First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany

“The Intelligence of Emotions”

Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore, February 8, 2004

Call to Celebration

You’ve met them.Those bright people skilled at remembering facts and figures, quick to solve a math problem, and always have the right answer for the teacher or the boss who just seem a little, well, out of touch.When it comes to knowing what they are feeling, coping with those feelings, recognizing emotions in others and skillfully handling relationships, they are fairly ignorant.Their prodigious intellectual prowess just doesn’t seem to translate into their emotional life.
That was my story in my early twenties:Intellectually smart, but emotionally dumb. All my energy was focused on developing my problem solving skills so I could be a successful electrical engineer.I didn’t realize my emotional development was stunted until one of my first girlfriends, a woman talented in her range of emotional expression, took it upon herself to educate me.She was pretty persuasive and motivated me to want to raise my emotional IQ.

For over twenty years now, I have concentrated on developing my emotional intelligence, with significant success.I’ll never be an emotive virtuoso, but my capacity for empathy and compassion has grown significantly.My experience is a testimony to the reality that one can increase one’s emotional intelligence and sensitivity.

And if I can do it, so can you.One important school of emotional growth for me was my Unitarian Universalist congregation.This community is a place where that learning can happen for you as well.

Let us point our attention this morning at increasing the intelligence ofour emotions as we join together in the celebration of life.

Spoken Meditation

So … what am I feeling today?


What emotions do I have access to
as I move inward now for this time of meditation?

I always find I have easy access to thankfulness right here in this place.
Thankfulness for the vibrancy of this religious community
And each individual in it that helps create that vitality.
I’m thankful for the opportunities of my birth to wise, and caring parents,
Who continue to watch out for me and wish me well.
I’m thankful for my wife Philomena and my son Andy and
All they bring into my life.
I’m thankful I live in a nation that values justice, equality and freedom
I’m thankful the spirit of the American Dream is found
In the heart and soul of Unitarian Universalism as well.
I feel thankful today.

And I’m joyful today.
The pleasure of ear and eye and nose and mouth and skin and thinking
Lift my spirits as I witness the exuberance of being all around me;
The abundant creative principle
of which the human species is one of its most amazing results;
In a vast galaxy, for all we know, practically devoid of life
we have the opportunity to exist on this blue green orb teeming with life.
I feel joyful today.

Yet for all my joy, I know sadness too.
Not everyone is able to celebrate at the feast around us.
My knowing of those suffering deprivation, addiction, illness,
the insults of aging and death, brings a heaviness to my heart.
The hatred and violence seething around the globe troubles my mind.
There are those who suffer wrongly at another’s hands, children brutalized,
Women abused, men maimed, victims of the will to power and control.
I feel sadness opening myself to their plight.

As I feel that sadness, a sense of anger and disgust wells up within me.
Much of the hunger, homelessness, and suffering could be solved, IF
The collective will could be mobilized to bring it to an end.
Much of the problem is not in the limitations of the world
But rather in the limitations of our collective hearts and minds.
I feel anger today.

That anger is tempered by recognizing those who are responding.
My heart warms as I remember the many people and organizations
Rolling up their sleeves and giving of their assets to help others.
We may not have all the answers but we know the right directions
Toward love and away from hate
Toward generosity and away from greed
Toward wisdom and away from ignorance.
I feel love today, thinking of the great works of generosity being done in the world.

Even though some of these efforts are small, they inspire hope,
a hope grounded in inherent human worth and dignity.
Knowing our worth and dignity can be touched and brought forward,
is the ground of my thankfulness, joy, sadness, anger, love and hope.
Human worth and dignity may wax and wane with the times
but it is never extinguished.
My faith springs from this awareness of the eternal potentiality that
Love can conquer hate;
Generosity can overcome greed;
Wisdom can dissipate ignorance.

I am feeling grateful
This community is committed to activating that potentiality,
Bringing love, generosity and wisdom to life.
I feel hope today and I am thankful to be part of this community.

Reading

From Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
It is almost impossible to understand the extent to which upheaval agitated, and by that very fact had temporarily enriched, the mind of M. de Charlus.Love in this way produces real geological upheavals of thought.In the mind of M. de Charlus, which only several days before resembled a plane so flat that even from a good vantage point one could not have discerned an idea sticking up above the ground, a mountain range had abruptly thrust itself into view, hard as rock--but mountains sculpted as if an artist, instead of taking the marble away, had worked it on the spot, and where there twisted about one another, in giant and swollen groupings, Rage, Jealousy, Curiosity, Envy, Suffering, Pride, Astonishment, and Love.

Sermon

Your emotions are smarter than you might think.
Up until the last fifteen years or so, emotions languished as a subject of research by scientists.The subject was scorned as if emotions were some kind of troublesome prehensile tail destined for the evolutionary trash heap.The emperors of stoicism looked upon a mind influenced by emotion as weak and inferior.Dr. Spock, on the television show Star Trek, modeled the corrective development by conquering his emotions through the development of the power of his intellect.Emotions meddled with the power of reason to see clearly and discern truth the highest value for a scientist.

