There is only one emotion, and that is stress or tension. Known to engineers also as pressure or voltage. The common people have a common name for it, but it's as often denied or euphemistically misnamed as it is called by its real name: fear.
I am an anti-psychologist. I believe that psychology exists to help psychologists pay their bills.
I'm not against psychologists paying their bills, but hired hands should usually not meddle in strangers' affairs. That's what families were for, before the raising of children was usurped by unrelatives and appliances owned by the family: to help each other through difficult times. And all times are difficult.
Nowadays, due to the transformation of human society into a money machine for the exclusive betterment of those who understand the money machine, we aim to keep our imperfections secret, and instead of talking to each other, we seek counseling. We get help, and of course the insurance and medical 'industries' have glommed onto this sad state of affairs and driven the cost of shrinkology through the roof, so now anyone capable of surviving the requisite education can refer to himself as a 'professional' and charge the intimidation rate instead of what his bad advice and worse prescriptions are actually worth.
So poor people are stuck with their emotional problems multiplying like cancer cells in unsustainable communities of malfunction, and everybody else is on pills, walking around like a bunch of zombies, thumbing their noses at the pitifully dysfunctional tweakers and squeakers who can't get their act together and deal with Reality 101 as perceived into existence by the Collective Average of our times.
Yeah, but... what is emotion?
All emotions are just interpretations of stress, which is a scientific name for fear. To complicate things, since everything from happiness to rage is just an interpretation, there are always going to be two or more interpretations of every alleged emotional state. For example, as a child I was called 'shy'. I remember the process of coming to accept this notion, for pragmatic reasons (so I could ignore idiots without having to give my reasons for doing so), and then coming to believe it, since no one around me was perceptive enough to guess what I was unable to explain at the age of three.
Because, you see, once I had gotten used to ignoring idiots, I was addicted. I couldn't get enough of ignoring idiots, and gradually forgot that my being shy was just someone else's interpration of whatever stressful condition I experienced when faced with an idiot.
Even as a child I was aware that not all people are idiots, but since non-idiots were so few and far between, the convenience of getting to ignore idiots--because I was letting them imagine that I was shy--overwhelmed the vast scarcity of non-idiots, so I accepted the 'shy' label and ignored everybody. As I grew older, and as more sophisticated (expensive) labels became available, the label was changed to schizoid, then ass-burgers. Then finally I started to understand the process of interpreting stress as various emotions and complexes of emotions, depending on the circumstances that excuse us poor fools from bothering to control our emotions.
All emotional states and emotional displays come from the same thing: stress. The person who's stressed doesn't need to name his emotion, he's busy feeling it. His Attention has been turned into a stress gauge; what's important to him is how bad or how good he feels. But the person observing the emotional state or display prefers to think he can bleed away his own discomfort with someone else's emotional peaks by labeling the stress as some emotion, or what they used to call a 'complex' and now a 'syndrome' or 'disorder'. The medical powers-that-be have even managed to make addiction out to be a 'disease'. This mindset serves to multiply addicts since disease is obviously something that must be rooted out by experts and religions like Alcoholics Anonymous. God forbid that an individual should sit down and have a little talk with himself and just get over his childish appetites.
As a child, I felt like I was smarter or better than other people (though I now realize I too am an idiot); I felt superior. Actually I felt stress. My older sister felt embarrassed (stressed) that I wouldn't respond to strangers, so she interpreted, for the stranger's benefit, that I was shy. So the stranger wouldn't feel offended by my silence. Get it? What I want, expect, or need is not there. This represents a differential in my mental state, a differential between my should and my is. My sister has a different differential going on in her mental state, and the stranger has another differential in his. Feelings of superiority, embarrassment, taking offense: all just stress readings on a stress gauge we call 'emotion'.
The is/should duality rules our emotional being. Everybody involved will be stressed, and among the three people--me, sister, stranger--there will be at least six interpretations or emotions that could be named.
All this sounds highly mechanical, and it is. All emotion, positive or negative, is the same thing: a measurement read off an internal differential meter in regards to our Is/Should Profile.
We repeat this tiny pattern over and over. Reincarnationists say we need 10,000 lifetimes to even begin the process of mastering the human form. I say, simplify the problem. We are not complex people with complexes. We are all the same nervous twitch, making ourselves out to be special. The self-importance of the individual is the greatest waste of energy since energy was invented. For no particular reason, we assume these emotions are inside us and have to get out, thus arming a whole branch of psychiatry with marketing ammunition to direct at our feeble minds: the 'express yourself' industry. In reality, emotions are just floating around out there tempting us to claim them and make them our own. Whether or not this is true, it's a pragmatically useful perspective.
