Mankind seems to have placed the vastness of their minds into rigid systems that labels their potential as pitiful, undermining and dismissing its capacity completely. This dilemma can be seen within America’s current socially accepted norms.
It seems observable that society has placed its citizens into an environment that doesn’t allow them to thrive. It makes sense, given the fact that people lack any form of self-awareness and, most importantly, their emotions.
Through lack of emotional understanding, people have trouble coping with things that pop up in their daily lives. As a result, society in America is facing a new dilemma that is causing its citizens to go through extreme states of suffering and pain: emotional distress.
There is an emotional dark age going on in America. Human emotions are something that remains untouched by the collective consciousness of our society. Because of this, no one has any form of intimacy, community, self-understanding, compassion, or empathy with each other or themselves.
Then you wonder about things like mass shootings, prisons with maximum capacity, teenage suicides, and emotionally destructive parents.
Greet a stranger walking beside you and they ignore you. Hold the door for someone, and they might find that offensive. Try to make a new friend at school and they feel awkward around you.
Most people are now lost due to the lack of having the ability to feel and guide themselves to wherever they want in life. The social structures that make up America no longer facilitate the sustainability of maintaining healthy spaces for all kinds of people to be.
Our emotions are the most powerful tool one has in their arsenal. It is responsible for the content of your thoughts, your attention, how connected one can be with people, how close you can be with people, how your sense of self manifests, how your body and its functions can occur, and more. Without paying attention to your emotions, it will simply actualize itself into something else that you need to experience later on – cause and effect.
According to Power of Now’s author, Eckhart Tolle, one of the most influential spiritual teachers in the world, says that “A strong unconscious emotional pattern may even manifest as an external event that appears to just happen to you. For example, I have observed that people who carry a lot of anger inside without being aware of it and without expressing it are more likely to be attacked...for no apparent reason.”
Without having a strong awareness towards the emotional play going on within oneself, then eventually, if you desire to change how life unfolds for you, then, like the Ouroboros, one stays stuck with the same emotional turmoil that just comes around and around and around.
One can observe that society is built to the point that most people are caught up in their own minds – too individualistic, too much social solidarity, placing logic over everything else. What might this mean as a community? The Way of the American has its foundation on striving towards a better future while completely denying and disengaging from the life situations that are happening now, living through escapism.
One can also see how that type of behavior is present within an individual’s relationship with themselves – they fail to meet personal circumstances and choose to deny the pain in exchange for addiction, self-abuse, self-rejection, and the need for altered states.
While the pain will have subsided for the time being, as said in Alan Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity, “… the more we are able to feel pleasure, the more we are vulnerable to pain…”
It is therefore crucial to recognize the importance of accepting how we feel and how much energy is wasted just by running away - There’s just nowhere to run.
To show how bad the impairment of self-awareness can be, it can also be seen with the relationships one has. Kurt W. Mortensen, author of Maximum Influence,says that when “...people behave in a manner that is inconsistent with these cognitions, they find themselves in a state of discomfort. In such an uncomfortable state, they will naturally be inclined to adjust their behaviors...to regain...emotional consistency”.
If one lacks emotional awareness, this type of behavior may bleed out into the world around them. As a result, this makes oneself into a vacuum which Nature abhors, a channel for resistance, bad luck, and having to fight your way through life.
The way American society is built has not been beneficial to the development of one’s emotional intelligence and has been treated as a trivial matter.
Luckily, there are ways to counteract with mental illness. Let’s first examine what exactly is an emotion. To describe it differently, an emotion is an overall occurrence in the body that actualizes in alignment with many different aspects of self. These occurrences may occur through the following:
- thoughts that may arise
- the relationship one may have with the external world
- the development of the phenomenal world; the “noise” of it all
- any dormant, subconscious conditioning that has yet been touched by the conscious mind
- One’s perception of an event
All in all, an emotion is a system of neurophysiological upbringings that take place in one’s being and can have an affect at many different areas in one’s life. As the emotions dictate the “I,” one can observe that it may act impulsive, as if it is controlling you. By letting it completely control you, one then unwillingly goes through their lives in this terrible manner.
It is important to implement self-awareness to completely recognize the inner mechanisms of the psyche. In this way, one can start to break the fetters that keep people enclosed by social ideologies that no longer maintains one’s health. It also allows people to recognize the most important questions society needs to think critically about: what do I feel on a daily basis? What do I feel about a particular experience? What is going on inside of me to feel this way? What is happening to my body?
It is time for America to embrace a new ideal culture, one that is medicinal to oneself and every single aspect of one’s life: An emotionally regulated, introspective, self-loving society whose main goal is to soothe the hearts of men, women, and children above everything else.
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