Not that anyone wanted to abandon feelings, mind you.Scientists still wanted to go to the opera, and exuberantly yell ‘Bravo’ at the end with tears in their eyes.They still wanted to attend agonizing Shakespearean tragedies that explore the human capacity for evil.They still longed to fall hopelessly in love--just not during their work hours.

What particularly disturbed these modern, largely male, divinators of truth was the capacity of emotions to disturb the intellect.I was reminded of this power while watching the romantic comedy, A Family Affair, shown last Sunday night as part of the anti-Super Bowl party.The star, Rachel, has a falling out with her lover Reggie, and moves from New York City to Southern California where her family lives.There, she seeks a new relationship and falls in love with Christine.They decide to marry but Rachel struggles with fully committing herself to the relationship, even though she loves Christine very much.They return home one evening and there is a message from Reggie on the phone for Rachel.Compulsively, Rachel must secretly call her back.Even though every rational bone in her body knows this is foolish, even though Christine is the best friend she has ever had, her longing for the fantasy of what could potentially happen with Reggie returns.I remember wanting to shout at the screen “don’t do it,” while remembering my own misadventures of just this kind when I was young.

Strong emotions can be devastatingly brutal when it comes to grief.An unexpected, violent death of a loved one can literally feel like being disemboweled.The flood of emotion can completely overwhelm one’s capacity to think or function normally--not just for hours, but for days, weeks, even months, sometimes years.Life threatening illness and clinical depression can be triggered by a major loss.No one who has been through such a loss can belittle the power of emotions to make one feel out of control.The power of emotions to overwhelm the mind and drive it to behave irrationally can lead one to believe that emotions are primitive, unrefined expressions of our animal nature, unreliable and unsuitable for serious study.

The newer technologies for peering into the brain have motivated a few scientists to take a second look at the world of emotions.Advances in medical imaging have allowed researchers to examine the biological systems that generate emotions in much greater detail.In the process, they have discovered a deeper logic to the emotions with a foundation in neuroanatomy.This more detailed understanding is revealing what is fixed in our brain function and what is malleable and responsive to conditioning and learning.

The emotional central processing unit seems to be the amygdala, a pair of almond-sized structures that sit on the brain stem.The amygdala generates the signals that initiate chemical messengers in the blood stream and neurological signals to various organs.The amygdala is a little like our body’s panic button.When it is stimulated it rings all the alarm bells in the body and gets us ready to flee, freeze or fight.

The stimulation of the amygdala is done by both lower and higher levels of the brain.The sensation of heat coming from the fingertips doesn’t need much brain processing to send a signal to the amygdala that initiates a reflex to pull the hand away from the source of heat.Now, think about someone pointing a gun at you and cocking the hammer.This is just the kind of thing that would cause my amygdala to go into overdrive.A high degree of brain processing is required to recognize that the object being pointed at me is a gun and to remember that guns are life-threatening. 

Recognizing a gun first requires the thalamus to process data from the optic nerve then send it on to the visual cortex.The hearing of the hammer cocking is not a sound that is inherently threatening such as a very loud sound might be.The integration of sight and sound with an understanding of how guns function creates the danger signal to the amygdala.

Similarly, there is nothing inherently disturbing about getting an email that should cause us to panic.But reading a message that contains a credible threat can elicit an intense reaction just as if someone was standing in front of you with a gun.Many levels of brain function are involved with triggering such an emotional response but the end result is the activation of the amygdala.

Emotional responses created by the amygdala after it is stimulated are biologically based and have a fair amount of similarity around the globe.Their purpose, says neurology professor, Antonio Damasio, is primarily the preservation and maintenance of the organism’s homeostasis.The basic, universal emotions are: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust.Emotions are directly connected with biologically determined processes and can feed back into the brain to reshape the mental and physical landscape inside the body.

Feelings, in Damasio’s typology, are the brain’s cognitive interpretation of emotions.Anger is an emotion; jealousy is a feeling linked to anger.Sadness is an emotion; grief is a feeling linked to sadness, but also fear, anger, surprise and even disgust.

I found an interesting example of how this works.Scientists filled two test tubes with the same substance that created the same smell to test for the emotion of disgust.They told their subjects one contained feces and the other contained an expensive, finely aged cheese.Most people reacted with disgust to the smell of the test tube labeled feces.A significant number of those same people found the one labeled cheese quite appealing.Clearly our perception heavily influences our emotions.

Martha Nussbaum has written a fascinating new book on the intelligence of emotions called Upheavals of Thought.In it, she presents her theory that emotions and feelings are strongly linked to our valuing of the objects of our perception.If we glance through the obituaries, for example, we generally don’t have much of a reaction.People die every day--it is a normal part of life.But if we recognize the name of someone near and dear to us, the emotions of surprise and sadness are likely to follow quickly.Our emotional response will be linked to how much we value that person in our lives.Nussbaum believes values are central to understanding the intelligence of emotions.

