Love Gyroscopics - Some Thoughts on Emotions and Self

I find it useful to gauge the significance of all our emotions relative to one single emotion: love.

My belief is that, because we humans are naturally loving beings, every moment when we sense ourselves feeling something other than love and openness, we are receiving an important signal to pay attention to, a signal that something is out of whack, a signal to reorient ourselves and/or change our circumstances.

There are plenty of incentives in our present-day culture to cultivate other feelings than love, to focus on the negative, to be on the lookout for things suspicious, to breed cynicism and distrust. All the negative feelings are valuable, and I don't think it's a good idea to ignore the negatives when they present themselves. But the cultivation of negative emotion, the adoption of negatives as our benchmark reference points, I believe, is a good route to depression and mental illness, not to mention ineffectiveness, inaction and loneliness.

While the wilfull manufacture of good feeling is not advisable, yet noticing what makes us feel good, noticing what we love, and cultivating the openness and vulnerability needed to experience joy and to be sensitive to delightful and delicate good feeling is a key, in my belief, to happiness and power. Noticing when we have a choice to regard our glasses as half full rather than half empty, and choosing to appreciate the opportunity latent in whatever reality, is an essential precondition to success.

If in reading this the word "love" for you conjures something like Hollywood romance, you might be wondering what the heck I am talking about. When I talk about love I don't quite mean the Hollywood kind, the heated romantic attraction of two private individuals.

Instead, I have in mind something in line with the thinking of Humberto Maturana, the great Chilean biologist, for whom love is not only the most fundamental human emotion, it is how we feel when our minds and senses are most plastic, agile, aware and alive.
Maturana defines love as feeling we have when we give "legitimacy to the other in co-existence with ourselves." Love is a willingness to appreciate the other in the other's independent being - whether we are talking about a person, a flower or a sunset. If we are not feeling love, we can be sure that we are not engaging the world with our full power, that we have strayed from our true selves.

Emotions provide an important compass to finding our true path, the path that brings us into relations of love and joy with the world, the path on which we realize ourselves as lovers, leaders, citizen-actors -- attractive beings who create love and energy around them.

Looked at in this way, love can be related to as a kind of centering force, keeping us at the maximum of our power. The chief skill to be developed in personal development, then, is the skill of becoming a human gyroscope, with love our orienting gravitational force. Grow up. Learn how to love.

Now, love doesn't simply mean going all soft and cuddly. In fact, in some circumstances, it's quite the reverse. The more we know what we love, the more we are willing to defend what we love and to act on its behalf. We grow courageous (from the word "coeur," heart), and we grow wise. When other emotions than love rule our perceptions, what we are able to perceive is diminished. Love helps us maximize our awareness, and therefore helps us to act in view of the ultimate consequences we wish to achieve.

I'd be interested in distinguishing different experiences, types, or qualities of love that might fall within the definition I am spelling out here. These might run the gamut from a simple feeling of openness to experience, without any particular charge to it, to the feeling one gets from full and active engagement, "being in the flow" (as Csikszentmihalyi calls it), exercising one's full self to the point of total elation and self-forgetfulness.

Not being in the love zone, on the contrary, means feeling agitated in one way or another. We're "hooked," for instance, by a particular emotion. It might be jealousy or anger. Or maybe we feel afraid, or unsure of ourselves. Whatever the circumstance, each of these emotions, reflected upon, will bear some relation to something that we care about, i.e. to some relation of love.

Trying to develop the self's gyroscope is not an easy task. It's probably a lot harder for most of us than learning to be a good sailor, or card player, or video-game player or what have you. In other words (looking at this glass as eternally half-full), the quest to learn the skill of love will provide you with an endless task with endless room for learning and improvement. It's a good idea to start reframing your fear of making mistakes into a love of learning to learn.

One of the difficulties is that the emotions and the mind are so agile, and move so quickly together - more quickly than we can be consciously aware - that they rapidly take us off track, decentering us, as if into a kind of blinded sleep, until we awake and find ourselves again.

In other words, we react to circumstances - based on instantaneous emotions and unconscious assumptions and expectations - and before we know it, we are acting from a lesser place.

I am reminded of an incident, an experience I had that bears on what I'm talking about. It's probably not quite the kind of story you'd expect me to tell. But here goes.

I remember one day some years ago when I was in college. I had a very important paper due the next day, and I had barely even started on it. I'd committed myself (or so I thought) to hunker down and spend the entire day writing it. Early in the morning, determined, I sat down at my desk with a hot pot of tea and pen and paper.

Come one o'clock, I suddenly found myself hanging out of my second-floor apartment washing my windows! It was if I awoke in surprise to find myself somewhere I did not want to be, doing something I did not want to be doing.

I recognized the power of my unconscious to lead me into procrastination and avoidance. Some chain of events -- perhaps I got up from my desk to take a look down at the street, perhaps I noticed a film of dust on the glass -- had led me into a series of activities, far from my original purpose of doing my paper.

When I rediscovered my commitment to do my paper, I focused my attention and got engaged, and I wrote something I loved. A lot of life is like that. We find ourselves doing something, working hard at it, and yet we wonder how we ever got there because we realize that it's not what we want to be doing.

I guess I'm saying it takes discipline and commitment to follow one's heart.

But how do we discover what we want? How do we know our hearts? The emotions hold they key, or one of several essential keys.

And yet our culture does not support emotional sensitivity. Why is that? Whence our commitment to rationalism and our disparagement or fear of emoting?

Because of our inherited cultural bias against expressing emotion, I think we are by and large in need of special practice if we are going to learn how to be true lovers of people and life.

To develop this sensitivity, we need to create a habit of slowing down, of making space to reflect on the underlying emotional responses, patterns and knee-jerk reactions that give rise to our habitual judgments, interpretations and thoughts, with the goal of gaining new power over ourselves and the choices we habitually make. Larger self-awareness can enlarge the space of choice within which we move day by day.

If you are not feeling love you are not wholly present, not fully open to the other, to experience.

We know the unloving emotions as negatives - fear, anger, dissatisfaction, etc.; negatives by definition don't exist in themselves; they are lessening reactions to something else. Thus to look at them or be gripped by them is to be by definition withdrawn from the positive, to be diminished from fullness of being and presence. Negatives are by definition a pulling away; love is fully turning toward and staying.

Science as we have learned it is a discipline of negation, of exclusion of uncertain, unquantifiable factors, i.e., the non-representational, the non-objective, whatever can't be pointed to. Science is the rigorous discovery of the lowest limit of loving attention. It's observation at its most emotionally minimal. However, it's always emotion that drives the scientist to land in his field of study; it's emotion that motivates him at least up to the point he puts his scientific lenses on.

Learning to see the positivity in relation to which a negative is experienced is to re-own the negation, is to be put back in touch with the power to act, rather than to shrink.

Love is simply finding and staying with what is, the present - and not entertaining the negative gods.