I realize that this theory of emotion seems to indicate that a drama queen who can't get along with people at work is in the same condition as a beauty queen up on the stage sobbing happily for the TV cameras because her dream has come true. A practitioner who's shooting for equanimity might try to avoid all such emotional peaks, because they're disturbing. For some New Agers I've met and/or been, sustaining some coveted and hard-won positive state of mind is a special state of stress that someone else--especially a spouse, roommate, co-worker, etc.--had better not mess with, or else that certain someone could come face to face with "drama queen meets beauty queen", all rolled up into one ticking time bomb and wrapped up with a pretty pink ribbon. Don't be pulling on that ribbon.
But is there a purpose for emotional peaks?
As a hint of further theories to come, let me just say that Someone, Somewhere eats our stress for breakfast, the more the better, and has no idea what we're going through to produce it for them. Or just doesn't care. Or thinks it's funny, tasty or just plain cute to make us squirt sweat, blood and tears.
Did this Someone create us for the very purpose of producing harvestable emotional energy, or loosh?
Or did He/She/It just happen along and find our goofy twitchings to be tasty morsels? I'll get back to this question before the end of the chapter.
First I must deal with the most overused word in human language: love.
The dangerous myth perpetrated by entertainment corporations for their profit is that love is a feeling. Then, this most amorphous of entities--the supposed feeling we call "love"--is defined and redefined and denied and redenied and argued over incessantly as to what this feeling love really is. Of course religious thinkers get involved to try and make it sound oh-so-technical: "There are six kinds of love..." which just makes the damn stuff more expensive.
Well, let me start with the example that will piss the most people off, and I'll just come right out and say it:
We don't love our children. Whew! Over half my readers just clicked me off and went back to posting puppy dogs and kitty cats on Facebook. As much as I love dogs and children, and even family gatherings if there's any chocolate, we as a former culture are now teaching our children that life is something that takes place on websites. What a loving thing to do for them...
At one time I would have said that "Love is not a feeling, it's an action." Now I think it would be better to banish the word than to argue over it, but I'd be the only one to banish the word, so why bother?
The sick and disgusting statement made above ("We don't love our children,") is partly true according to the notion that to the extent that we sacrifice what we want for what our children need, we do in fact love them. But why pollute an obvious truth like 'take care of your kids' with a bunch of debatable philosophy. Just take care of your kids to the best of your ability... and how do I get off stating that we don't love our children??? The opposing argument comes straight from the emotions: "But I do do do love my children, when I gaze upon my child I am torn to shreds, I love my child so so so much," etc.
Well so do I. Poor kid!
We see our child and we hate ourselves. We see our child and we resent our parents, we detest our fate. That's what we feel for our children. Most of what we call love is guilt about our inadequacy as parents compared to superhuman expectations; fear for their future; despair because we know that, ultimately, our children are doomed! They are going to suffer excrutiatingly! And it's our own fault for bringing them into the world.
So that love we feel for our children: Resentment. Guilt. Fear. Remorse. Despair. I could make a similar case for self pity, envy, jealousy, and all the nastiest of emotions that our loved ones bring out in us, but it's self-evident; I don't have to convince myself. No wonder this thing called "love" tears us to shreds.
This concept can be extended to romantic love, love of country, etc. As it turns out, the notion of love is a useful device for excusing all kinds of horrible behavior. The eternally indefinable word "love" is in general a euphemism for anything felt or done out of overwhelming emotion, that is, when we're out of control. Basically, love is an alibi for anything. Adultery, murder, suicide, addiction, war... anything.
Although I wouldn't want to be guilty of oversimplifying a complex issue, I much worse wouldn't want to be guilty of overcomplicating something simple. I realize that I'm too honest for my own good. So sue me.
Enough pragmatics, now let's move on to the philosophical part of this chapter.
There's a rumor, which originated from the book Far Journeys by Bob Monroe, which goes by the name of loosh.
As background, let me state that for every thing that uses energy, there's some other thing that considers the first thing's rejected intake as well as its exhaust to be perfectly acceptable sources of energy. From shit-eating dogs right on down to the bottom feeders who we then turn around and eat in fancy restaurants, somewhere right now somebody is eating what someone else considers to be trash. This untidy fact of life on earth is true at all levels of anything resembling a food chain. It's kinda depressing, but when we indulge ourselves emotionally to the point where we're emitting emotional energy as a waste product, firstly we tend to use up most of the energy in the room which is why people start to leave, and secondly, something is eating our excessively peaked emotions and thriving on it.
Please let's not jump to the conclusion that it's the aliens doing it to us. "They came to this planet to harvest our emotional energy"... poppycock. What's so bad about your emotional exhaust being someone else's fertilizer? Do white people really want to sterilize the universe, or does it just seem that way?
