“We can’t live in our mind. There’s no food here.” - A man who is slightly sane

When the world outside becomes too much to bear, we flee to our minds and find safety in our private world where we can reign as the king with no objections from reality. Initially, we feel all powerful lording over our mental palaces. Yet, as time passes we find that our sanctuary becomes a prison, our trappings of majesty are chains, and the walls around are wrought from the same pain and shame we so desired to escape.

Our attempts to deny our experiences lead to us becoming enslaved by them. Existence remains existent outside our minds. What has been actualized, is. There’s no escaping the truth of our lives.

Vital to wholeness is understanding these fundamental truths: There are no feelings that are unreal. There are no emotions that do not create ripples, no matter how imperceptible. There are no neutral thoughts devoid of emotional charge. There is no path to negating aspects of the self into non-existence.

There are circumstances where impulsive expression of a feeling or desire will lead to outcomes more painful than what would result from temporarily inhibiting that desire. It is not a wise course of action to explode into rage in the middle of meeting at work, or to pant like a dog in public when you gaze upon an attractive member of the opposite sex. However, these inhibitory faculties can be misused to extend suppression of feelings and desires far beyond what is healthy or wise.

With continued inhibition, the emotional energy is channeled through the mind to create structures in one’s thoughtscape. These manifest as varying forms of fantasy and delusion, the shape of which is dependent on the emotions and experiences being suppressed. Shame for instance, oscillates between fantasies of extreme mastery and self-negating worthlessness. Anger causes the mind to write scripts justifying a world where the anger could be expressed in an uninhibited manner. Loneliness and longing will be channeled into visions of a idealized other to provide infinite warmth, nurturing, and companionship.

These mental fantasies are crafted from are the desires, feelings, and pains that are being denied expression.

Should this process continue long enough, the emotional charge will build beyond the mind’s capacity to hold and the current will spill out into impulsive behaviors. Paradoxically, the same mechanisms used to hide a feeling end up creating compulsions based on that feeling. However, these behaviors are clumsy and twisted tries at expression undertaken from the basis of denial and fantasy and can only end in frustration and further pain.

We can see how damaging and destructive many of the 20th century psychological theories are to actual healing. By segregating the mind from body and spirit and elevating it to a point outside of creation, we besiege our minds and bombard them with intellectual ideas, failing to understand that these are anti-fragile organic manifestations of emotion that cannot be destroyed and will reform as soon as the shelling abates.

The only way to stop this self-suppression is to acknowledge the affective substance of these fantasies and master the skills to discharge the suppressed feelings in a healthy and harmonious manner. Acknowledgement of the objective emotional reality followed by expression of the emotional state is the only way to reach escape velocity from the cycle of self-denial and suffering.

So we arrive at the question: what is healthy emotional expression? Denying reality is untenable, but impulsively expressing whatever we feel leaves us in an incoherent state full of conflict.

There must be an external standard the individual exists in relation to in order to judge healthy behavior. The substance of these external ideals is beyond the scope of this writing. But through this concept we can see our mind’s true place. Thought is not meant to govern or suppress emotions, instead we think to discern the truth, reconcile the individual’s subjective emotional state with their current understanding of the external truth, and channel emotions into expression in accordance with those truths. The mind is the mediator between earthly reality and heavenly ideals with the goal of compassionately guiding one’s emotional body closer and closer towards the ideal of the good.

Perhaps what I have written here is wrong, and I as I grow my understanding will shift. I make no claims of certitude. Yet as I wrap up this essay, I feel comfort wash through my body upon seeing my mind as a purposeful piece of a greater being -a complete being. Intellect and reason are faculties for discovering reality -not creating it- and certainly not a place we should dwell.