Thinking self and Emotion

I have had a crush for a long time for a year in my school. She is shy, but she has a long hair, pretty face and beautiful voice. She is liked or loved maybe by many men in class I think. I had constantly thought of her and make her my own. In other words, she had seduced me somehow and I fell in love with her. I read books or articles about loves or how to make others like me like “ Art of Seduction” by Robert Greene and “How to win friends and influence people”. I also started exercise more and train muscles to be more attractive, a topical behavior for men who fall in love. It seems good to be in love, but the negative point is the emotional drama that love brings into my life and how it affect my life. It makes me difficult to concentrate on tasks or works which is important to do in order to improve myself as she shows up to my mind. Her image and memory with her makes me so excited but also distracted. When she talks with other men, it makes me so jealous and sad that it makes me think, guess or make a assumption about their relationships. I sometimes think that another man love her, and she is also influenced by his love and love him back. They meet together, talk together, laugh together and go on a date and so on and on. It also makes me unusual around her. I feel very nervous around her, and difficult to talk to her even though what I really want to do is talk with her, have a good time with her and love her. This makes me sad, jealous and I don’t like it.

Shakespeare once said.

love is blind

 and lovers cannot see
 the pretty follies
 that themselves commit

William Shakespeare

I love her, but I started to hate the emotional drama  because it seems something is controlling my life. Why do we act foolishly like this when we are in love?I always want to calm and be in control in my life. I like the feeling of falling love and thinking about my crush, but is this healthy to think about her all the time, and be distracted to do things that is important in my life and live my life fully?  I don’t think so. The name of this blog is “start living my life” and there is a big obstacle to live my life, the feeling of love for my crush. Is there a way to cleverly in love with someone and also being calm, love her fully, and detached from these emotional drama. Even if I am disliked by her or she dates with another man, can I remain calm?

Therefore, I started to find a way somehow to get out of this emotional drama, and start living my life, and I may find an way to do so. I think this problem is deeply connected with Thinking self and Emotion. The key word to get out of them is “awareness”.



Certain emotion like emotion of happiness, lust, nervousness, attraction, hatred is reaction of the body or the brain to certain triggers, causes or stimulation.

I need more studies and experiences on this subject.

For example, when I see a beautiful woman, a trigger point, the information from my sight first come to spinal cord, then to limbic system, where we feel emotion, attraction toward opposite sex.

This is how emotion works!

And we are surrounded by so many triggers for thousands of kinds of emotions we feel such as irritation, fear, comfort, dislike, and we will feel these emotions constantly through out our life. So, can we stop feeling emotion? It is also most impossible because it is deeply inherited into the human nature our DNA. Emotion is actually essential to live.

We use emotion to decide people to be with. Do you want to be with a person who stare up the feeling of discomfort and anxiety or you want  be with people you are comfortable.

When a man with a knife approaches you, the feeling of fear or danger makes you realize you are in danger.

When you need to do bold action, the feeling of nervousness tells you that you need to be careful about the action you take.

Emotion can be useful, but not perfect.

Emotion cannot distinguish emotion coming from reality and our thought. In my case, as I think about my crush, I feel the emotion of attraction again and think about her again and again and again.

Imagine someone sexy or attracted to. If you like her legs or hips or breast. Think about it and I am sure that it will push your emotional button for lust. I have no idea how women feel lust, but maybe very different from men, but similar process.

This is also a characteristic of emotion of human beings, which can be a huge problem. Animals have emotions, but not be able to think. Therefore, their emotion only occurs when a certain stimulation pushed their emotional button. However, in the case of human beings, they develop a strong power to detach from the present moment and learn from the information they gathered and think and imagine about past and future.

This thinking also can push our emotional button. Just thinking about a certain event, situation or person, make us feel a certain emotion, fear, anxiety, attraction and so on. It can happen over and over again, which is very how people fall in love.


