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 The Scale of Emotion/Vibration

 

In our vibrational universe concept, emotions, like thoughts, are vibrations, and can be placed on a graduated scale from lowest to highest. Any counselor will find it beneficial to know where her client is on the scale, and to know the client’s likely reaction if he were to rise or fall from that position. Knowledge of the scale is similarly helpful in everyday life.

Behind emotions are the thoughts that keep them activated. For example, if you think enough disparaging thoughts about Joe, you can get yourself feeling very upset about him. Thoughts affect the body’s cellular structure, and also give direction to the life force energy that composes the Human Energy Field. Resistant thought can block or distort the flow of your own life force, leading to emotional swings up or down the scale. 

The other day I was upset with my computer. My email program keeps eating my inbox and I lose all my messages. After the third time, in which I lost some valuable data, I was about ready to chuck my computer out the window! There were two very important business matters that needed my immediate attention. I needed a solution right away but I was too upset to think rationally. What to do? 

I attempted to improve my emotional state by simply imagining that the problem was solved. I didn't know HOW it was going to be solved, but I focused on the feeling of "OK, that's great. That handled it." That led me to thinking about the upcoming holiday season, which always makes me feel good. After about 3 more minutes, I suddenly remembered I had an old email program lying around on my D drive. So I fired that up and viola! problem solved.

A solution appeared only after a series of seemingly un–coordinated and logically unconnected actions. From this I realized that when I am angry or upset I’m not going to come up with good solutions. My first solution, throw the computer out the window, wasn’t so good. My second solution, to send an angry email to the company who wrote the software (name withheld), wasn’t much better.  A rational solution only appeared after taking my attention off the problem and putting it on something else, even though that something else was totally irrelevant to the context of the experience. We've talked about this before, in the essays on Problems, but here is a new little twist.

When you're experiencing negative emotion, you are less intelligent. When you feel good, you are more intelligent. You can prove that to yourself by becoming more mindful, and by observing others.

This brings up an important point: the intellect atrophies, or is unavailable entirely, when you feel crummy. Therefore, trying to think your way out of a situation that involves negative emotion is very difficult to do. Readers who have a very disciplined intellect may be able to do so, but I am not one of them, and I expect a lot of people are the same as me.

In order to figure out how to handle a problem one must obviously have the intellect available. But the intellect is not available when you feel rotten. The solution is, then, one which at first cannot involve the intellect, and which must rely on emotions. I have found that it is very helpful to understand the order in which a human being will experience emotions, from negative to positive. It helps to practice each of these emotions from lowest to highest and get a feel for how they progress one into the other. Anyway, here's the scale:

Death

 

Dying

 

Apathy

Giving up

Making Amends

Complete turning over of your free will to another

Grief

 

Propitiation

"I'll do anything to make it up to you!"

Sympathy

“Oh, I’m so sorry!”

Fear

 

Covert Hostility

He's smiling in your face and stabbing you in the back. Says one thing and does another.

No Sympathy

"Tough for you. Just do it."

Anger

Our of control, lashing out at the world.

Pain

 

Positive emotion

Antagonism is the border between negative and positive emotion.

Antagonism

"Hey! Come over here and let me kick your butt!"
Feistiness.

Boredom

 Yawn

Conservatism

 

Interest

"Hey that's cool!"

Enthusiasm

"Wow! Let's do that again!"

Exhilaration

"I feel  fantastic!!!!!"

Adapted from "Beyond Psychology: An Introduction to Metapsychology" by Frank A. Gerbode. M.D.

 This scale  is a measure of increasing (or decreasing) life force energy. 

Getting back to our example, if I'm mad at the computer, a viable solution is to feel good about the upcoming holiday season.  Huh? What does Christmas have to do with computers? Nothing. To the intellect, it's a non-sequitor. But an emotion is a very powerful amplifier of vibration. If you are feeling a certain way you always seem to get experiences which match that feeling, even though the content of those experiences may have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It is the underlying emotion which ties the experiences together. In other words, a negative emotion will tie together experiences when something rotten happened. A positive emotion will remind you of positive experiences. When you feel good, you’re smarter than when you feel bad, so the idea is to raise your tone and then you’ll be able to think up something brilliant to solve your problem.

