Dear Anita,

My zeal for conscious evolution may easily be mistaken for self-promotion.

I have no books, baubles or beliefs to sell, and no need to impress or convince.

There is no advertising on the Whole Human site.

I post to evolve my own theories and practice, and to share what I have learned. What you wrote about children disassociating their emotions from their awareness is an excellent insight. It contributes to my evolution through greater understanding.

I question your assertion that ‘The job of emotions is to motivate us to do what is effective for us to do, to survive and maybe thrive.’ Agreeing upon what is an emotion could clear up our communication.

At a workshop in the 90s, the leader said e-motions are energies in motion. I accepted that for the next few years, but the definition did not help me manage emotions, which were still outside my control. Two years ago I was a house parent to at-risk teen-aged boys, and in the clinical setting of therapists, there was a lot of talk about triggers. Just recently I made the connection between triggered reactions and emotions, and started seeing my responsibility and capacity for catching triggers and reactions as they occur, to not let them control me. I am still practicing, and it has gone from hit and miss to feeling more and more in command, with notable exceptions.

Anita, if it can be distilled to a single cause, what would you say is the cause of humanity’s history of conflict, suffering and its current condition of chaos? Could it be that humans are driven by lower emotions rather than powered by higher feelings? What would shift if humans acted solely from higher feelings? I see emotions as a bridge to the higher feelings. For clarity on what I mean by lower emotions and higher feelings, I wrote on the Whole Human site with example lists of both.

To answer your question, what is the greater flame, I feel a need to give my words more attention than time allows this morning. It has to do with a way of looking at ‘what is’ and ‘what am I.’

Thanks for the pointer to the guidelines.

Kind regards,

Gary