Emotions Are Fiat Currency and You Are Your Own Central Bank

Emotions are nothing more than memories. In a pure physiological sense our emotions are memories stored in our synapses that instruct us to move. They are charged with neurotransmitters and hormones that are fuel for the movement. Emotions motivate us to move. We can move physically, or we can move our thoughts. The Latin root Mot means to move. In the psychological sense emotions are perceptions we create, unbalanced perceptions to be precise. Our emotional concepts are important, they are necessary for our survival. They would not have survived natural selection if they did not serve an important function. But they are empirically subjective, they hold no real intrinsic value. This is a difficult concept for most minds to grasp because few things feel as real and powerful as our emotions when triggered. Jet fighter pilots and race car drivers have a few things in common. They operate some of the most sophisticated machinery on Earth and they do so in a manner that challenges the laws of physics regularly. This is a dangerous place to operate. The few immutable laws that govern each and every one of us come from physics. Mostly everything else about our existence, our realities, are subjective and this includes our emotions. Pilots and race car drivers don't have the luxury of utilizing their instincts or senses, they religiously rely on their gauges. Why is this? Because our feelings and senses are subjective. They are applicable only to certain environments, those which we are wired to. Humans are not wired to operate a Formula 1 car at 240 miles per hour pulling 6 G's on a track or traveling at Mach 3 40,000 feet over the Pacific. The gauges inform the pilots and drivers of what is reality, their senses and feelings do their best to guess but with so much at stake, guessing is not acceptable. Our emotions operate in the same manner. Every situation has more than one way of perceiving it. We perceive in a way that is congruent to our individual experiences, beliefs and expectations. This forms our perception and our emotions follow suit lock and step with this. How many times have you reacted to something with a response you later regretted? How did this happen? You did not have a balanced perspective of what was possible in that space and time. You jumped to some sort of conclusion and created a response, from memory, and applied it to the situation but it was the wrong application. Emotions facilitate this type of behavior. Our emotions evolved for one purpose, to move us away from danger or to move us towards pleasure. Over time we have coopted this function to have so many applications we get our wires crossed frequently. We can get comfortable moving towards something we are better served moving away from and we move away from something we are better served moving towards. All cultures have and experience emotions but have different applications of receiving and expressing the same things. The people around you, the culture you are wired to determine the meaning and value of the emotions we have and how we experience them. Money operates the same way, it only has value if enough people buy into its use. If you are crossing the street and the person driving a car approaching the intersection runs the red light because they are texting, you need to be able to move out of the way, with force, without having to consciously think about it. This is where our emotions serve us. If the pit bull someone is walking in the park gets loose from its leash and starts to barrel towards you, your emotions need to charge your system with all the adrenaline available and power you to haul ass. These are where our emotions are serving us. But when you come home from a stressful day at the office and yell at the spouse and kids who are doing nothing other than being themselves but you are ego depleted so you go off on a rage, this is not serving you well. If you have an irrational fear of something that obviously is not an imminent threat to your well being, this is not serving your best interests. If you can grasp the concept that emotions are subjective things we create, you can work to construct them more specifically to meet your needs and serve you best. We learned our emotional concepts so long ago we can't recall learning them thus they feel innate, they aren't. They are innate in that we are prewired for them but their application is wholly learned. They are wired into our neural architecture because we learned them, we're conditioned to them, and have perpetuated them for so long but make no mistake about it, we create them. We don't have to change them so much as we have to be more mindful of how and when we apply them. We can also work to modualte them if needed. This rewiring process starts with accepting that you are more of a creator than you may realize. At our highest level of performance we can transcend emotions. We can experience feelings in the absence of emotions. This is transcendence. This is where gratitude, unconditional love, enthusiasm and peace reside. These feelings operate independent of impulse (approach) or instinct (avoid) and empower us to move objectively in accordance with what we truly value.