I see ‘This topic has been reported for inappropriate content’. Oops, that was unintentional.

New to this forum and site, I have searched but not found guidelines for posting. It would be marvelous if some kind soul would drop me a note to let me know in what way the post is inappropriate. I attempted to edit or delete the post, but it seems the post is frozen too as clicks brought no response.

If the inappropriateness stems from there not being a clear focus for discussion, it is meant to be this:

‘Unattended emotions – that is, triggered reactions not faced – can numb a person to life. How do you feel about this? What would you add or say differently from your experience?’

If the post triggered someone’s reaction to report it as inappropriate because it seems too promotional with the web site link, I can see that and attribute it to my over-zealousness. Naughty Gary, don’t do it again. Are we good now?

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Gary R. Smith.
• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Gary R. Smith. Reason: To address report for inappropriate content

Dear Anita,

Thank you for responding. If you feel to write further, can you help me understand why someone would report my post for inappropriate content?

Yes, it is common knowledge that unattended emotions can numb a person to life. Why do you suppose, then, that emotions generally are left unattended? Facing emotions is avoided at all costs in most cases.

Maybe what was a significant realization to me is also commonly known, that emotions are triggered reactions. Realizing that and seeing in another way helped me to approach emotions more effectively.

My second ‘revelation’ was that when a soul is frozen by suppressed emotions, it can be gently thawed by embracing the greater flame. That has personal meaning, and perhaps is not for anyone else.

The naughty Gary refers to the many aspects of personality. Someone seemed to react to my post by reporting it. Part of me reacted to that way of behaving. I would rather correct myself, if I know how I have been inappropriate, than to be ‘reported’ without any indication of the reason behind it. All of this, I realize, is only as important as I make it.

Are you and the reporter part of the welcoming community Lori writes about on the About page of Tiny Buddha? She says,

“We’re a really welcoming community! It’s a lot easier to be who you want to be in this world when you remember you are never alone. We are all in this together, and we all have something to teach and something to learn.”

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

Dear Anita,

If my post was vague it is because as I wrote, ‘to answer your question, what is the greater flame, I feel a need to give my words more attention than time allowed’ that morning.

My answer may seem philosophical and far away. To me, it is closer than a heartbeat and just as real.

Whether you respond to this or not is okay. Others may read it or not, and that is okay. I will continue to write on this focus and post on the Whole Human blog.

You wrote, ‘ maybe you mean by it the “higher feeling” – but I don’t know what you mean by the later either.’

As I wrote above, ‘For clarity on what I mean by lower emotions and higher feelings, I wrote on the Whole Human site with example lists of both.’

Out of respect for the Tiny Buddha Founder who wrote that ‘Tiny Buddha is about reflecting on simple wisdom and learning new ways to apply it to our complex lives’ I am looking at keeping my posts focused on simple wisdom and may go to posting short text with pics on the Tiny Buddha FB page.

But, to finish what I started here,

by ‘the greater flame’ I mean universal consciousness, the ultimate reality.

Can anyone deny that there is an Everything?

I don’t mean the bagel with cream cheese, but the all that is — physical, non-physical, known, unknown, all universes, dimensions and planes of existence with all its chaos and order design and randomness, laws and mysteries. No specifics now, as Everything includes everything, whatever it is.

And Everything is unified by Something called consciousness.

According to Athene’s ‘Theory of Everything’, consciousness is produced by neural synergies.

There is local consciousness generated by human brains (each person has three ‘brains’ – in the head, the heart and the gut,) the flame of an individual. Yet there is another consciousness, which pervades all things, animate and inanimate. It is the consciousness of the atoms, particles and creating wavicles, non-local and universal. This is what I call the greater flame.

There are many views regarding consciousness and voices speaking sense and nonsense. Matthew R. Francis debunks popular pronouncements in the article ‘Quantum and Consciousness Often Mean Nonsense.’ I have read lightly in this field and am informed/inspired not by writings but by feeling and knowing. A quick browse through Brainy Quotes yielded these nuggets:

“These experiments have been carried out hundreds and hundreds of times in all sorts of ways so that no physicist really questions the end point…. these experiments are very clearly telling us that consciousness is limitless and the ultimate reality.” – Robert Lanza

“Consciousness, when it’s unburdened by the body, is something that’s ecstatic; we use the mind to watch the mind, and that’s the meta-nature of our consciousness; we know that we know that we know, and that’s such a delicious feeling, but when it’s unburdened by biology and entropy, it becomes more than delicious: it becomes magical.” – Jason Silva

“Each time you choose not to act on a frightened part of your personality, you create authentic power – and you grow spiritually. The frightened parts of your personality come less frequently and with less intensity, and the loving parts fill more and more of your consciousness.” Gary Zukav

Then, what am I?

What makes a being a being? Consciousness?

One dictionary definition of being is, ‘the nature or essence of a person.’

Athene wrote in his “Theory of Everything”, “When we use our mirror neurons to look at ourselves, we may construct the idea of identity. But if we do this with our scientific understandings, we see something completely different: the neural synergies that produce our oscillating consciousness go far beyond our own neurons….”

At my core essence I am a cell of the One Being, whose body is all that is. My core purpose is to emerge as a whole human.

Anita, does this give you a sense of what I mean by ‘the greater flame’?

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Gary R. Smith.

Dear Anita,

The words ’emotions’ and ‘feelings’ are commonly used inter-changeably, so I distinguish them by ‘lower’ and ‘higher.’ They are not lower and higher in value or morality, but in frequency. When having a dialogue with people who agree, I simply write emotions, feelings and eternal qualities.

As I use the terms, some but not all emotions are fear-based. All have local origins within an individual or the disturbed mass consciousness/astral planes surrounding the earth, and all are unstable and stormy energies in motion. All are experienced as reactions triggered by stimuli, and are fast changeable. A person may experience awe in one moment and disgust in the next, expectation is followed by disappointment, exultation by despondency.

All higher feelings (feelings) are love-based and stable. Some have human origins while others are universal, non-local characteristics of Nature which I call the eternal qualities. I theorize the e-qualities emanate from the creative source and are ‘picked up’ by humans when in the flow.

None of the feelings are triggered reactions. They may be experienced as a response, such as compassion for an under-nurtured child or as an action in the flow, such as giving nurture to the child. Or they may fill the space in a person that was blocked, when judgment is dropped. A person tightened by resistance who lets it go may fill with the warmth of presence.

Embracing the greater flame means shifting from being driven by emotions to being powered by feelings, and experiencing the love of the one Being as one’s own love.

Just to be clear for anyone who might read this thread, the Whole Human website does not have religion in it.

I mention on the site my experiences as a Christian before 2000. In that year, I made changes in my life and started to live my truth.

I learned much from being a religious person, and have integrated those lessons and moved on.

Once, when my wife and I were giving a hitch-hiker a ride, we were asked, ‘What is your religion?’

Kati, new to English and trying to find the words, answered, “We follow an inner religion.” Then she re-considered and added, “Only, it is not really a religion and we don’t really follow it.”

That still applies today.