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how to talk about our emotions related to our religious or spiritual experiences?
emotions are mentioned quite a few times in the book. Andon and Fonta experienced a primitive religious experience resulting from emotions and Jesus appealed to the emotions for teaching purposes.
Where do emotions come from? What are they?
the most rudimentary instincts are:
flight, repulsion, curiosity, self-assertion, parental, reproduction, gregarious, acquisition, construction, pugnacity.
Related are the most basic emotions:
Fear, disgust, wonder, elation, subjection, tenderness, sex-hunger, security, hoarding, pride of creation, anger.
(from mind at mischief)
is it these that spirit reaches out to? Or higher secondary emotions even sentiments? Are emotions the launchpad to our higher spiritized mind?
What do emotions have in common with mind ministry?
thinking about the Adjutants: intuition, understanding, courage, knowledge, council, worship and wisdom.
How do these function in us, through our emotions? This was how it is described that Andon and Fonta had a primitive religious experience, or was it purely an emotional event?
We are told that higher beings – angels- have more emotions than we do and they are not ground up evolutionary beings like us humans.
Emotions must be more than flesh and blood and I assume that because I believe that higher beings that are not necessarily evolutionary have them, so it may be more than racial or hereditary?
anyway, I have not seen an emotion thread yet and a search in TUB brings up many references that get the Curiousity going.
Mind at Mischief has a different and complementary approach.
Anybody??
As I understand it, emotions are cognitive interpretations of feelings and urges. Emotions can be learned and unlearned. Emotions can be positive and negative. Emotions can be divine and human. Jesus described four faith attitudes which I believe to be the learned, positive and divine emotions which make up the character of a balanced personality.
140:4.8 An effective philosophy of living is formed by a combination of cosmic insight and the total of one’s emotional reactions to the social and economic environment. Remember: While inherited urges cannot be fundamentally modified, emotional responses to such urges can be changed; therefore the moral nature can be modified, character can be improved. In the strong character emotional responses are integrated and co-ordinated, and thus is produced a unified personality. Deficient unification weakens the moral nature and engenders unhappiness.
Gene – Ever since reading about the adjutants’ role in evolving evolutionary material life, I’ve thought of “mammals” as experiential exercises for coordinating adjutant motivation with biochemical / psychosomatic response. Think of the way we associate mindal characteristics or propensities with horses, cats and dogs.
In common usage, emotion implies moving, stirring up, and agitation. And from the Latin (emovere), we get the idea of “moving beyond”. So we might intuit the idea of emotion as “agitation designed to move us beyond our biochemistry” ?
As Bonita’s reply implies, the idea is that as we grow, we learn to choose to respond — rather than react — to such emotions.
And as we grow some more, more and more can we respond to the lures from above, rather than just the urges and agitations from below.
Just some first thoughts – Nigel
the most rudimentary instincts are: flight, repulsion, curiosity, self-assertion, parental, reproduction, gregarious, acquisition, construction, pugnacity.
Here’s a list of the instincts mentioned in TUB that I’ve been able to find:
1. Self-preservation
2. Mating
3. Worship (the instinct for Deity)
4. Maternal
5. Parental
6. Play
7. Fear
8. Herd
9. Hoarding
10. Gregariousness
So the urge to worship can be explained through our physiology, emotional responses to instincts?
what separates us from our animal cousins? It must be the personality that can rationalize and choose and coordinate in order to acquire a super additive emotion like altruism as an example – built up from others like curiosity, reverence/awe, gratitude, humility, remorse – and as Sadler suggests can lead to the practice of the Golden Rule.
But the Adjutant of worship is more than an instinct. It’s a mind ministry. Do we interpret some aspects of mind ministry as instinct?
Is wisdom a successful personality? Above and beyond instinct and emotion?
But the Adjutant of worship is more than an instinct. It’s a mind ministry.
Part of ministry is urging. It’s the gravity thing. Each adjutant has a differential urge. Is an urge an instinct? Of a sort. The spirit of worship is the adjutant that urges the mind to search for spirit. Besides personality, this adjutant is what separates humans from animals.
36:5.11 6. The spirit of worship – the religious impulse, the first differential urge separating mind creatures into the two basic classes of mortal existence. The spirit of worship forever distinguishes the animal of its association from the soulless creatures of mind endowment. Worship is the badge of spiritual-ascension candidacy.
