said “neither”, and that she would not feel hurt because that person “obviously doesn’t know what they’re talking about”.  But is it really possible to not have some kind of feeling in this situation?  And what kind of situation(s), if any, are genuinely neutral?

I believe that to be alive is to have emotions.  Some of us are more barriered from our emotions than others, but I believe that we all have emotions, no matter how hidden.  Furthermore, I would like to experiment with the idea that this element of human existence is not something we can turn on and off.  We can block our feelings from being expressed outwardly, and can even block them from ourselves, but we cannot remove them or shut them off.  They are there.  Also, whether we block them (from ourselves) or experience them is not within our conscious control.  When we are ready to consciously experience an emotion, we will feel it.  It will come up.

Is it possible for any emotion to be neutral?  That is, can an emotion be both ‘not positive’ (not even slightly) and ‘not negative’ (not even slightly)?  It doesn’t seem possible by definition.  Is it?  Is there anything about which you can say “I feel strongly neutral”?

The other possibility is that certain things stimulate our emotions, and certain things don’t.  Anything that doesn’t stimulate our emotions is neutral to us.  In this case the question is, can we experience something without even the slightest emotional affect?   That is, are emotions just one part of our mind that doesn’t always get involved?  Or, are emotions more fundamental to our mind, ever present, and always ‘touched’, like the surface of a pond, by our experiences?