I never say thinking is useless, but it is essential. Being able to think and learn from the past is very unique for human and precious. For the ability, we can learn, create, have a belief or ideas and communicate so effectively with others. However, it is why people have some many problems like my case. My thinking about my crush over and over again  affect my life fully and it also ruins my life. I not only felt jealousy but hate for those who try to approach her even though they did nothing wrong! They are also attracted by her and just take actions to interact with her. It is a completely natural action. She is not mine!! She is a just another women living and breathing. However, love is blind and I have less mental space to analyze the situation fully. Our emotion  ruins my life to choose wrong choices. From my value, I don’t want conflict and don’t want to hate others, but my love made me blind. The thinking self and emotion can trap you in a drama or if you used smartly, it can be our ally.

The problem is not emotion, but how we tame or use it. Emotion is a double edged sword. We start to suffer as soon as we identified ourselves with our thinking self and emotion.

 At school, we don’t learn about emotion or how to tame it. I think it should. Furthermore, we are surrounded by popular culture like TV drama, comics, books, and influence from others to tell you that it is usual to follow the emotion and let it go. We soon start to tell myself stories of ourselves .

“I am that kind of person, so I should not do these things.”

“I need to be successful because I have so much talent!”

“I am useless and worthless because my parent and my life is a shit.”


Identifying with thinking  self makes us difficult to live in the moment and see the reality as it is because we are so into our dream, our self-made story. It also increase your emotion as you think and think all the time. When something is going well, you feel extraordinary happy. However, when something goes wrong, you feel irritated, and depressed. Your life will be a giant story like a roller coaster going up and down and up and down all the time. And, many believe that they see life as it is. The reality is they are controlled by their thinking self and emotion. They think and think and are influenced by intense emotion or expectation from the thinking self. Reality is much more simple, you’re you, a normal human being with a conscious mind and you have emotion. A certain simulations or thinking triggers your emotion, and your brain feels it! That is it!

Now, I know what emotion and thinking self can do to us. Aware of the existence of emotion. Then, how can we do about it? How can we tame emotions? These are recommendation from books.

First, Calm your mind. Stop the insensitive thinking that happens in your mind. Your thinking mind makes it very difficult to see what is happening inside you. Famous analogy for this is the state of a river. When your mind is working all the time, the river is not clam. The flow of the river is harsh, you can not easily observe what is happening in the river or on the river. When your mind is calm, it is like a calm river, flowing peacefully. You can see fish inside. You can clearly see it when a stone fall plop on the river. It is said meditation is a good way, but I don't want to write about it because I am not in a position to be able to teach it.

Second. Be aware of emotion as it arises. We have another rational self that can observe our emotion objectively with calm eye. Be aware of it. It might be useful what puts your button and other people’s button. Write down. Enjoy it. You will have more understandings of emotion so that you can find a way to do with them when emotion arises.

Third, Auto-suggestions(Prayer) can be used to make our mind full of positive emotion and thought. Instead of calming the mind with non-doing like meditation, by repeating the same emotion or belief over and over again, we make the mind full of these positive ideas so that there will be no space for negative thought to happen. Once you are in love, you tend to think about the love for him/her over and over with strong emotion, intensifying the emotion. We can use it to decide the direction of the mind and emotion. It is different from controlling the mind, but powerful tool.

These are three I can think of now to tame my emotion. It is easy to write about it, but it is extremely difficult to master I think.

Robert Greene said that just reading books is not enough, I have to apply what I have learned in the book and use it in order to improve my life, power. So, I would like to write articles on my daily diary, what happened and my analysis  toward my emotional reaction for it. I think it will be very useful to be aware of emotion, and it might be interesting for you to read how another man feels and deals with emotion everyday. I would like to write other article about emotion as I realize something as life goes on. I hope I would be able tame my emotional self and control my life. I think taming my emotional self is a big step to start living myself.

Feelings and their origination in judgement

`Trust your feelings!` -But feelings are nothing final or original; behind feelings there stand judgement and evaluations which we inherit in the form of feelings(inclinations, aversions), the inspiration born of a feeling is the grandchild 
of a judgement- and often of a false judgement!- and in any event not a child of your own! To trust one's feeling- means to give more obedience to one's grandfather and grandmother and their grandparents than to the gods which are in us: our reason and our experience.

Nietzsche

From The Laws of Human Nature chapter 1. master your emotional self, Laws of Irrationality.