Are emotions the launchpad to our higher spiritized mind?
TUB indicates that God does not communicate with us by our feelings and gives little regard to our human emotions.
101:1.3 The divine spirit makes contact with mortal man, not by feelings or emotions, but in the realm of the highest and most spiritualized thinking. It is your thoughts, not your feelings, that lead you Godward. The divine nature may be perceived only with the eyes of the mind.
108:5.6 Your transient and ever-changing emotions of joy and sorrow are in the main purely human and material reactions to your internal psychic climate and to your external material environment. Do not, therefore, look to the Adjuster for selfish consolation and mortal comfort. It is the business of the Adjuster to prepare you for the eternal adventure, to assure your survival. It is not the mission of the Mystery Monitor to smooth your ruffled feelings or to minister to your injured pride; it is the preparation of your soul for the long ascending career that engages the attention and occupies the time of the Adjuster.
The spiritized mind is accessed by spiritual insight.
102:3.3 Material feelings, human emotions, lead directly to material actions, selfish acts. Religious insights, spiritual motivations, lead directly to religious actions, unselfish acts of social service and altruistic benevolence.
Clearly, there’s a difference between human emotions and spiritual motivations, which I have always called divine emotions. If God has emotions, they’re divine, but call them what you like.
Did you know that there are angels whose specific job it is to foster the holier emotions (divine emotions) of both men and angels, as part of the higher activities of our local universe?
39:2.5 2. The Voice of Mercy. Mercy is the keynote of seraphic service and angelic ministry. It is therefore fitting that there should be a corps of angels who, in a special manner, portray mercy. These seraphim are the real mercy ministers of the local universes. They are the inspired leaders who foster the higher impulses and holier emotions of men and angels. The directors of these legions are now always completion seraphim who are also graduate guardians of mortal destiny; that is, each angelic pair has guided at least one soul of animal origin during the life in the flesh and has subsequently traversed the circles of Seraphington and has been mustered into the Seraphic Corps of Completion.
Hey Gene. Is this thread dead?
How do these function in us, through our emotions? This was how it is described that Andon and Fonta had a primitive religious experience, or was it purely an emotional event?
What primitive religious experience are you referring to? I can say that religious experiences cannot be purely emotional, otherwise they’d be fake.
100:5.5 But emotion alone is a false conversion; one must have faith as well as feeling. To the extent that such psychic mobilization is partial, and in so far as such human-loyalty motivation is incomplete, to that extent will the experience of conversion be a blended intellectual, emotional, and spiritual reality.
91:7.3 Religious ecstasy is permissible when resulting from sane antecedents, but such experiences are more often the outgrowth of purely emotional influences than a manifestation of deep spiritual character. Religious persons must not regard every vivid psychologic presentiment and every intense emotional experience as a divine revelation or a spiritual communication. Genuine spiritual ecstasy is usually associated with great outward calmness and almost perfect emotional control. But true prophetic vision is a superpsychologic presentiment. Such visitations are not pseudo hallucinations, neither are they trancelike ecstasies.
101:1.4 The highest religious experience is not dependent on prior acts of belief, tradition, and authority; neither is religion the offspring of sublime feelings and purely mystical emotions.
I have been reading about emotions, instincts and Adjutants this morning trying to make connections and or distinctions. It’s new stuff to this uneducated mind so I’m taking some time in order to find something intelligent to say – no, thread is not dead.
take the emotion of Wonder for example and the associated instinct of Curiosity: this can be viewed as a biological approach to scientific efforts as well as religious speculation. Is there an Adjutant at work here?
or how about the emotion of disgust and associated instinct of repulsion that can motivate people to look for the beautiful and even realize altruistic thoughts. I have believed altruism to be associated with religious experience but there is a biological approach as well?? I’m trying to figure if there is an Adjutant at work here??
Well . . . for what it’s worth . . . here’s my spiel on emotions and adjutants, in as much of a nutshell as I have capacity for:
- We’re born with a temperament which is built into our DNA. It’s a physical pattern of emotional response to both the outer and inner environment which forms the basis of our character.
- Adjutants make contact and work with the physical elements of our existence through the medium of mind.
- We’re built to react a given way, the adjutants nudge and urge those reactions to go their way.
- We go along with it or we don’t. If we do, we learn and grow mentally, emotionally and physically too.
