How do you know when your emotions work in harmony with your rationality? We always think we’re being rational, so even if our emotions conflicted with rationality, it wouldn’t be immediately obvious.
You consult your inner self.
Your inner self will tell you “yes” or “no”.
How does an artist make his choices?
He consults his inner self.
He asks “is this more beautiful than this?”
The inner voice responds “yes” or “no”.
Consonant or dissonant.
He can’t explain to you the logic of his inner self.
He can’t explain to you the exact mechanism that determines what is more and what is less beautiful.
But he does finish his job – he does make a fine piece of art.
Without knowing “how”.
If you bypass your inner self, you bypass the filtering mechanism.
You become whimsical . . . you start doing whatever comes to your mind.
No processing whatsoever.
The deeper you process your choices, the more rational they become.
That’s the formula.
And this processing isn’t purely left-brained.
Merely engaging your left-brain is shallow.
You want to engage your entire body.
Pull strength from all directions.
Not only one direction.
Rationality = long-term thinking based on perception of objective causality
Emotionality = short-term thinking based on instinctive drives and urges
Emotionality is in conflict with it itself because it doesn’t account for the long-term.
Emotionality thus has to be dominated and guided by rationality.
Magnus, your type of rationalization is quite strange, if I understand it right. You talk about imbalance and rationality restoring that balance but the way you go about does not sound natural. Your loved one is dying. You’re trying to stay strong (rational) and hold back your tears. Because your emotions are unbalanced (you’re sad), you should think happy thoughts in order to restore emotional balance. This is what to me you’re basically saying and to you, this appears like a logical thing to do in order to restore this balance of. Balance of feelings, or feeling vs feeling.
Is that right?
And to me, thissounds more like a denial because instead of acknowledging you’re just applying the opposite, or seesawing. It sounds like the happy/sad clown routine, which I don’t think really works.
No, that’s not what I am doing. It’s just that when a loved one is dying I am not merely sad but also many other things which makes it impossible for me to revel in sadness without repressing other parts of myself.
?
If you are bedside for this impending death, what other emotions would be present that you are repressing? Why would you be reveling in sadness? Reveling…really?
What you are doing is gearing up for the loss of their presence in your life, working through your helplessness, your inability to save them, protect them, and keep them with you. You may also be forgiving yourself for continuing on and forgetting their impact on your life so viscerally after they go. Sadness is mourning on many levels for the past, the present, and the future.
Pride/Shame? I think Magnus is kind of guy who just holds himself to high standards. (That would sound like Magnus, too, a little on the uptight-side; but I guess to each his own)
High standards are code words for unresolved, control issues. Perfectionism is damning and short-sighted, too many people with potential are written off too soon.
I don’t know.
Perhaps paying close attention to the person dying?
To what you can do to make it easy for them?
To what’s going on around you?
To the consequences that will follow?
These are actions…not the emotions that are being repressed which was what I was asking for. I don’t disagree with your list, but that’s not what we were discussing…reveling is what we were discussing.
That’s the problem, there is no making the unknown, death, easier or less scary for the person passing.
Emotions are actions.
Or re-actions if you will.
Emotions are not actions or re-actions. Emotions inspire the will towards actions or re-actions. Emotions are the impetus for human existence upon which all else is built or created. Now back to your other repressed emotions?
When actions are not fully expressed they are experienced as feelings.
When a woman is sexually aroused by a man but she represses it, she experiences it as some kind of tension within the body.
When a man limits the expression of his sexual desire out of respect for some other more important inclination, he experiences it is a deep and pleasant feeling inside his body.
The former is repression, the latter is sublimation.
Everything is based on a feeling, every experience is underlined by an emotion, some are noticeably more powerful than others so as to seem to distract from thoughts/rationality, but they were there all along as a baseline of the operation to live.
We’re eating a taco dinner…laterz.
An emotion leads to an action, a release of sorts, I agree. Wouldn’t that be another form of expression, just not seen as a normal type of communication such as speaking our thoughts? Doesn’t what inspires us to move, to be, need the totality of our body, our being to respond? Emotions are that inspiration. Once a person can pinpoint their emotion, it is already too strong to be contained, so yes, it needs to be expressed through an action of release.
Binary mindsets are frustrating. 
If I get a job I will barely have 5 hours per day that aren’t job-related.
9 hours of sleep.
8 hours of work.
3-4 hours of commute.
Unless I don’t sleep.
How can anyone sleep less than 9 hours?