Emotional decisions

Don’t get all emotional about it. He’s tired and emotional. I’m an emotional wreck. I don’t want to make some horrible decision based on out-of-control emotions. You just need to control your emotions. Think logically about it. Make a rational decision.

Emotions get a bad rep. We have a neat binary between emotion, on one side, and rationality and logic, on the other side. There’s no contest over which one wins! We value logic and rationality far above emotion, especially when it comes to making decisions. Even when it comes to relationships, which are defined by emotion, we want to be rational and logical. Because that’s good and emotion’s bad. So we draw lists, we weigh up the pros and cons, we conjure up various scenarios, we do everything in our power to make a purely rational decision. But there’s no such thing.

Decisions are emotional

The neurologist Richard Cytowic started off looking at people with synaesthesia (when one sense is stimulated but you experience another, like The Man Who Tasted Shapes). His research led him to some extraordinary discoveries about the brain – particularly about where we make decisions, and how we make decisions.

To make decisions, we have to evaluate what factors to include, how important they are, whether they’re positive and negative – all that list-making pro-and-con stuff. Neurologists call this “valence”, we call it decision-making. But here’s the thing. It’s not the nice, logical, rational cortex that’s in charge of calculating valence. It’s the limbic system – the “emotional core of the human nervous system”.

The limbic brain has retained its function as the decider of valence [during the evolutionary process]. What the cortex does is provide more detailed analysis about what is going on in the world so that the limbic brain can decide what is important and what to do. (Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes)

You can send your logical brain off for more information, you can demand lists from it, you can order up a detailed evaluation of pros and cons. But your logical brain can’t make the decision: biologically, it’s just not capable. It doesn’t have the wiring. The logical brain is the adviser; emotions are king. But the adviser is trying to get at the throne – and overthrow the king.

We make decisions behind our own backs

Since 1965, we’ve known that decisions somehow escape our conscious minds. Kornhüber ran experiments to test people’s decision-making. He wired them up, then all they had to do was move their finger, whenever they felt like it. He discovered that the brain built up its activity, its “readiness potential” to make the decision, almost a whole second before they made the conscious decision. (In neurological terms, that’s years!) By the time they made a conscious decision, the decision was already made. As Cytowic describes it…

Such a decision is an interpretation we give to a behavior that has been initiated someplace else by another part of ourselves well before we are aware of making a decision at all. In other words, the decision has been made before we are aware of the idea to even make a decision. If “we” are not pulling the strings, then who or what is? The answer is, it is an unknown part that is unfathomable to introspection. … Our conscious self is the tip of an iceberg.

We all know the feeling: that mad decision that got made almost behind our own back which we now have to explain to the world – and ourselves! Logically we think it’s the wrong choice; somehow we made that choice. Psychologists call this “cognitive dissonance”, the horrible feeling of holding two opposite ideas, and we try to smooth it over by explaining it all away, rationalizing it. We come up with logical reasons after the choice was made.

Getting access to our decision-making

If you consider that we all want to make rational decisions, and all our decisions are actually emotional, then we’re all suffering cognitive dissonance. Maybe, in this case, emotional dissonance is a better phrase. Emotions are going to make our decisions anyway, so instead of trying to ignore them or write them out the equation, perhaps it’s a good idea to look at them. Which emotions are going to make your decisions?

After a lifetime of dismissing our emotions from decision-making, it’s hard to learn to hear them again. The logical brain keeps jumping in and shouting. In her forthcoming book on Energy, Carol Hautot describes a range of access tools that let you make contact again with your emotions, with your energy, and with the universal energy. One of the simplest is just this:

Does it make me feel light or does it make me feel heavy?

Your logical cortex can still do its job – gathering information, giving a detailed analysis – and it can learn its place. It doesn’t have the power to make decisions and no amount of stern self-control will rewire our brains. The ultimate decision is emotional: access the emotion.

The king is dead... Long live the king!

