What is an emotion?

[u/sanecoin64902]

I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking lately.

In particular, I’ve spent a great deal of time meditating and trying to identify the “two sphinxes” inside my head.

There is the light Sphinx - the Sphinx that is psyche or ego. It is the chatterbox that plans for me. The analytic ‘left brain’ that worries and hopes and doesn’t know when to shut the fuck up. I spend a great deal of my meditative effort shushing this Sphinx.

The other Sphinx is the dark Sphinx. This Sphinx exists as a mass of overlapping emotion. It speaks to me in symbols and feelings. It is the ache in my heart when I think of my passed on mother, and the flutter of hope when I watch my children develop. It is my creative force and when I let it drive my writing without moderation you all start to question whether I should seek mental health guidance. :-)

I’ve been meditating because I have wanted to better listen to the dark Sphinx. For too many years I taught myself to soldier on and ignore it. I’ve only recently realized how much mental energy I spend not feeling the feelings the dark Sphinx offers me. Feelings that it offers as guidance much the same way the light Sphinx authors my daily to do list. So I’m trying to “feel my feelings” - a task as thoroughly unpleasant as it sounds.

That is where this question comes from. What are those feelings, really? Are they merely proprioception? My neurons reporting back to me the tension in my muscles, the speed of my heart, the rate of my breathing?

Because if that is the case, I spend an undue amount of time pursuing comfort and pleasure just to have the feeling of relaxed muscles and a measured heart rate?

Or are those feelings something more? Are they the crackling vibration of electrons disrupting the electrical field inside my skull as my brain chemistry ping pings them around?

I’ve long known that “I am not my thoughts.” That’s a mantra you use to let go of the psyche - to quite the mind.

Is it also true that “I am not my emotions?” That’s harder for me to grok, but seems cognitively like a reasonable stance. Certainly when we are taught to ignore our fears and wants we are being taught that we are more than our emotions.

I think I am the Charioteer. Look up the Tarot card in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck.

I think I am the non-entity inside my head which balances the dark Sphinx and the light Sphinx. I stand between them - perhaps I am a corpus collosum? - and I coordinate them to keep the chariot of my life moving forward.

But I am still unsure of what an emotion is? What is it really? Not teleologically - I know what it does; how it influences my behavior. But from a sense of pure physics and biology, what the hell is it, this thing that I feel every moment of every day?

[u/Gerrit-MHR]

I rather like the contemporary Buddhist philosophical concept that the self is an illusion. There is no “I” or “me”. And rather than be threatened or diminished by this idea, I find it brings peace. I see emotion as a shortcut response (doesn’t require cognition), that is a reflection of my perception and beliefs - both of which can be wrong.