UNLOCKING EMOTIONAL POWER

In my early 50’s, I finally learned about the line of separation between positive and negative emotions.  Wish I’d known this earlier.  As my wife would say, “Sheesh!”   If you’ve read many of my blog posts, you will likely recognize a theme of developing emotional empowerment using the tools of imagination to concentrate emotional power internally.

So, what is that exactly? 

Drum roll, please!  The difference between positive and negative emotions is the location of the emotional power in that felt emotion.

Say, what?

There is a line that delineates whether a felt emotion is positive or negative and that line is determined by where the POWER of the emotion resides.  It can be either internal or external to YOU.

When the power of the felt emotion is external to you, the emotion feels negative.  When the power of the felt emotion is internal to you, the emotion feels positive.  We’re not talking about where you FEEL the emotion.  We are talking about where the POWER of the emotion lives.

Take greed for example.  It’s about the most obvious example of the power of the felt emotion being EXTERNAL to US.  If we are feeling greedy about money, a car, a house or any other object, where are we placing the power of that emotion?  Is it internal or is it external to US?  External, right?  When you think about it, does it feel like a positive emotion?  Most would recognize it as a negative emotion.

What about joy?  Is the power of joy inside of us our outside of us?  Again, not where do we feel it, but where is the power of the emotion?  You might want to close your eyes and see if you can imagine where the power of the emotion lives, but you will likely get it right.

Try applying this litmus test to any emotion and you will find higher or lower levels of energy in the emotion, but the line that determines whether it is positive or negative is where the power of that emotion lies.

This concept completely changed how I saw my emotions, but it begged another super-important question:  What was determining where the power was placed and who was in control of it?

The answer was disturbing and liberating at the same time.  And I could only see it by looking in the mirror.  It was me.  I was determining where that emotional power was going by deciding how I saw any situation or piece of information and the emotion I felt because of it.

But what was determining what emotion I was feeling?  Then, I realized that in any situation, I had a choice of how I was going to respond to the information.  But, I wasn’t going through any mental exercise to determine how I was going to feel.  I just FELT.

Then, I realized that there was a program running inside of me that automatically responded to situations based on what was in that PROGRAM.  That was probably the most important “aha” moment of my life.  And it was empowering, and it was embarrassing.   Most of all, it was liberating.

Eventually, I concluded that it was not only likely, but probable that the program wasn’t written in my brain, but in my very DNA.

Wait, what?  Did you say DNA? 

Yup.  I believe we are the most powerful biochemical computers that have ever existed on the planet and that we have a program running in our bodies that is stored in DNA and can be passed from generation to generation as a SURVIVAL mechanism.

Sharing that sort of information will likely get me laughed right out of the room.  I’m aware.

But consider the salmon.  He is hatched from an egg that was laid last year by his parents whom he never met.  He has a complex life cycle that includes swimming to the ocean from the mountain stream where he hatched, growing up and returning to the exact same stream at just the right moment to spawn.  He jumps over waterfalls, around bears and fisherman to the exact place he himself hatched, digs a hole, fertilizes the eggs his girlfriend laid and dies, committing his body to the stream where he started his journey.

How did he know how to do all of that?  His folks were dead long before he hatched, so they couldn’t teach him.  Instinct.  Yeah, I get that, but where did the instinct come from?  There is only one explanation:  DNA.  It was the only contact he had with previous generations of salmon.  So, that stored information was NOT just structural, but MUST have functional information as well.  It is well-known that less than 3% of DNA is structural information and the current generation of intelligentsia refers to the rest of DNA as “junk” because they don’t know what it does.

I don’t know how to prove it, but the salmon’s complex life in the absence of social contact begs an explanation that functional information storage in DNA provides.  Its an elegant explanation that begs for understanding.

-Doc