All you have to do is get yourself out of the negative range. You don't have to feel perfect joy to get your intellect working well enough to start effectively handling the problem. For me, the solution popped into my mind like magic.

 How to Use the Emotional/Vibrational Tone Scale

As an example let’s take Barb and Jill, who had planned to go out for lunch. Barb is apathetic about her life, and calls Jill up to cancel their appointment. She’s moping around at home and Jill says “I’ll be right over.” Let’s say that Jill has a good knowledge of the emotional/vibrational scale.

Joe and Moe are in the same situation. Joe calls Moe and tells him he can’t play golf that afternoon, and Moe, who hasn’t got a clue about the scale of emotions, comes over to get his friend out of his funk.

Barb and Jill

“What’s wrong Barb?” says Jill.

“Oh, I just don’t care anymore,” Barb says apathetically.

Jill is just about to fire off an angry comment about Thorpe, her former boyfriend (that big jerk) but she realizes that a very large vibrational gap exists between apathy and anger. Apathy is very low on the scale of emotions and Jill doesn’t want to overwhelm her friend, so she says gently, “It’s Thorpe isn’t it?”

Suddenly Barb bursts into tears, an activity that used to really piss Thorpe off. “Damn women,” he’d think, “what the hell is wrong with her now?” But Jill knows that grief is the next harmonic of vibration on the scale of emotions, so to her Barb’s reaction is perfectly logical. Barb is wailing on about Thorpe and how lonely and rejected she feels. Jill is a good counselor, and even though she thinks to herself, “You’re a whole lot better off without that loser honey,” she says nothing and lets Barb vent a little. She knows that although being around grief is uncomfortable, matching Barb’s vibration would result in failure, for two vibrations of grief would just reinforce the other, sticking both women right in it. Jill knows that only by maintaining a high vibration can she be of any use to Barb at all.

After several minutes Barb is cried out and looks up at her friend. Jill recognizes that Barb is poised at an emotional brink; and that a word or gesture from her can send her friend up the scale or back downward. She also knows that people can hit an emotion and pass by it very quickly on the way up or down, so she’s not sure exactly where Barb is going next, but she knows it’s going to be some version of negative emotion, and is prepared for it.

Jill says, “You had some good times together, didn’t you?” hoping to bring Barb up a little. She doesn’t say, “Still feeling sad about Thorpe?” because that might stick Barb back in grief.

Barb says, sympathetically, and a little defensively,  “Yeah we did! I remember the time we went to the putt-putt golf course and he put his arms around me…”

Jill let’s Barb go on a bit, because she recognizes the emotion of sympathy, which is a little bit up from grief.

After a time Jill suggests, “Maybe you’ll meet somebody else.”

A look of anxiety comes over Barb’s face and she says, “Do you really think I can? All the guys I’m attracted to treat me like crap.”

“Yes I think you can. You’re such a great person.”

Barb says fearfully, “I don’t think so. Thorpe didn’t think so anyway. Maybe I’m doomed to be lonely forever.”

Jill puts a little anger in her voice and says, “Remember how he  cussed you out at the amusement park when you didn’t want to go on the rollercoaster?” That was a little reach by Jill, because anger is the next major harmonic on the scale, but it could backfire and put Barb right back into grief. Even if it does, Jill knows it’s not a problem, for it just means Barb needs to cry a little more and fully release it. Barb’s face is a study in emotion as she goes up to anger, down to grief and up to fear again. But Jill’s statement hit home, because Jill knows something about Barb’s life and how her friend thinks.

Barb remembers many more incidents almost as bad, and her face hardens. “That bastard,” she says.

