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Article 2 - Meta Feelings
A brief description.
“If you are pained by an external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you-but your judgment about it.” Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome, a.d.121-180
What do you Feel about your feelings?
"Meta" refers to something which is above or about something else. You can usually recognise when someone is has gone “Meta” when they use the words about or bring to bear on.
What this basically means is that to go “Meta” on something you go a level above it where you can talk about it. Metaphilosophy is to philosophise about philosophy. To be involved in an argument and then to talk about it later would be to go “Meta” on the argument. Human beings are the only ones that can engage in self-reflective thought, that is, we think about our thinking, or we go “Meta” to our thoughts. We get angry about being angry (meta-anger), we get curious about our attraction, and we bring a sense of anticipation to bear upon our joy of doing something great.
Metafeeling refers to the way, just as we always have thoughts about our thoughts ( i.e. thinking about whether our decision making was correct), we nearly always have feelings about our feelings, for example we could feel ashamed about our fear, which usually makes it worse, or we could feel curious about our fear which usually lessens it.
There are many, many combinations of emotions and some combinations will not be useful in making you happier, while some combinations will break apart negative emotions and can also increase the positive ones.
Some of our most basic and powerful meta-feelings are those of Denial, Doubt and Acceptance on a very basic level, and above that are Affirmation and Rejection. No matter what it is we are experiencing, we will have one or more of those feelings. We can deny something is happening, but then we never get to decide whether to Affirm it or Reject it in our lives. However once we accept something is happening, we can then deicide to affirm it and make it stronger or we can reject it as part of our lives and weaken it.
A lot of people limit their enjoyment of something by bringing a sense of doubt to bear upon their happiness (i.e. should I really be enjoying this? would others accept me if I expressed my enjoyment? I’m not sure if I should be enjoying this…). And a meta-level of doubt about will dilute the feeling it is about, which can limit our good emotions but at the same time can be useful when applied to negative emotions. For example, doubt can be very useful when applied to a negative emotion such as anger (am I really angry? I’m not so sure if I’m really angry…). Thinking like this tends to pull the carpet out from under the dominant emotion.
There are as many variations to this as there are ways of thinking, and each of us have our own preferences, both useful and hindering. The purpose of the CDs I’m creating is to use the power of these levels of thought and feeling so that people may become familiar with more useful and powerful ways of thinking and feeling.
"Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune."
- William James