In the last video, I talked about being stuck within a certain role or with a certain label, the idea of being a certain “type” of person.
And we can sort of automatically become stuck into treating ourselves as if we are a certain type of person, whether it might be a good label or a bad label, but we sort of assume that that’s what we are.
And one of the things that is so limiting about this is that when we have an idea like that, this label that we apply to ourselves, being a certain type or role, it’s a mental construct.
It’s an abstract idea of what is this type of person.
What does it mean to be a good person, or a loser, or a leader, or whatever type we apply? These are ideas in our mind, that we can pick up, and we can apply them, and we can fit ourselves into them, but there’s something dry about it.
There’s something empty, something devoid of life.
It’s like a skeleton.
It’s an idea that is simply there, just bones.
And even bones is not quite the right analogy, because bones are not completely dry, and bones are living.
But this is more like, you know, some kind of dry frame.
It’s a shell, that we then can use.
We use these abstract ideas as tools, and we can refer to them, and we can compare what’s happening to them.
Like oh, you know, my life appears- look, I’m clearly a strong person.
Look at how my life matches that image of a strong person.
Or look at how my life matches that image of what a loser is.
And oh, OK, so I’m fitting into this particular role, whenever it is.
But there’s something empty about it because it doesn’t have any emotional fuel.
It doesn’t have life to it.
It’s not connected to real feelings and real experiences.
When we have a mental construct, it’s so abstract and ethereal.
It’s there in some kind of imagined form, but it can be seen as something dry, because it doesn’t- it’s not filled with any blood.
It’s not filled with the blood of real feelings, real experiences.
When we have real experiences that really affect us and really give us feelings, that is like something that is wet.
That is like flowing blood.
It’s emotional fuel.
This is like something we can feel as this is real, when we have a real event that happens.
Real things.
But when we look into the world of abstract ideas, when we apply those, they don’t have that fuel, necessarily.
Now, we can pour fuel into them.
We can say, like, you know, what does it mean? We can take these kind of mental constructs and sort of apply them to ourselves, and then we can feel good or feel bad, depending on what they are.
But that’s fuel we’re putting in.
Like we have experiences that make us feel very strong, and then OK, well, we put that into the construct of being a strong person.
But that’s like a dry shell that we’re putting the idea into.
Or the idea of we have experiences that make us feel bad, and now we say oh, I’m a bad person.
Maybe we do things that we’re guilty about, so now it fits the role of this bad person.
So this construct of bad person: now when we think of that, it’s filled with a lot of emotional fuel.
But that fuel comes from the real experiences that go into it.
The label itself is dry and empty.
So I like to look at this contrast between things that fill us with real feeling, real experiences that affect us, and then we have these kind of shells of ideas that we can put them into.
But it can be useful to remember that those shells themselves, they don’t have any of that fuel to them.
When we don’t need to use them- and you know, if we do use them, we’re not getting the fuel from those ideas directly.
Just, you know, having a label of yourself of being a certain type of person is not in itself full of feeling and experience in life.
It’s simply a label that we put on top of it.
Now, I love working with abstract ideas and I love using them.
They’re very powerful tools.
But I also find it’s useful to keep them separate and remember that, you know, if we’re looking for real feeling and experience and really being alive, as much as we can work with abstract ideas, they don’t themselves carry this emotional fuel.
They are more like shells and skeletons, and they themselves cannot be a source of life and emotion and feeling.
So I’d be curious to hear what you think about this idea.
Can abstract ideas be full of emotion? Or are they necessarily something dry that needs the emotion to come from somewhere else?
#emotionalfuel #mentalconstruct #abstract