From poets to philosophers, everyone has different ideas about their emotions. Let’s discuss our broader perspective on the purpose of emotions.
The problem of emotions
If we don’t understand what emotions are, then it’s not at all clear what purpose they serve. Or if they even serve a purpose. We end up with a lot of people running around treating them differently and responding to them in completely perpendicular ways. Over time, you end up hearing lots of usually well-intentioned advice and perspectives on the proper response and purpose of emotions.
- Express your emotions
- Honor your emotions
- Respect your emotions
- Ignore your emotions
- Eat your emotions
- Control your emotions
- Mask your emotions with pills
- Fix your emotions with surgery
Obviously, those can’t be all right! Feel free to roll your eyes when even experts can’t agree on basic truths.
Mechanisms, not causes
While it’s certainly true that chemicals, neurotransmitters, and physiological changes are needed to express emotions, those are simply some of the mechanisms connecting the effect to the underlying cause. Situations that evoke emotional responses, specifically the response produced within you, are also mechanisms. Random thoughts and observations of other people are yet other mechanisms.
This is actually easy to see as two people can participate in the exact same shared event but experience two very different emotional responses. The shared experience would only be the mechanism. The law of attraction brings together all cooperative components but for their individual, and often different, reasons. The different reasons begin to explain the different emotional outcomes.
Cause → Vibration → Situation → Response → Effect
Most of the time when we reason about the “cause” of emotions, we’re only looking at a mechanism in a chain of mechanisms all sandwiched between the cause and effect. The underlying cause of emotions is key, and without it, we can’t begin to understand the purpose of emotions.
The cause of emotions
The various channels have spoken about this with perfect consistently, and we’ve hinted about it elsewhere several times. Let’s review the setup to make the answer more impactful.
We know we’re more substantial than simply these physical selves we see in the mirror. Our broader perspectives, often called inner beings, have existed long before our individual physical lives and will continue to exist long after. For more explanation, see our Best Description of Reincarnation.
We also know that our broader perspectives provide us with some amount of feedback. Channels have this ability refined to the point where they can receive coherent blocks of thought from their inner beings. Good channels can effectively translate that into their human language for whatever purposes their individual alignment allows. For more on general channeling, see The Who’s Who of Channeling.
Finally, we get to the answer. Every physical human is a channel. We all receive basic feedback from our inner beings with every thought. Your emotions are this feedback. The good or bad feeling attached to each thought is valuable feedback from our inner beings; that is the purpose of emotions. That’s it. Wantedness versus unwantedness of every thought.
Words describing emotion are relative
Admittedly, good feeling emotion versus bad feeling emotion is a little vague. Depending on where you’re hanging out on the emotional scale, you can be much more specific as we often are in conversation.
For example, let’s say you’re typically feeling content. From there, anything that sounds interesting is a good feeling thought. Something that sounds exciting is a great feeling thought in comparison. On the flip side, a boring thought feels kind of bad. An idea that sounds unpleasant is a really bad feeling thought in contrast.
As a separate example, let’s say your typical mood is overwhelmed. Any disempowering thought will feel bad from there; disempowerment is worse than being overwhelmed so it feels worse. A thought that evokes a feeling of boredom will actually feel really good compared to being overwhelmed.
In the first example, boredom felt bad as it was further down the emotional scale. Alternatively, the second example had boredom instead feeling better as it was a step up. Abraham’s book Ask and it is Given covers this relativity very well.
The purpose of emotions
Our inner beings provide us with feedback about each thought; that is the cause of each emotion. Specifically, how well a thought feels signals how much your inner being agrees with that thought.
When you think a thought that’s in alignment with what your inner being knows, it feels wonderful. When you think a thought that’s not in alignment with what your inner being knows, it doesn’t feel so great. Love and appreciation are the closest we can get to our inner being’s understanding of anything, so those types of thoughts feel as good as anything will ever feel in physical form. Everything much less good feeling from there is a human creation.
In the simplest terms, the purpose of emotions is to show us, thought by thought, whether our inner being agrees. Just as GPS devices will navigate us home with only left and right turns, emotions show us thought by thought how to find our true selves.
Every subject is really Two Subjects in One. An emotional response to a thought on any subject will indicate if it’s on the more productive end of that subject or the less productive end.
Emotions are simply feedback, and we all choose at every moment whether to ignore or observe them. We recommend getting into the habit of observing them more and more often. Temporary feedback doesn’t need to define us in any way, and we always have the option to utilize this feedback to choose better-feeling thoughts going forward. Unsurprisingly, we recommend practicing this as much as you can, and as you embark on this process, you’ll find yourself playing a different game following different rules.
Expanded purpose of emotions
Now that the cause and purpose of emotions are laid out, let’s discuss the many uses of the emotion mechanism.
By default, emotions tell us whether or not our inner beings agree. What happens if we prime our inner being with a goal, and then think about a decision? Exactly what you’d hope. Your inner being knows immediately how to accomplish your goal, so any thought you think after will produce emotion indicating whether or not it’s in agreement with your inner being… who already knows how to reach your goal. Of course, if the goal is contrary to anything your inner being wants, you’ll still get the right answer (just not the one you’re mistakenly looking for).
Similarly, we can gauge the quality of a channel based on how it feels. Any source of intelligence being properly channeled should say the same things as your inner being. Therefore, the understanding you form based on anything you read or hear will produce an emotional response relative to what your inner being knows.
Finally, our mood can be thought of as a longer-term emotional response to our typical vibration. As we saw in Watch for Premanifestations, our usual thought process dances around our usual pattern or habit of thought. Those all generally produce similar emotional responses since they have similar vibrations. We get a continuous emotional response in this regard which we tend to call a mood.
Onward and upward
Ironically, one of the best ways to get good at listening to our emotions is to think nothing. In the absence of thought and its accompanying emotion, we resensitize ourselves to the feedback. When we get good at clearing our minds (holding zero thoughts), we become better prepared to hold only a single focused thought at once. Practicing meditation accelerates this process.
Perhaps best of all, as we value our inner being’s feedback more regularly, our inner beings will give us more specific feedback more often.
