VLOG | E9 | Emotional Responses are like Sensory Responses

In the last episode, I talked about understanding primary emotions as emotional responses. This week, taking that further, it’s about understanding that emotional responses are just like sensory responses.

Our sensory responses are sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Our sensory systems respond to what’s happening around us. As I said last time, our emotional responses are the same thing, or emotional responses to what’s going on around us and inside us.

Let’s look at one sensory response in particular that helps make the point. That is taste. We are always tasting something, and most of the time do not think about it or realize it. When there’s something that has a strong taste, we notice it. Like a sour pickle. Before we bite into it, we don’t notice that we’re tasting anything, but is soon as we do, wow, that’s sour.

Same is true for primary emotional responses. We’re going along, having feelings, not noticing them. But then we get a phone call from someone we love, we have the joy response, and love them back.

Secondly, like the taste sensory response, we have four primary emotional responses. In other words, there are five primary taste responses, or sweet, sour, salty, savory, and bitter. Similarly, there are four primary emotional responses, or joy, anger, fear, and sadness.

One of the key discoveries here is that we’re always having sensory responses, including emotional responses, but we don’t realize it. We are always tasting, seeing, smelling, and so on. Similarly, we are always having feelings, or emotional responses, and most of the time we do not notice them.

Or, when something happens that causes a noticeable response, like a strong smell or taste, we notice it. Similarly, when something happens that causes a noticeable emotional response, like something that causes great sadness or joy, we notice it.

We are always sensing, we are always feeling, and it’s part of our Caring being, part of Existing. Everything about our living being is Caring, and emotional responses, or all sensory responses, are Caring.