Jill is secretly thrilled, for her regard for Thorpe is like a gooey mess on the kitchen floor: dispose of it immediately! But Jill keeps her opinions to herself and recognizes Barb has reached no-sympathy, and that if she’s successful, the dam will burst. Jill hates anger but she steels herself for it anyway, knowing it’s the next harmonic. After probing around a bit on that subject, Barb starts screaming and cussing. “Did I ever tell you what he said to me after I made dinner for him???@!@!!” etc. This goes on for a while as Barb recounts all the times Thorpe was mean to her. Jill is holding it together in the face of Barb’s anger, even when her friend picks up a glass of water and hurls it against the wall,  for Jill knows that anger is a big step up from apathy.

After a while Barb calms down and begins to tease herself about Thorpe. “Maybe I should go over to his house and put a dent in his truck.” All of a sudden she bursts out laughing, realizing that Thorpe liked his new truck, and paid a lot more attention to it, than he ever did to her.

Barb says, “Why did I ever hook up with that guy?”

Jill smiles and says, “I don’t know sweetheart, but I do know that there are plenty of guys out there a lot better than him.”

Barb says, “There better be!”

She’s feeling a lot better now and Jill suggests they go out and get something to eat. Barb is eager to talk some more to her friend and agrees. Jill hopes to get her up to at least interest on the subject of the opposite sex.

Moe and Joe

Now the conversation with Joe and Moe would probably be a lot shorter. Moe walks in and sees his friend apathetic, and knows it’s all  about his job. But Moe has heard that story over and over and he’s tired of it. He’s got a beer in one hand and his keys in the other and says. “C’mon Joe, let’s go. We’re gonna be late.”

“Screw it,” Joe says apathetically. “I’m not going.”

Moe says angrily, “Get out of it, you woman! Are you going to sit around here all day and cry?”

“Screw you Moe!” Joe says.

“C’mon, let’s go,” says Moe, rattling his keys. Since Joe is a guy, and guys aren’t supposed to cry, (although that’s exactly what Joe feels like doing) he has to make his decision quickly. Joe decides, hell, why not play some golf, it doesn’t matter anyway. So they both go out and Joe plays terrible. He’s not very interested in the game, thinking about his crummy job and how desperately he wants to change his life, but he just doesn’t know how.

“You played like crap Joe,” Moe crows after the round. “Got you by 13 strokes.”

“Yeah whatever,” Joe says.

“C’mon let’s go to the clubhouse and get a few beers,” Moe suggests.

“Sure.”

We leave Moe and Joe here. At this point, Joe is still stuck in apathy, because he hasn’t really changed his thinking or his focus. For a brief moment Moe made him really angry, but it didn’t last.

 

You can also use the Emotional Tone Scale to bootstrap yourself up the emotional ladder.

If you're in apathy and begin to cry, that's a step UP. Mostly what happens is that a person begins to cry and says "Oh what's the use! I still feel rotten" and gives up. Giving up is the same as apathy. So you're right back where you started.

When you are fearful and make a step forward, you get angry. Society does not like angry people; the authorities like to put such in jail. In school angry kids are drugged to make them conform. This puts them lower on the scale, in apathy mostly. The fact is, an apathetic person is easier to control and easier to get along with.

Why is anger more positive than fear or grief? Because an angry person is more animated.  The animating principle is consciousness. In general, the more animated a person is, the more conscious he or she is.

(This is not a hard and fast rule. If you read the books of the great masters (Swami Muktananda, for example) you'll see that these wise ones were completely conscious yet able to totally control their life force energy. They demonstrate a feeling of total power, serenity, and joy all at the same time. The key to this is complete non-resistance, or allowing).

When you are in anger and take a step up, you might feel antagonistic. An angry person is spewing, he's out of control. An antagonistic person is more directed, more under control. He's resisting much less and feeling a little better. And he's more rational.

Why is boredom higher than antagonism? Because there's less resistance. Boredom is a higher harmonic of apathy and a lower harmonic of serenity, antagonism is a higher harmonic of anger, and a lower harmonic of exhilaration. Emotions are just vibrations, and they have higher and lower aspects.

Of course, the emotions on this scale will feel more comfortable to different kinds of people. For example, I used to know a guy who much preferred antagonism to boredom or conservatism. Once you get out of the deep negative emotions it's just a matter of where you feel most comfortable.

 

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