We've been talking a lot about fighting negative emotions, but we've not spent time talking about negative emotions themselves. How come they're so important? Let me get a bit metaphysical. I'm taking Metaphysics this semester, and it happens to be my favorite class. So, I think I know a bit of what I'm talking about. You see, there are three grades of reality: physical, mathematical and metaphysical. Now, let's to a little matchup. Do you recall how Plato divided reality? He said there were: appetitive, animated and intellectual realities. He also said there were: ignorance, opinion, and knowledge. And the modern philosophers give us: sensation, imagination and thought; as well as: spirit, soul and body. Okay, let's matchup these five classification models. In the highest category we'll have: metaphysics, with intellect, with knowledge, with thought, with spirit. In the next category, we'll have mathematics, with animation, with opinion, with imagination, with soul. And in the third category, we'll have physics, with appetite, with ignorance, with sensation, with body. Let me add a sixth classification model, a la Samuel (smiles): (evil) spirit, (negative) emotion, and (evil) behavior. This model, I hope, will help us to understand why negative emotions are such an enemy.
Now, evil spirits exist at the highest level of reality. Recall that St Paul has called them principalities in the high places (Eph. 6:12). Their realm is often above our direct grasp. Most humans operate at the level of soul, of animation; of imagination; of opinion, and of mathematics. Recall what we said when we dealt with Rhonda Byrne's The Secret. We said that our thoughts produce our reality, and so we need to watch our thoughts. But we also said that our thoughts are so many, and the frequencies they set in motion are so great, that we cannot keep track of them. We said there was an easier way to keep track of our thoughts, and we said it was through keeping track of our emotions. We said we can know that we are thinking positive thoughts if we genuinely feel good. And we can know that we are thinking negative thoughts if we feel bad. And so, we need not bother keeping extraordinary tab on our thoughts, but we can simply gauge our emotions at each step along the way. Similarly, rather than focus on evil spirits, even though they are the sources of all negative emotions, we can simply guard against the negative emotions we are tempted with feeling. If we can vanquish negative emotions and replace them with positive ones, we will in effect be ridding ourselves of the evil spirits that cause them. The principle is: without any effect, there is no cause.
Now, how do we know that emotions are on the level of math, opinion, soul, animation and imagination? Think for a minute. When you do something bad, don't you sometimes say: "Ah, I did not think that one through." The direct cause of our behavior is emotion, not thought. Even when we think something through, we still need to believe the inference and feel its weight in our emotions, and then we act. And so, there is a middle way, a segue way, between intellection (highest class) and behavior (lowest class). That segue way is emotion. Now, emotions are a step higher than behavior. Animals are at the level of spontaneous action. They don't think or feel - they just act based on instinct. They are at the level of appetite, physics, ignorance, body, sensation and behavior. Even the smartest of animals - when it appears for example that they show love or loyalty to their human companions; dogs for example - they are simply acting out of habit. They are not feeling a sense of duty or charity in the same way that humans do. It's like storing a software program on your computer that makes it do say, XYZ. It will always do XYZ; not because it understands the sentimental value to you of doing XYZ, but because that was what it was programmed to do. In the same way, because of the ontological disposition borne out of the habitual response to affirmative (what Pavlov would called conditioned) behavior, an animal, say a dog, would always wag its tail when its master arrived. Not because it loves its master in the same way that humans show charity, but because it has been conditioned to do so by way of habit built over time through classical conditioning. Realize how analogical the foregoing is to the distinction between syntax and semantics; lexes and logoi, and so forth.
