Now that I have explained briefly our four primary emotional responses, it’s time to understand how they work, whether in the background or the foreground.
The main point here is that we are always feeling something emotionally, even though we don’t notice it most of the time.
It’s just like we are always tasting, touching, and smelling, even though we don’t notice it most of the time.
For instance, it’s only when we have a strong taste response, like to a sour pickle, or a strong smell response, like to a fragrant flower, that we notice our taste response.
The same is true for a strong emotional response — that’s when we notice it. Like the joy of a close relationship, or the sadness of losing it.
Primary emotions and primary tastes are a good comparison. Or, our four primary emotional responses of joy, anger, fear, and sadness are just like our five primary taste responses of sweet, sour, salty, savory, and bitter.
So, we feel joy when something great happens to us, we feel fear when we get in trouble, or anger when somebody offends us. Similarly, we taste the sweetness of a chocolate bar, the saltiness of french fries, or the savoriness of a juicy steak.
But most of the time, we cannot identify what we’re feeling emotionally, or there’s not much there to notice. Again, it’s just like we’re always tasting something, but there’s not much there to notice. All of these experiences are insignificant, or are in the background. Yet it is so important to know always feeling.
This also helps us discover that we are not our emotions — they are something that we have, just like our sensory experiences.
Like I said in the previous episodes, sometimes we need to manage our emotions. Like sometimes managing joy when we’re with someone who feels sadness, like managing fear in the face of adversity, or like managing anger when we need to remain calm. Much more on that later.
But it’s important to know fundamentally that our primary emotional responses are always happening, always there, or that we’re always feeling something, whether in the background or the foreground, whether low or high in their intensity.