reason or emotions

so, when do you decide your emotions should handle stuff, and when should your reason?
Or:
Ever had a instant in time where you letted reason/emotion decide whereas later on, you thought it would have been better if you didn't?

Re: reason or emotions

I am not a student of Gurdjieff, but I liked his concept that the emotional centre of the brain operates many times faster than the intellectual centre.

I don't always know which centre to pay attention to when they conflict so I can't answer your first question. However, I err on the side of reason, so have more instances to regret not following my heart, but I know some emotional people who would do better stopping and thinking rather than plunging in heart first.

My classic heart/head moment came thirteen years ago when my children were small and I had a steady but unfulfilling job. Luckily my wife has a big heart and helped to convince me to throw it all away and move to a remote spot with “no future”. I have never been happier, I work on what interests me (it doesn't pay well) and by some miracle we are still here. I could never have made that decision using reason!

one - nil to the heart !!!

On the other hand, in the 80's I won a competition and recorded one of my songs with the Eurythmics. My heart told me that I didn't want to achieve success through their fame, so when I sent 100 demo's out I didn't mention the Eurythmics at all. Reason tells me I could have opened up a world of opportunity but instead I didn't even get one reply.

the equaliser !!!

Re: reason or emotions

i agree with chaparral..in that emotion moves faster than the intellectual does. it's not easy to decide which to listen to: intelligence or emotion, but it depends upon the situation. if you're lost, and you get a weird feeling about one of two paths at that fork in the road, then i would listen to your emotion, because likely there's something evil on it. then again, we call that instance animal instinct. now for a better emotional example: if you like someone, and you are drawn to him or her no matter what, for sure listen to your heart and emotions! brains will only screw you up.

you should listen to intelligence when you're doing anything that requires half a brain, such as math and loan papers. obviously. but say you are, yet again, in that fork in the road, and the ogre from the trail your gut told you not to go down is running at you, and you have a pick axe in your hand. you should definately listen to intelligence and determine very very quickly if you can either lose him in a chase, or take him down with your weapon.

Re: reason or emotions

In the fully realized soul, emotion emerges only secondarily to reason, as its dynamic support. In souls which are not realized, the emotional centers are conscripted to reactions to sense experience according to private and selfish motive. From this dichotomy a huge gap arises between the realized and non-realized souls, whereby up becomes down, black becomes white, and every priority is reversed and confused.

The experiences Chaparral here relates are interesting, because the two behaviors he lists are not incongruent with a realized or angelic soul. Those are both highly rational actions, which he learned to love later. He tries to apply the world’s standard to his own actions, perhaps even thinking a little similarly to myself, that if only I could think as they think, I’d have a pile of money and no problems. Yet it was reason that compelled me to act rationally although it got me into trouble in the world, and any regrets which I feel are my emotions being used to highlight the differences between my thinking and theirs, as I seem to long for a condition I could not enter, and continue to maintain a higher integrity.

If you are a realized or angelic soul, then you will find yourself always acting as you should according to the higher dharma, but it may cause you anguish as you live among those who are selfishly motivated, which means cold of heart, unfriendly and unkind towards others who share the human frame. The angelic soul, as it is growing up as a youth in a human body, will long to be told what to do for a job, by some older and wiser individuals who have been given experience and opportunity to consider what the society needs most. In other words, he or she will have a living concern for the health of the society, and this concern governs their ideas over how they will spend their working career. They want to help, and they are flexible enough to do well in any needful task.

Then further, they will be able to work without the thought of exchange for their labors, thinking only of contributing in order to grant the other members of the society a secure physical platform from which to experience maximum spiritual joys and ecstatic states. Since this is an inherently rational condition, such a  person will find other options are bizarre and unfriendly. Having an internal standard for reason granted from the divine core, this person knows he or she is on firm ground, and if there are others who also experience this firm ground, they will not find one another’s thinking bizarre, but right.

In this way a new type of rule could come, the rule of the individual mind through reason. There is no need for politics or laws among persons who can apply Golden Rule Thinking authentically. The ego ponders the world outside itself, and having no internal standard, concludes it must wend its destiny on the physical plane, grabbing at objects and fame. This motion of grabbing is fundamentally wicked, in that it denies the rights of other souls. Laws have arisen to keep the mutual disruption minimized, and the society as it now exists reflects the exorbitant use of resources to expand the pie into which so many fingers dip. A soul which knows itself in the depths, will know that grabbing is inherently wicked, and never making this awful and ugly mental motion which is the ego’s raison d’être, retreats from objects into living consideration of spiritual states and effects. This is a dream of mine although every evidence of history says it is far outside human potential.