I've come across an interesting theory of emotions that I've been experimenting with all week.
The psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett believes that emotions are conceptions we form during our life that work to explain four base sensations: pain, pleasure, calm, arousal. Our brain only registers these four states, but it comes up with theories for why we are in whatever state we're in.
For instance we don't feel hatred. We feel pain and high arousal. Hatred is the theory we have for why we feel what we do. If I felt most of my early life in pain, and I was surrounded by hostility and hatred, then hatred becomes the default explanation for every bad feeling I have. Not only this, but hatred then becomes its own driving force, and then indeed it is the explanation.
I spent the week trying out several paths to deconstructing this hatred. One is to just be with the sensations and deconstruct the feelings. I've had a fair amount of opportunity this week because I have a work colleague who sees me as an adversary, and things have come to a head.
She said something to me that has crawled under my skin and doesn't seem to want to budge. She says people are turned off by my dominating tone. It's true, probably, that I enjoy criticizing people. Hatred is always included a component of pleasure. That's why we stay in the loop. There are all kinds of pleasure in hatred that I'm not acknowledging and if I don't, I will probably stay in that loop forever. There is pleasure in contempt towards others, or we wouldn't be so addicted to television. There is pleasure in hatred of self. Being with that pleasure is one of the most difficult challenges I can imagine feeling because it forces me to confront a self-image that I don't want to have.
It could mean that I take pleasure in causing other people pain.
Not a recipe for a good life.
But it comes down to the realization that we all want to be happy, and that hatred can become the default loop that brings us "happiness" in the form of pleasure, even a cold calm. Ignorance is the defilement that keeps it in place. The challenge is to become aware of this pleasure, and re-route it to lovingkindness and nurturing.
