If the Enlightenment was called The Age of Reason, perhaps, our own should be called the Age of Emotion or better yet, maybe, we should bring back that old word neurosis and call our Age the Age of Neurosis. Here are some thoughts about Our Age of Emotion/Neurosis and how to live in it.
It was Karen Horney who stipulated it was anxiety that underlay – neurosis. The neurotic’s behavior can be explained as ways of allaying anxiety. When a sizable part of the American population do this, we have a Social Neurosis – such as we are seeing today.
Regarding the method of Social Self-Inquiry that is needed in times of such Social Neurosis, it has been said:
“it is the responsibility of participants to be aware of their biases and assumptions; to sense them as largely generated socially; to share them verbally when that seems likely to enhance communication; and especially to experience the sensations that signal and accompany them.”
http://www.lifwynnfoundation.org/trigant.htm
You see consciousness/awareness is always key in Times of Social Neurosis.
“The purpose is to find out, as a group, how the sensations associated with bias and affect-projection feel. That is, what are the sensations associated with making other people and outside events responsible for our feelings (i.e., "she makes me mad, " "I'm upset because my train was late." etc.)? Through such proprioception, we are learning to become more aware of our own projections and of their power as a motivating factor in human interaction. Our concern is with the development of a fresh approach to social transformation and healing that can be realized on a broad scale. (Throughout this article the word affect is used to denote feeling that has become attached to symbols and ideas.)”
Now of course the bulk of the population in a Neurotic Age such as our own will never have the self-consciousness, become the awaring necessary to do this. The bulk of the American Population in the Age of Neurosis live in a state of emotional fusion. Their behavior is largely determined by the functioning of others in our Neurotic Society.
They rarely exhibit individuality. It is the intensity of their emotions that drive their behavior. They function as part of the groups they are affiliated with. Their thinking is emotional thinking – they feel it so it is so. No introspection here. No self-awareness. No solid sense of self built up through thinking. They are unconsciously dominated by anxiety and their actions largely serve the purpose to relieve this unconscious anxiety. The more anxiety – the more togetherness fusion – relying on the groups they associate with to give them direction. People functioning at the same level of emotional reactivity are attracted to each other – so you see these emotionally-driven groups making up Socially Neurotic America.
How Do We Extricate Ourselves from The Age of Neurosis, our age of anxiety-driven emotional behavior? We become awaring. We detach ourselves from the crazy whole we are immersed in – and become watchers.
We watch how our feelings, actions, and urges arise from our thoughts. We learn how to watch our thoughts.
We watch how our thoughts, actions, and urges can arise from feelings. We learn to watch our feelings.
We watch how our thoughts, feelings, and urges can arise from actions. We learn to look at our actions.
We watch how our thoughts, feelings, and actions can arise from urges. We learn to look at our urges.
In this way we detach ourselves from the crazy media, the crazy government, the crazy part of our population with its crazy thoughts and feelings and actions and urges that make up the Social Neurosis. And we become awaring, the watcher.
Then from our detached stance, we can ask ourselves what we want amidst this rampant social disorder, what we want for our own life. And as far as is possible in every single situation we can decide what to do to get what we want, what is consistent with our own personally thought-out values.
When the bulk of the population learn to do this, the Age of Emotion/Neurosis may become a New Age of Awaring.