How is it for you? How much weight do you give to your feelings as a measure of the world around you? How accurate are they, and how do you know? When you have a persistent feeling, what do you do? When a feeling is proven inaccurate, what do you do?
Fascinating thread. I skimmed through most of it, though the disagreement with your friend there seemed so telling of a lot of things. I have arguments with my wife like that. I hope you two have managed to make up.
Trying to be quick and succinct. I always fail. I'm a slow thinker.
Cause and effect operate before us in their normal order.
We witness or act, and then we reflect back and back again within ourselves. That reflecting causes emotion the way I think of it.
I'm filled with emotion, very strong and passionate emotion. But it leads me astray. I think the people who use emotion to define their world are largely either people who live within a normalcy range that the majority of people around them can easily relate to --or-- live beyond that normalcy range and are so envious of it that they put extraordinary stock in their emotions in a compensating manner to achieve acceptance.
My emotion is beyond that normalcy range, and I've learned to accept myself. I live life with those passions bubbling away, but I watch reality separately. I try to speak about reality. I try to interact with reality. I'm not real social. When I'm with those people that gather and babble away and lean in close to each other to speak and really get each other, I'm usually pretty quiet. I hear the reality of their words; they comfort each other, reaffirm each other; they hear the intonations, and they get each other.
If I play it right, I look smart. But it's easy to end up looking naive and foolish, because it's like an invisible deformity that is only noticed when we gather and compare.
By the way, I think what I'm saying is, I think it's a fantasy, those emotions. We create them, and we give them importance through checking them against other people's ability to create them. We make up what's the proper emotional response. I know it's a chemical brain thing, but it alters reality and puts each of us in our own little world.
That's where my wife and I fight. She makes connections between circumstances that are entirely unrelated, because she felt the same in both of them. I make connections between circumstances because they have common elements. We can't talk like that. I ask her how on earth they're connected, and she talks in circles for hours until she finally asks me how my circumstances are connected. When I can immediately list common characteristics, she finally realizes she can't. But she doesn't get what I'm talking about. No...she goes off on another circle of unrelated events. And I realize everything I say gets filtered and categorized based on non-existing elements, or elements that only exist in her and that anyone within her normalcy range would understand. But she can't hear me. And I'm not in her normalcy range. So I end up apologizing a lot. It's my responsibility to apologize. She can't hear me. I can hear her, and know she's talking from a different place. I can accept that. She can never see that anything outside of her emotional interpretation can be true. If she hears ideas from beyond her normalcy range, she assumes they're fabrications meant to manipulate. I can see her. I can see her speaking honestly from a different place. So it's my responsibility to apologize.
Succinct, huh?
