Well, if you have never felt hate than how could you have felt hate and forgiving at the same time. The question has no relevance to your experiences.
I would like to know more about the experience of love and apathy at the same time. I tend to think of love as the most intense form of caring. Caring for the other more than caring for the self. Apathy is at the opposite side of the scale, an absolute lack of caring for the other. So love vs apathy is caring or not caring. How can you care and not care in the same moment. I can see love fading away into apathy but that is transformation not unison.
I liked your anger-amusement example for a few reasons. You use the terminology of ‘laughing inside.’ An everyday term that points to an interesting phenomenon. From your description, in that moment, you split your identity into two distinct spaces. The two spaces were the public space, where you displayed anger and the private space where you felt amusement.
Now both of the different spaces were you. Your sense of identity encompassed both of them. There was no sense of losing identity or madness. Yet it was as if you became two people who were simultaneously one person. There was a splitting of attention so that one felt anger and one felt amusement.
I would suggest that your identity mapping had to create two temporary spaces for both emotions to exist at the same time.
I would agree with the model that emotions re usually like a soup. I am also interested in the bowl, as it were. How does the mind contain the emotions? What happens when they spill outside of their bowl? Is that the source of panic attacks and berserker rages when our emotions spill out of their bowl. Admittedly there are just metaphors, neurological evidence points to the amygdale as the culprit for these experiences. But we don’t usually live with neuro-anatomy as the metaphor for how the mind works. We usually tell ourselves simpler stories.
Intensity may be the key to unlocking to experience of this exclusionary pairs. Perhaps only high levels of these emotions tend to exclude each other. Then again any intense emotion tends to take center stage and push all others into the wings.
The very act of naming the emotion may influence it. Once we say, “I am angry,†our emotional state might change a bit. Yet the ability to name our emotions is part of maturity. It is one of the skills that we teach to children.
Emotions, being irrational resist any effort to organize them too much. As Jung pointed out, complete subjugation of the unconscious mind by the conscious mind is undesirable.
Forgive me my rambling.