The reason emotions get such a bad rap is that we let the wrong emotions rule the day.  With the goal of creating heaven on earth by December 21^st, 2012, isn’t now the time overthrow the king and crown a new king?  With fear-based emotions such as anger, hatred, misery and rage ruling our existence for so many years, isn’t it about time the human species evolved to a more vibrant existence and crowned “Love” as the new king?  Aren’t we tired of bowing to grief and guilt, sadness and suffering, hostility and hysteria?  The problem isn’t living by your emotions: the problem is what emotions we choose to live by.

Aren’t we, as a race, ready to live by emotions that lifts our spirits?  Emotions like awe, euphoria, gratitude, hope, joy, and love – emotions that make us feel vibrant and light, and not dark and heavy. In our April 5^th blog, But the Greatest of these is Love, we looked at out how all major religions preach love without always creating much actual love: fear-based emotions toward people who don’t share their beliefs can override the conscious belief that love is the answer.  So how do we resolve such an issue?  By crowning a new, all-powerful king: unconditional love.

Now is the time to have an emotional rescue and let love make our decisions for us, without any conditions.  The first decision is to make a more vibrant and loving planet by letting unconditional love rule the day – especially on December 21, 2012 and onward.

Cosmic attraction

Electromagnetic attraction

In the last two posts, we’ve explored the important role that electromagnetism plays in the existence of the human species. We learned that the heart-brain sends electromagnetic signals to the head-brain, communicating through our emotional center (the sub-cortex) rather than directly with our logical thoughts (the cortex). We also looked at how electromagnetism resonates throughout our bodies and compared that to the way organized religions and spiritual movements talk about inner light. We can’t say, definitively and scientifically, “Electromagnetism is inner light!” But the connection between the two can offer us a great deal.

On the Science & Spirituality website, we talk about the relationship between science and spirituality. It’s complex and occasionally fraught, but still useful. Science offers spirituality new models of how the world works (think of how quantum physics has transformed our assumptions). Meanwhile, spirituality offers science a safe haven for unproven ideas – some of which, once dismissed as “old wives’ tales”, have since been proven. Of course, the two argue – mainly about how you know something is true.

With electromagnetism, science offers us an incredibly useful model for thinking about inner light, magnetism, and attractiveness. But why do we need a new model? Let’s look at what’s currently on offer.

Cosmetic Attraction

Today, whole industries fund themselves with the sole purpose of making us appear more attractive, “vibrant”, “shining” with that “youthful glow” (on the premise that young people are shiny – rather than the matt peachiness of actual young skin). Face-lifts and botox injections promise a vibrant, youthful appearance (and deliver a frozen, stretched look). People go to tanning saloons and apply tanning creams so to keep the “glow” of a deep, dark tan (which risks being matt erring on leathery). Teeth-whitening products are being sold to create “radiant smiles” (no toothpaste can actually make you smile) and men can turn their gray hairs dark in only five minutes to give them back their appearance of vim and vigor (as opposed to still tired, but now with dark hair).

We want to feel vibrant – and there’s nothing actually wrong with that. Feeling that you look good and youthful can raise your confidence, which in turn helps you keep your head up, your shoulders back, and a smile on your face - which certainly enhance your vibrant appearance. The sense of attractiveness and confidence lifts your spirits, which enhances your attractiveness more. At today’s level of evolution, the feeling we get from cosmetic attraction can be important to our wellbeing – if it all works as the marketing says. But there’s a fatal flaw in looking for our vibrance this way.