Emotions, which are proper to human beings, are at the level of math, opinion, soul, animation and imagination. And the wiser a human is, the more precise his or her emotions will be. Emotion is what happens when the intellect is impacted by physical reality. Something happens, and we interpret it a certain way, and so feel a certain way. All this is pre-thought. When spirit interacts with body, the product is soul. Let me be more explanatory. Think of math. It is a step higher than the physical sciences (such as physics, chemistry and biology) because it can be transcendent of material reality, and you don't need to rely on the senses to do math. Yet it is not purely intellectual. It can sometimes bear no resemblance to reality, to actuality, but can simply go off on its own. Erratic. It makes me recall a certain joke. A young man was learning theoretical math in class one day, and he said to his professor: "Sir, how on earth are surds ever going to help me to live a happily married life!" Emotions can be like that. Sometimes - indeed, many times - they bear no resemblance to actuality. Rather than help us in our chosen vocations, they can - when they are negative - ruin us. Or take statistics for example (math). If one is not careful to explain statistics, they can end up deceiving rather than clarifying. Statistics can be used to tell harmful, destructive lies, when not used ethically.
It is similar with opinion. Many times, opinions are not truth. Take the classic case of the Moor that thought his wife was cheating on him, and he killed her; only to find out later that she hadn't been cheating on him. Remember as well in the movie, The Pursuit of Happyness (sic), when the young boy had the opinion - before his father disabused him of it - that his mother left because of him. If his father hadn't disabused him of it, he might have allowed himself to get depressed. Think of the many times we have believed something to be true, only for us to realize that it wasn't. That is the nature of opinion. It is also the nature of emotions. They are often not founded in fact, in reality, in actuality. Emotions are often unscientific; unintellectual; inappropriate. Also take imagination. We all know that they are often not real. We can imagine say, a unicorn, when we know it does not exist. We can imagine that we were a rich and powerful superstar, when we knew we weren't. We can imagine that the sun is a small ball in the sky because it looks that way to the naked eyes, when in fact it is many times the size of the earth. We can imagine we see a pond in the street when it is simply a mirage. And soul is like that. Unlike spirit, it is not the perfection or completion of God's act, but is in fact in many cases inchoate. So we see that emotions are on the level of math, of imagination, of opinion, of animation - because they move us to act sometimes without fully thinking things through - and of soul. Emotions are not perfect reality, and acting out of emotions does not guarantee ethical actions. Acting out of emotions does not guarantee perfection.
Imagine if all you ever did was borne out of pure and crystal thought. You would be a saint. Socrates did say that an unreflected life was not worth living. Imagine if all you did was done from the position of thought, of spirit, of intellection, of true knowledge, and of metaphysics (reality). Then, you would be free from each negative emotion. God has no matter. His reality is not a matter-form composite as ours is, and so for him there is no incidence of spirit on matter - and so he has no emotions. All his actions are based in pure thought. All the passages in the bible where he is said to be angry, or showing this or that emotion, refer to anthropomorphic representations of God. God is pure thought. Aristotle sees him as the Thought which is thinking thought. He is the One of Plotinus, and the Intellect of Aquinas, to whom everything is perfectly adequated, and compared to whom all humans are arranged in a hierarchy of increasing adequation, proportional to the increasing acuity of rational faculty. The more thoughtful we are, the better behaved we become.
We must not even contemplate acting on instinct. We must not even become like animals who have no reason, but live at the level of body, appetite, sensation, ignorance and irrational behavior. As humans, we are held to a higher standard than they are. We are supposed to be ethical, to "be perfect as our heavenly father is" (Matt. 5:48). We should also strive to transcend the level of emotion, of soul, of math, of imagination, of animation and of negative emotion. We should ultimately strive for perfection, to be at the level of intellection, spirit, knowledge, and metaphysics. How? We shall talk about this tomorrow. But what have we learned so far today? We have learned that the more direct enemy to our human capacity are negative emotions. Evil spirits are often beyond our capacity. Most of us will do fine if we simply vanquish the effects of evil spirits (negative emotions), and so get rid of the causes thereof, which are the evil spirits themselves. In this way, we understand what the proximate enemy is: negative emotions. If we got rid of them, we would always feel good. We would always have only positive emotions. Because nature abhors a vacuum, getting rid of negative emotions means filling up with positive ones. And always having positive emotions is the meaning of happiness.
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