- Once the higher adjutants make contact, the capacity for divine, or spiritual, emotions has arrived
- Once all seven of the adjutants make contact, the Holy Spirit is in charge of nudging and urging emotional reactions toward those higher, holier and more divine reactions which contribute to soul growth.
- The highest, most holy and divine, emotion is fatherly love.
- Once the Spirit of Truth and the Adjuster start nudging and urging, there’s hope for attaining the emotion of fatherly love, the potential character of the soul.
The highest, most holy and divine, emotion is fatherly love.
But what of “mother love”? How does it fit into “fatherly love”?
(932.3) 84:1.6 A family of some simple sort was insured by the fact that the reproductive function entails the mother-child relationship. Mother love is instinctive; it did not originate in the mores as did marriage. All mammalian mother love is the inherent endowment of the adjutant mind-spirits of the local universe and is in strength and devotion always directly proportional to the length of the helpless infancy of the species.
(932.4) 84:1.7 The mother and child relation is natural, strong, and instinctive, and one which, therefore, constrained primitive women to submit to many strange conditions and to endure untold hardships. This compelling mother love is the handicapping emotion which has always placed woman at such a tremendous disadvantage in all her struggles with man. Even at that, maternal instinct in the human species is not overpowering; it may be thwarted by ambition, selfishness, and religious conviction.
(765.3) 68:2.6 Hunger, vanity, and ghost fear were continuous in their social pressure, but sex gratification was transient and spasmodic. The sex urge alone did not impel primitive men and women to assume the heavy burdens of home maintenance. The early home was founded upon the sex restlessness of the male when deprived of frequent gratification and upon that devoted mother love of the human female, which in measure she shares with the females of all the higher animals. The presence of a helpless baby determined the early differentiation of male and female activities; the woman had to maintain a settled residence where she could cultivate the soil. And from earliest times, where woman was has always been regarded as the home.
But what of “mother love”? How does it fit into “fatherly love”?
Mother love is an animal level instinctive emotion. It is not a divine emotion. It’s there to perpetuate the species – self-preservation – it is a lower adjutant differential urge.
Really enjoying the discussion and topic. Thanks. Not much time but I am studying your issues raised in the UB and found this which relates (I hope) to some of the questions here:
8:4.2 (94.4) God is love, the Son is mercy, the Spirit is ministry — the ministry of divine love and endless mercy to all intelligent creation. The Spirit is the personification of the Father’s love and the Son’s mercy; in him are they eternally united for universal service. The Spirit is love applied to the creature creation, the combined love of the Father and the Son.
8:4.5 (94.7) As the Sons of God are engaged in the gigantic task of revealing the Father’s personality of love to a universe, so is the Infinite Spirit dedicated to the unending ministry of revealing the combined love of the Father and the Son to the individual minds of all the children of each universe. In these local creations the Spirit does not come down to the material races in the likeness of mortal flesh as do certain of the Sons of God, but the Infinite Spirit and his co-ordinate Spirits do downstep themselves, do joyfully undergo an amazing series of divinity attenuations, until they appear as angels to stand by your side and guide you through the lowly paths of earthly existence.
8:4.6 (95.1) By this very diminishing series the Infinite Spirit does actually, and as a person, draw very near to every being of the animal-origin spheres. And all this the Spirit does without in the least invalidating his existence as the Third Person of Deity at the center of all things.
9:5.4 (103.2) Since the Third Person of Deity is the source of mind, it is quite natural that the evolutionary will creatures find it easier to form comprehensible concepts of the Infinite Spirit than they do of either the Eternal Son or the Universal Father. The reality of the Conjoint Creator is disclosed imperfectly in the very existence of human mind. The Conjoint Creator is the ancestor of the cosmic mind, and the mind of man is an individualized circuit, an impersonal portion, of that cosmic mind as it is bestowed in a local universe by a Creative Daughter of the Third Source and Center.
Sadler’s interesting view of the most basic instinct: flight and emotional response: fear, are we in flight mode because we are afraid or are we afraid because we are fleeing? Does it matter?
As with any emotional response when devoid of a rational healthy mind it can destroy us or with a healthy mind can grow us.
So any instinct can get an emotional response and maybe things like self consciousness, something that makes us different from our animal cousins can be part of a growth process if we are in control of our emotions. It is assumed that faith is the ONLY antidote to fear. Only a self conscious rational being could accomplish this and some sort of mind ministry must be involved.
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