Tuesday, Jul 31, 2007

Becoming Emotionally Rational

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In our last two calls, we spoke about choice as a faculty - a function of being alive and being human, and about free will and karma - how the momentum of choices we make, over and over again over many years, shapes our perception of what is possible, often giving us the impression that we don’t have free will. In this call we will grapple with one of the most basic human experiences in relationship to volitionality - our experience of emotion. When we are in the midst of the experience of strong emotions we often believe we have no choice. Think about it - what’s your most recent experience of fear or doubt, desire, or even happiness, and how did that influence the choices you made? The experience of fear can be as debilitating as running into a brick wall for many of us, stopping us in our tracks and rendering all our good intentions useless. But if our goal is to be free, so we can consciously change and evolve, we need to find a way to navigate by something more stable than whatever emotion happens to be on the horizon. To do that we need to develop an objective or rational perspective on our emotional experience.

Posted by Jeff Carreira at 11:40 AM |   

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