Fatal Attraction

Most marketing campaigns for cosmetics promise confidence-through-beauty. What they actually deliver is insecurity – which creates market “need”. They can’t be credited with the birth of physical insecurity, but they demonstrably fuel its flames. The fatal flaw of trying to maintain a youthful, vibrant appearance is that, eventually, it will be gone. There is no product that will make you look young and vibrant forever. Yes, you can alter or adjust aspects of your appearance in cosmetic ways, but if you want to live to a ripe old age, you’re going to look old one day. So if you rely on your physical features to bring you love, attention and self-worth, your life story will have a sad ending. But all this is assuming these multifarious products work. Most products don’t even make you look young and vibrant today. They don’t even make the model, usually selected for her youth and beauty, look like that. Dove recently ran a campaign showing the evolution from original model to billboard ad. (Watching this video has since been shown to reduce physical insecurity in young women.) They also ran a pro-age campaign, showing a selection of beautiful middle-aged and older women, all considered “too old to be in anti-ageing ad”.

If you are recognized in this world because of your vibrant spirit, there are no worries or mid-life crisis: your spirit does not have an expiration date. There is no shelf-life for being a loving and compassionate person. The ability to resonate electromagnetism can come from a 91-year-old as easily as a 19-year-old. Your true vibrant spirit should be your measure, not your ability to not-look-your-age.

So how about a different model of attractiveness – one which links attractive to light, not to body? Look back at Cosmetic Attraction. What are we really after? We want to look “vibrant”, “shining”, “glowing”, “radiant”… and feel confident. That’s not youth. Young people aren’t shiny! And they’re famously insecure. “Face-lift + shiny teeth + heavy tan + dark hair” doesn’t equal vibrant, smiling, relaxed energy. What are we actually chasing here?

What we’re actually after is vibrance – the kind of attraction that is both possible and genuinely attractive. Physical beauty and youth don’t necessarily offer that. But the cultural model, which tells us they do, is so powerful and entrenched. It’s hard to abandon that way of thinking, unless we can find a different model to replace it with. And that’s what the model of electromagnetism, in our heart-brain and in our bodies, offers us: a new way of understanding attractiveness, at a deeper and lasting level. We know the experience of seeing someone’s inner light: this gives us a way to conceptualize it.

Cosmic Attraction

When we see inner light in another person, it makes them more attractive – “magnetic”, we say, “shining”, “vibrant” – and someone we want to be around. It’s not so hard to move beyond physical appearance. After all, our brain only stores the bare basics of what someone’s face actually looks like, and quickly matches it up. People we love become more beautiful to us. Perhaps, by concentrating on someone’s inner light, even thinking of it in terms of electromagnetism, we can learn to step past physical appearance – and concentrate their true spirit, their inner light. In many Eastern religions and in the New Thought Spiritual movement, one person will greet another person by saying, “Namaste.” By saying this, they are actually honoring the spirit in you, which is also in me. Namaste also has been referred to as “the light in me sees the light in you”.

Imagine that the light in me, which sees the light in you, is the electromagnetic energy that comes from our heart-brain and that resonates in our bodies. Imagine that the electric impulses inside you are generating a magnetic field around you. This cosmic connection of honoring one’s spirit can give us a sense of depth far beyond our standard reaction to a physically attractive person. It shows us an option of evolving past our animal and materialistic instincts to a deeper spiritual connection.

Coming Attraction

At one stage of our evolutionary process, reproduction was the number one priority for keeping the existence of the species alive. Because of this collective agenda, the ability to reproduce strong, healthy offspring was the basis for picking a mate. Theories of beauty are very quick to trace our current standards of beauty back to this biological imperative (happily ignoring the very different standards of beauty across the centuries – compare the size zero debate to a Botticelli beauty!). But that biological imperative is something we need to rethink. Survival of the species is survival of the species – not the individual or even the individual’s genes. With the Earth population approaching 7 billion people, all of us reproducing offspring actually deters our survival. To insure the existence of our species, it’s not reproduction we need – it’s the ability to co-exist. A dark tan or a glowing smile will not enhance our co-existence. The ability to listen to our heart-brains, to radiate our inner light, will. And as part of the New Age of Enlightenment, this is where the human race is heading: past the level of skin-deep beauty to resonating our inner light, the same light that will illuminate this planet and create Heaven on Earth.