On emotions and spiritual awakening for skeptics
Emotions follow a different logic than thoughts and are usually underdeveloped abilities. In the West, the majority of the difficult work of an awakening is related to emotions and trauma.
My advanced articles on emotions deal with empath coping skills such as changing emotional tones, dealing with others emotions, and encoding emotion in works of art or literature. This is a basic article to contextualize emotional work, and with additional basic articles on emotional healing (trauma), and relationships.
Photo by Landon Arnold on Unsplash
“Our emotions are intended to have to have flow, to be e-motions. In a healthy system, we experience the whole spectrum of emotions, but they pass through sort of like weather systems. We may experience a burst of sunshine, or a few days of rain. The emotions we do not allow ourselves to experience, that we have been taught are wrong or bad, live within us, gathering energy and denseness.”
— Mary Shutan, What is Spiritual Healing
I want to be really clear off the get-go that I consider the entire spectrum of emotion as equal and valid. I am not someone who thinks all anger needs to be transmuted. I do think all anger is an emotional reaction to misunderstanding other people — but the signal is not the problem. The sense of anger is as useful to us as the photoreceptors in our eyes that differentiate light from dark. The spiritual mistakes that lead to anger needs course-correction but this can’t happen unless the signal is interpreted correctly. When we deny emotions, we lose their navigational value.
Like colors, emotions have intensity, a spectrum, and base primary hues, e.g., anger, fear, happiness — with infinite combinations. Most people who are asleep are stuck in the negative end of the spectrum with fear, despair, and loneliness because they have failed to process those emotions which inhibits them from reacting emotionally to positive stimuli.
Numbness is not emotion, numbness is the result of failing to process emotions to the point that you have clogged your sensors and can no longer navigate with them. At the point of numbness, they just accumulate and weigh down the body which starts to feel heavy. This will sound very familiar to anyone who has suffered from depression.
The way to process emotions is simply to feel them. People who are adept at feeling their emotions experience a greater spectrum of emotions which gives their lives a richer sense of depth. Empaths have the psychic ability to feel other beings emotions, and artists can encode emotions in their work to give it greater power and nuance.
There is a lot to be said for mastering this spectrum of human ability. And it needs to be said that emotions are not thought. You can’t think or logic your way through this skill. It’s a completely different and overlapping layer of reality. It’s a feeling, you have to feel it.
If you don’t understand emotions, or think you might have them, you might need to be taught. Its very common for people in the West to have piss-poor emotional intelligence (shout out to my Latin American, Indigenous, and African friends who are much more adept in the emotional plane).
The best way to start learning about emotions is listening to music or looking at works of art, most of these have emotions encoded in them and you can find out what emotions you are feeling by finding what pieces you resonate with and correlating that with the intellectual content of the piece.
As an exercise:
Try U2 and Mary J. Blige singing One to see if it brings up feelings of grief or anger at old relationships, it’s a great song for emotional release in that context.
If you want to try a higher order emotion for the same thing try Mr. Brightside (Jaques Lu Cont's Thin White Duke Mix) by the Killers and see if the same emotion is a bit… sparklier and lighter.
Okay now that we’ve got some of the basic stuff out of the way…
Emotions and skeptics
For the longest time people have regarded science and humanities as being distinct. C.P. Snow spoke of the two cultures: science on the one hand, humanities on the other; never the twain shall meet. So, I'm saying the mirror neuron system underlies the interface allowing you to rethink about issues like consciousness, representation of self, what separates you from other human beings, what allows you to empathize with other human beings, and also even things like the emergence of culture and civilization, which is unique to human beings.
— Vilayanur Ramachandran, The neurons that shaped civilization
Luckily for me there has been a veritable explosion of research on emotions, emotional processing and emotional intelligence from psychology recently — accompanied by fMRI evidence for higher order emotions like gratitude, long-term romantic love, and empathy.
Most skeptics would at least intellectually agree with me that dealing with emotions properly has long-term psychological benefits. Additionally, historians argue that the words we use to describe emotions interact with our capacity to feel and extract information from them. Higher order emotions might be possible for humanity more frequently, if we learn to discuss them more eloquently.
There is a ton of scientific evidence showing the benefit in not only understanding emotions, but using them to cut through our cognitive fog to determine how we really feel about the situations and people we encounter. Emotion research would suggest that emotions convey true information about our subconscious cognitive processes and for this reason alone hold tremendous value we can learn to harness.
Now with fMRI, emotional intelligence is aligned with empiricism. And its legitimate to point out that the changes in our science with the enhanced ability to measure emotions, might presage changes in our science if we develop the ability to measure consciousness.
Emotions and spiritual awakening
The useful emotions in this process are the fiery one’s we’re taught to shun and avoid; anger, hatred, contempt, scorn. These are the propellants of progress. When it’s over they will be fully expended and you’ll have no more use for them, but for now you need them to fuel your journey. Did your spiritual teachers not mention this?
— Jedvaita: The Way the World Unfolds (2025)
Emotions are a massive part of a spiritual awakening. The big issue for most people, especially Westerners is that as consciousness expands, previously subconscious emotions come to awareness and must be felt, in order to release.
This is one sentence to describe what is often a ten-year agonizing process that differentiates a successful awakening from an unsuccessful one.
In the normal, asleep, egoic mind trauma and negative emotions are simply stored. Stacked up in a closet and left to influence behavior unconsciously. Over time the person becomes more rigid in their thinking, and begins to navigate the world in smaller and smaller circuits with more and more diminished reflexes. They age, and their thinking solidifies and then degrades.
In a spiritual awakening, the traumas that conscribe emotional reactivity come up to clear. They are physically, cleared out of the subconscious closet and the person has no choice but to face them and process them. I have an advanced article on the existential depression that commonly results during this experience, and one about difficulties with kundalini.
Over time this process confers emotional aptitude, and restores the full range of emotional expression leading to emotional behavior that is reminiscent of children. Near-immediate and authentic emotional processing, greater happiness and delight, and a wider and more nuanced emotional spectrum. This is one reason awakened people are often described as childlike.
Aside from subconscious emotions, and stored traumas, an awakened person often develops the psychic ability of an empath. Empaths feel other people’s emotions, as if they are their own. It’s not like listening to music, its like vibrating like a bell when you hear other bells ringing. Given that most people in the West feel conscious and subconscious negative emotion, this can be a painful ability. (I have a lot of resources on this one in particular).
A full awakening leads to conscious experience of some very esoteric, and nuanced emotions. Notably agape (a higher form of gratitude), divine love (a higher form of love), and awe (an emotion that enables you to comprehend something greater than yourself).
It’s worth putting in the hard effort in an awakening to free up your consciousness for these emotions.
Emotions and spiritual awakening for skeptics conclusion
This is a fairly long article to give an overview on emotions, their place in a spiritual awakening, and how one can access the science on emotions for tools, context, and as a meeting ground between science and psi. As above, I have a number of articles on emotions and I highly encourage further investigation on the topic for anyone, scientist or psychic or both.
