Emotional literacy

If you want to know how evolved you are, take a tour through your life experience and look at your emotional range experienced so far.

Knowledge is acquired through experience, and everything we experience, whether on purpose or not, as a conscious choice or as a result of our unconscious fears and desires, starts and ends with emotions.

Emotions are the language of creation. The language through which we communicate with everything in existence, from your lover to the vast multiverse.

How many letters of this alphabet do you know? The human genome alphabet contains 6.4 billion letters, or 3.2 billion pairs. The emotional spectrum is such a language and works on the same principle of pairs.

Your whole life experience is a mirror of the level of consciousness you operate from, and that level of consciousness is a perfect reflection of your level of fluency in this complex binary emotional language.

The duality ruling this level of creation, the binary system of our universe, of our genome, and of our emotions require balance between polarities. That balance is what we call ‘harmony’. That is, the melody created by the conversation with Self of its halves.

Take the first emotion that makes or breaks you: love.

Imagine your emotional spectrum under the form of a car speedometer, or better still, of the sound spectrum which is its more accurate translation.

Now look at your life. At every given moment you are speaking some letters of this alphabet. How much on a moment to moment do you speak love and how vast is your vocabulary?

In 12 hours a day of your awake state, if you looked at your love speedometer, how often would you see its needle move?

The vocabulary of emotions is similar to the vocabulary of a spoken language. The richer our vocabulary, the higher our social position, and the more pleasant and enlightening the conversation. That is, if you have a correspondent with a similarly wide vocabulary.

That’s why our relationships are so poor. Both our vocabularies are atrociously poor!

We find something that we love and repeat that conversation until we die, changing places, partners, jobs, in an attempt to recreate that first emotional state. Our partners in that conversation are looking for the same thing, only that even if we speak the same letters of the emotional alphabet, each experience is as unique as the individual.

We assume that each word (emotion) has the same meaning for them as it has for us. And they rarely do. So, our relationships are monologues we each hold in our heads, not conversations.

Our human interaction is a collection of misunderstandings and the compromises made to keep the appearance of a conversation, when in fact we live in a monologue with its own narrative.

Look at the classic example of a couple’s holiday. One loves the sea, the other loves the mountain. For the sake of keeping the conversation going (the relationship), they reach a compromise: one week by the sea, one week on the mountain. Both weeks are a monologue.

Take another classic example of a couple. One wants sex, the other wants to ‘spend some quality time together’. Just that expression in itself should be warning sign enough, but I digress. It all becomes a trade: sex for quality time together. Sex for going to see her parents. Sex for a new dress or car, or simply to make sure he doesn’t take the conversation elsewhere. There is no conversation. Just two monologues agreeing to disagree.

Now look again at your day. From when you wake up to when you go to bed, how many times do you see the needle moving on your love chart? By love chart I don’t mean your romantic relationships. And how rich is your vocabulary in love language? How much of what you know and do in your daily life do you love? How do you love? How versatile is your love vocabulary? How well do you love?

Illness, loneliness, despair, or any life dissatisfaction we may have are all the result of this monologue we’ve been doing, stuck in the utterance of the first letters of this colossal alphabet.

We cannot evolve until we all become proficient in the emotional language to be able to hold a conversation. That is what Conversations with Self means.

© Gratiela Rosu, 9 Jun 2021