I've never seen an alien, but I have seen an unidentified flying object. It was real and I was not the only one who saw it. It was flying. It was a light, it was utterly silent despite its closeness--less than a thousand feet from us. It had no blinking lights and it was silent. It was 3 a.m. and there were no other lights anywhere. I was camping in the mountains. The light was big, but not big enough so that its shape could be discerned, if it was in fact an object and not just a flying parcel of light.
The light moved into the clearing where it was completely unobscured by anything, and apparently when we became visible to it, the light instantly changed directions, heading straight up into the clear night sky. Silently and in only seconds, it got further and further away till it disappeared in the distance. Never made a sound, never blinked.
But what's alien about this? It happened in my reality didn't it? And that of my companion who saw the same thing.
Invariably, when we talk about loosh--emotional energy as a waste product which someone somewhere takes in as a kind of food or energy input--someone wants to start blaming the aliens. Well, first of all, this planet we perceive ourselves to be living on is the center of our worlds. The entire universe is projected from here, afresh, once per Moment, by our Attention. "Here" can mean a lot of things. But why do people insist on assuming that the little green men, who've been with us since before the days of elves, fairies, and gnomes, have to be from a different planet?
It seems like the simpler solution to assume--since we only see them here and close to here--that these aliens are residents of here, where we see them. As for how physical they are... but how physical is anything? Physicality is a function of agreement among various viewports. So the UFO phenomena will continue to escalate because more and more people are seeing them. What they turn out to be depends on what we collectively decide to dream about them. And that will depend on which filters we're habitually looking through, and how that selection of filters changes between now and when these buggers reveal themselves to reality at large. As soon as science can no longer deny their existence, a new branch of science will be born to explain them and make them commonplace. People might have to explain to their children that the elves and gnomes almost disappeared during the 20th century oil glut but came back when the air was fit to breathe.
Now about loosh. Emotional energy is twoness. It's a wave, all our passions and appetites and fears and pains and glories come in waves. Emotion comes and goes, it is input and exhaust, all the dualities apply. By definition--"ex-" + "motion"--it's an outward movement or movement away. To me, the perfect and inviolable definition of emotion is "differential between one's should and one's is".
What is waste? It's something that is or was potentially useful but ends up spilled or otherwise unretrievable. Anyone who believes that emotional energy is sanctified and sacred must be under the age of 98. Addicted to emoting vs. ready to accept that enough is enough. Our emotional excess is someone else's food, so what? Sharks eat nice people as well as nasty. When was this not a predatory world?
As for what exactly loosh is or why exactly it exists, and especially who it is that finds it so attractive as an energy source, the answer is at the end of this chapter. First I wanted to object one more time to the assumption that it's the Little People who find it useful. I mean it probably is them, but I don't think they're the ones who actually use it.
I think they sell it.
Just kidding, but Bob Monroe did not convince me that he knew what Loosh was. Like everyone else who has a book to sell, he tried to connect it to love. I don't blame him. It's a real temptation when writing on metaphysical topics to have all the unanswered questions mysteriously blossom into love somehow. Maybe his editor made him add that part so the books would sell.
Which brings us to the end of this chapter, finally.
Loosh is wasted emotional energy which generates spinning vortices of energy that are located inside and outside the person wasting the energy. These spinning structures of energy are flywheels which just sit there and spin. When located outside of us, the loosh absorbers are the very populants of the belief system territories, the heavens and hells that Monroe discovered for everyone to believe in. Another word for this energy is karma. Our karma goes to heaven and hell as timeless images which do not suffer or accumulate knowledge of anything. They are static. They are ghosts. They exist, they are real, but they don't need to change because they don't experience time so they don't suffer. The loosh eaters are just machines that absorb and store useless energy. The only way to make them seem dynamic is to interact with them. Feed them your energy and they reflect you. Same way everything else works.
But we also have spinning vortices within our being, our chakras which can be personified as dream bodies. In our day-to-day upholding of the physical world which I call the human form or the Dayly Dreame or the 2-3-4 Body/Mind/World, much of our energy is stuck in the lower three chakras which deal with emotion, identity, attachments, memory, time, values, and thousands of synonyms for these lower Basics. It's all in the line of duty, it's the cost of doing business. It takes a lot of petrol to build a world, and some of it is going to spill on the ground.
So when Monroe sensed that someone had created the world as a loosh mine, he was talking about us. You and I create our own loosh mines. In our supposedly realer-than-real physical worlds, our inner flywheels spin faster and faster throughout life as we accumulate emotional garbage and useless memories, and someday when we die, all that junk will fly into the Nowhere and spin without us.
We are just pure awareness, and only our excessive emotional energy can go to hell. Only our karma goes to heaven or hell or haunts houses.
The other option is to control the energy used by the lower chakras and send the energy that they can't use to the Uppers. That way, you can keep your personal allotment of energy in the family, instead of feeding it to ghosts. They call this 'enlightenment'.
