Metaphysical Emotions: Emptiness, Anxiety, Boredom, Rootlessness, Bewilderment

Excerpt from Epistemics of Divine Reality, p.227, 2007
Metaphysical sensations involve the accompanying sense of the paradoxical, which gives rise to metaphysical emotions. The various paradoxes are the paradoxes between reason and experience, viz., transcendence-immanence, infinity-finitude, immutability-mutation, necessary-contingent, and unity-plurality. The inability of reason and experience to solve the paradoxes generates negative emotions. As has been already seen, neither reason nor experience, which are in reality, by combination, the source of the problem, can bring about a solution. For that would mean in each case to lift oneself by one’s own bootstraps. The only solution reason brings in is the rational which nullifies the empirical, ultimately leading to non-dualism. The ultimate that experience can do is the relativizing of truth to the chagrin of reason. The dissatisfaction of any such solution is bound to generate emotions that are negative; for man is not just conscious but emotionally conscious. The negative emotions that accompany the turbulent condition of Being-as-care’s (to borrow Heidegger’s notion of the existential human as Dasein) failure to harmonize the rational and the empirical, may be identified as void or emptiness, anxiety, boredom, rootlessness, and bewilderment.

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Spirituality and the Meta-emotions


Emptiness- The epistemic experience of void resulting from the self's failure to experience the Love of the Spirit through Faith.
Often caused by a turning towards the things of the world (sensations) or towards the things of the self (narcissism)
Anxiety - The epistemic experience of uncertainty resulting from the self's failure to experience the Hope of the Spirit through Faith.
Often caused by trying to find certainty in the present through mere mental reasoning or sense-experience.
Boredom- The epistemic experience of lag resulting from the self's failure to experience the fullness of joy in the Spirit through Faith.
Often caused by not feeding the passion for God and His work.
Rootlessness- The epistemic experience of aloneness resulting from the self's failure to experience the peace of Divine Fellowship in the Spirit through Faith.
Often caused by a disconnection from prayer and meditation on God's Word.
Bewilderment- The epistemic experience of confusion resulting from the self's failure to experience the goodness of God in the Spirit through Faith.
Often caused by attempts to reconcile worldliness with spirituality. Leads to sin, bitterness, and confused anger.

© Domenic Marbaniang, April 2011

2 comments :

  1. I really liked the way you have described the Study of human motions through Metaphysics. Thank you for the post.

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  2. This explanation looks like it's on the right track. It's better than any other I've seen so far. The paragraph above requires a great deal of parsing, and perhaps some background reading would be helpful. I would ask if negative emotions are an active emanation, like sweat is to the body, or the result of insufficient life energy resulting in emotional life-body "decay," like the shedding of dead skin cells. I welcome any thoughts.

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