Psychic Measurements of Emotion

I find it odd that the mind - or the cognitive thinker - can gain a sense of a precise emotional reality. It's hard to even say what is happening when you experience this. For example, say you're dissociated (a severely limited ability to experience emotion) and you need to "focus" upon the feeling state that you want to experience. To do this, you find yourself surveying and exploring different emotive experiences in concept, but in doing so, you gain an insight into the relationship between the emotion (the feeling intuited) and the affect that it creates in voice, body and manner.

For example. In a dissociated state, you find yourself highly aware of thoughts and ideas. This tends to express itself as obsessional worries and fears. Some "idea" "out there" is perpetually entering your consciousness. Even if you aren't experiencing the worry consciously, you feel some faint "undercurrent" badgering for your attention. How do you deal with this? It isn't easy, but what needs to be done can be done.

First, the individual needs to become aware of his bodily experience. To dissociate means to "break association". In breaking association, different breaks can be pointed out - perhaps reflecting different levels of how mind-body relate. The first is a sense of break in a continual emotional experience of reality. People dissociate all the time: it is a basic "cluing out" from bodily experience i.e. emotion. This is what we do when we "doze off". Were not very animated at those time. We're very much in "neutral". Secondly, there is a break in awareness of the self. Usually, before we act, we have a "spark" that PUSHES us unconsciously into active experience. Just think for a second: where do your thoughts comes from? And how is it that when they come, we immediately, and instinctively, engage in behavior? This is a very unconscious process that automatically connects body (vagal efferents i.e. nerves of the body that are controlled by the autonomic nervous systems) with mind (the cerebral cortex). When we do this, it's usually disregarded that the body suddenly facilitates and mediates energetic processes that begin "out there", presumably in mind, and finish as one energized expressed product: a word, a bodily expression. This is basically a crux of social engagement. If someone doesn't access bodily energy, they are unable to connect with another human being.

With all this in mind, lets return to my query about psychic measurements of emotion. In order for a dissociated person to regain normal emotional experience, he has to cognitively "hold in mind" specific states imagined by his consciousness. When thinking about this, he is literally moving his being into a totally different experience. Like night and day, the personality awakens and individuality is effectively expressed.

What's especially amazing is, this is ability of the conscious mind to pick and cultivate a specific quality of emotion - which in effect changes conscious experience, giving emotions the key to organize cognitive thought processes - gives man an almost mystical ability to regulate his body, and in effect, master his physical nature.