Emotional Reasoning

“It takes will to keep emotion under the control of reason.” - Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman. 

More so in conflict than most other situations one’s emotions run rampant and the key to survival is learning to recognize when emotions are hijacking your human/rational mind and the emotional/monkey mind is controlling actions at the speed of light. This is probably the most complex aspect to acquiring character that comes from emotional intelligence. 

It has been and is currently being bandied about in the world of self-defense, martial arts and combatives that the monkey is the culprit to many of the conflicts we encounter. In a sense that is true but who controls the monkey. We tend to perceive our emotions as some uncontrollable thing that is part of our humanity that is uncontrollable, but it isn’t. 

As a SD person, a martial artist and once who had come to believe that all things are about us, as an individual person, are controlled by us, as an individual person. The moment we refute the idea that our actions are due to something outside of us we begin to control ourselves in a way that promote more control over our monkey brains. Our next step then seems to be learning about our emotional minds, the monkey mind, so that we may begin to understand just how much control we have over it and its affects on us in life and not just SD, etc. 

We have a rapid-fire emotional reaction to things that are of an urgency that is inter-connected with our primal survival instinct. That instinct is still with us regardless of things like the “Industrial Revolution” or the current revolution, i.e. the “Electronic/Technological Revolution.” Humans are still subject to evolution even when our influences cause change because natural evolution still takes millions of years provided we survive any cataclysmic change to our Universe. 

The slower emotional reaction is also there to plague us depending on such things as our culture, our beliefs and our knowledge. If you don’t know about something you cannot control that something when it hits you between the eyes, ergo why knowledge from academia, society, our perceptions in our environment, etc. along with the beliefs we build through daily life events. The slower emotional reactions are those that come from our attitudes, our beliefs, and our internal discussions. 

We can be either pessimistic in our thoughts and words and deeds or we can be optimistic. This slow thought process tends to be recurring in our active mind chatter of daily life so it can simmer and brew first in our minds as our thoughts and then as circumstances dictate they lead to feelings, feelings of joy or feelings of anger, etc. Get where I am going here, our thoughts lead to how our emotions work, dominate or balance out depending on various controlled factors that are ours to control and use while being independent to what others think, say or do. This will influence our more rapid-fire emotional actions and reactions. 

Our rapid-fire emotions are such that to gain control over them we have to develop a mind that is knowledgable of those instincts that cause such emotions to rise up and take control. It is about taking the monkey out of the equation and allowing the emotional mind to say what triggers and how. This cannot be done through ignorance so knowledge of this process is important and the only way to change that is through appropriate ongoing, continuous, diligent and “reality-based” methods so the lizard, the brain that is instinctive in nature, can use that training in lieu of other more naturally driven instinctual methods and models. 

So, how do we gain that kind of knowledge that will allow us to recognize what emotional reactions we are having and to apply the right kind of training to achieve a more emotional intelligent reaction and action based from those emotions? See the bibliography for that answer:

Bibliography:

Goleman, Daniel. “Emotional Intelligence: 10th Anniversary Edition [Kindle Edition].” Bantam. January 11, 2012.