wheel of emotion

This wheel caught my eye because of the colors,
but the display of organization and relationship of human emotion
is what kept me looking at it a 2nd, 3rd and 4th time.

via {Neil_k personal cargo}

Becoming The Primal: Neutralizing The Fear Reflex

When the Control System needs to pull in the reins on its feverish denizens, when it wants to curb the opportunities for conscious discovery and just wants everyone to get back in line, it always does the same thing - it strikes fear into the hearts of men.

Fear is a hardwired neurological response designed to get an organism out of trouble. Psychologist Robert Plutchik posited that human emotions are designed to accommodate adaptive survival strategies for reproductive success. In other words, they keep you alive so you can procreate. There are eight primary emotions: fear, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, acceptance and joy. Each emotion has a distinct role to play in the continued existence of the whole organism. Combinations of these produce more advanced emotions like optimism (anticipation + joy), remorse (sadness + disgust) and love (joy + acceptance). The principle is the same as mixing primary colours to obtain subtler secondary and tertiary shades.

Whilst we must acknowledge that there are other, more profound and multi-dimensional energetic qualities to the emotions, for now we shall concentrate on their core organic function. For it is through understanding the mechanics of fear, and its potential uses, together with detaching from the unnecessary portals which promulgate its fake cognition, that the individual fear response can be defused and potentially deactivated altogether.

The biological mechanics of fear look like this:-

stimulus event ( threat) —> cognition (danger) —> feeling state (fear) —> overt behaviour (escape) —> effect (safety)

In a primal context, this is pretty clear-cut. You are confronted by an angry lion. You see the lion, hear its roar, try to control your bowels, then you scamper up a nearby tree as fast as possible. Stimulus, cognition, feel, act… and finally get to safety.

In an intellectual context however, a powerful fear response can be derived from rather abstract constructs; threats that are not directly perceived, such as economic decline, a deadly virus, looming war, civil unrest, terrorist plots or radical social changes.

What the unreality veil does so successfully, is to bypass the stimulus event altogether and deliver the cognition straight to you, ready for the automatic gut reaction.

Consider the wording from just 20 headlines, 5 each from The BBC, The Guardian, CNN and Reuters in one single day (late March 2009). Expelled. Kills. Strikes. Attacks. Stress. Die. Fire. Accuses. Torture. Alert. Flood. Abuse. Dies. War. Embarrassed. Porn. Row. Target. Offensive. Death. Poorest. Protest. Looms. Killed. Demand. Swamped. Failure.

Note the inordinate amount of negative words. All this from just one day; and it is the same every day. The content and context of the articles is immaterial to the subconscious mind. It is the montage effect of the trigger words that counts - and their corresponding emotional prompts that induce a primal response.

Curiously, such fear memes are relatively absent from the tabloid press. It seems the Control System only deems it worthwhile to broadcast despair and fear to what it perceives as the ‘educated middle classes’. For the rest of the rabble, distraction is more the name of the game. The messaging is strikingly different in the tabloids: celebrities, sport, sex and gossip. It does occasionally seek to inflame the xenophobia and belligerence of the white Anglo-Saxon horde with headlines of immigration and paedophilia, but mostly, the front pages are all breasts and footballs.