In Nussbaum’s analysis, for an emotion to arise, we need an object to appear in our minds, such as the example of the gun or the sensation of hotness.Not only must the object arise but we must have some sense of intention or relationship with that object.Most people are emotionally reactive to chocolate and the smell of decaying flesh, for example, because they have a preexisting desire or aversion in relation to those objects.My emotional response is likely to be in proportion to the involvement I have with that object.

What most strongly affects my emotional response to an object are my beliefs associated with the object.Believing guns are potentially lethal is very important to recognizing them as a threat.After the immediate reflexive response to hotness many emotions and feelings will follow filled with beliefs about what the hotness may have done to my hand.

The final determiner of the emotional response will be the value placed on the intention and the beliefs directed at the object.If I recognize that the gun pointed at me is a prop in a skit and that the person pointing it is my friend and the gun isn’t loaded, I’ll value the situation differently than if I find myself in a dark alley at night, alone, facing a stranger’s gun.

That valuing process can profoundly shape the emotional response to the same type of object or event.A five-year-old Ifaluk boy died of meningitis after a short illness and at the moment of his death, the boy’s biological mother “rose to her knees and began violently pounding her chest. The adoptive mother…began to scream and throw herself about on the ground. The whole house was filled with crying.”The Ifaluk believe that those who do not “cry big” at a death will become sick afterwards.

An anthropologist related the story of a young Balinese housekeeper who cheerfully asks for a week off to attend her fiancé’s funeral, showing no signs of unhappiness.The anthropologist is hard pressed to explain her feelings until he learns of her cultural context.In the Balinese culture, sad feelings are thought to be dangerous to one’s health.If you brood or grieve over a loss, you weaken your life force and become prey to malicious forces.Thus it is culturally appropriate to deal with grief by expressing exaggerated happiness.

These two stories illustrate how beliefs and values shape emotional responses to what we would classify as similar events.I interpret this wide variation as really good news for all of us!It means our emotional responses are not determined but rather are malleable and can respond to conditioning and instruction.We need not be prisoners of our emotional reactivity; we can influence and redirect it in positive, non-harmful ways.

One good example of this redirection is anger management training.Individuals that have problems managing their anger can be greatly helped by directing them to examine carefully the triggers, beliefs and values that support their outbursts.By consciously deciding to change those beliefs and values, their relationship to anger can be transformed and brought under conscious control.

Another wonderful example can be artistic appreciation.By learning about the life circumstances of a composer and the intentions and feelings that motivated the composition, one’s emotional enjoyment of a piece of music can be increased.For example, knowing that Tommy Dorsey was grieving the death of his wife and son when he wrote the hymn, Precious Lord, deeply changed my feeling as I sing it.By studying the style of painting and the challenges an artist overcame to capture the image on canvass, can deepen one’s appreciation of the work.By knowing what economic, material, mechanical and engineering challenges an architect faced, the beauty of the design can be magnified.

The same logic applies to religious feeling.One important dimension of what we do here on Sunday morning is to educate our religious feelings.In every service, I seek to elicit the feelings of joy and hope and connect it with many different aspects of our lives.The feelings of community and transpersonal love, what the Greeks called agape, are important outcomes I strive to stimulate in relation to many different people.Once felt, I seek to extend that sense of community and love beyond the self and our congregation to the world outside our doors.At times that feeling of compassion is uncomfortable and confronts us with our limitations.At other times, it validates the values and beliefs we already hold dear.The education of our religious feeling allows us to extend our love and care into larger and larger circles beyond ourselves.

As I prepared this service this past week, I realized just how integral this emotional education process is to what we do here.The development of religious feeling is the highest level of emotional development.By reshaping our beliefs and values inspired by the lives and teachings of wise women and men, we are learning to love more fully.Through looking at the art in Channing Hall or listening to our choir or singing hymns, we are deepening our appreciation of art and music and infusing our feelings with powerful religious associations.Just the act of sitting in these pews for five, ten, twenty, or more years can shape the emotions.I know of some of our members who have described just sitting in our sanctuary as a holy experience.Just our presence here in this beautiful space can change us and enhance our emotional life-–in a loving way.

Discovering the feelings of love transformed the mental landscape of Proust’s character M. de Charlus.What before was flat is now full of hills and valleys.In the experience of that range of emotion, he feels more intensely alive.Feeling and emotion are key to our sense of well-being.The examination and reflection on our beliefs and values can profoundly affect one’s emotional responses to life.Participation in this religious community is one way to educate those feelings and expand their range.

May we all better understand the beliefs and values that drive our emotions so we may learn how to create more love here and in the wider community.And through that learning, may we develop a richer emotional life that contributes meaning and satisfaction to our lives.

Copyright © 2004 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore.All rights reserved.