The Supreme Doctrine - neo-alchemist

Chapter Fourteen
EMOTION AND THE EMOTIVE STATE
CLASSICAL psychology, in studying emotivity, misunderstands an
extremely important distinction from the point of view of the inner
evolution of man. It certainly describes this 'movement of the soul'
which wells-up as a result of an impulse from the outside world, in response
to an image consciously perceived, a movement of anger, of love, of remorse,
etc.... But the play of emotion, in us, is not confined to that. I often feel the
existence in me of a durable emotive 'state' concerning which I see clearly
that it is not released in me by images that I have in my head at that moment;
I am more or less gloomy, for example, while thinking of a thousand
harmless matters. If then I demand what images have brought me this state,
sometimes I do not find any, but often also I find the worry which lies
underneath my surface associations and which releases my sombre state of
mind. When I was not thinking about it my worry was motionless in my mind
(fixed idea) and released a durable emotive 'state' that seemed motionless.
Now that I think of my worry, when I evoke an imaginative film about it,
emotive movements are produced in me, like those of which we spoke at the
beginning; but I feel that there persists beneath these movements the
motionless emotive state, and I feel that this state was certainly in relation
with the worry that I have just brought up to my surface mind.
Inner experience shows me then that, under dynamic emotions, there
exists a static emotion. But how is one to understand this last? Its name even
seems paradoxical; emotion implies movement; can one speak of static
movement? In order to resolve this contradiction and show how the emotive
state can be at once a movement and an immobility, it will suffice to compare
those 'movements of the soul' which are emotions with the movements of the
body which are our muscular contractions. If a muscle can contract
dynamically in a contraction it can also contract statically in a spasm, or
cramp. Emotions connected with conscious images are psychic contractions,
the emotional state connected with subconscious images is a psychic spasm.
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