The Temple of Chrysalis looks at emotions as allies that can, when correctly harnessed, increase, decrease, emphasize, create, or remove experiences.
By manipulating emotions and our way of thinking, we can affect our wellbeing. Emotions are like water. We can let it flow freely in the river, or create dams. We can investigate what kinds of winds make the water move, what makes rain fall upon the ground, what factors harden water into glacial ice, and what makes it evaporate dry. If we get very enthusiastic, we can distill other compounds out of water.
An ecstatic, inspired, and sparkling state of happiness is magnificent. When adding the spiritual link to the universe, we are talking about an experience which will not easily be forgotten. I am lucky to have experienced this several times already. And I want to teach you to reach it too.
For example, nausea can be meddled with, though it isn’t easy. It requires practice. First you need to find the buttons which make the bad feeling less bad when you push them. Then you need to remember where in your mind these buttons lay. Every time you push the button, pushing it down becomes easier with less friction. If you don’t push the button, nothing will happen. Stroking it with your fingertip doesn’t yet do anything.
At the same time, you can affect good emotions and increase their intensity. Focusing and truly gourmandizing on the emotion, you can at best get even more out of it. Combining in a fitting way and throwing yourself in the right direction, you can turn a mediocre situation into a pleasant one. Imagine going to a beach. You can either just “go to the beach”—or you can go to the beach and maximize the positive feelings the visit creates for you. You can just breathe for a moment and bury your toes into the sand, grateful for being able to do it. You can let the wind come to you, and close your eyes, feeling the physical caress of nature on your skin.
Let your senses lead you, take the impulses they offer and connect these impulses to your emotions. Focus on the experience and throw yourself into it internally. Explaining the expression “throw yourself” is somewhat challenging, as it feels quite abstract. In my own mind, this kind of augmenting and emphasizing of a feeling happens in a very specific manner.
If I stop right now and reach into myself by writing one paragraph of pure stream of consciousness, you might get a picture how this could happen:
At first, I feel excitement and happiness for the process of writing. Joy for starting this process. A feeling of happiness originating from inspiration flashes in my mind, so I grab it and focus my mind on it. Oh. Well, ain’t I quite foking inspired! Nice! I seek out the areas in myself where I feel this. For example, the bursting, impatient breathing which reminds me of the feeling of being romantically in love. I can emphasize this physical emotion by slightly tensing my muscles as if performing the bursting a little more stronger way a couple of times. A physical sensation begins to increase my mental emotion which makes me smile out of excitement. I point out the smile to myself and smile a little wider.
I want more.
So, I smile even wider and close my eyes. I gasp for breath, and an almost erotic moan escapes my lips from the intensity of the sensation.
There we go. Now I’m writing the text with tears in my eyes as my inner outburst of emotions feels so stupendously good. As if I’m having some sort of spiritual orgasm.
Time for a coffee break.
This kind of feasting on emotions can be taken even further. Especially if the situation is disturbing or distressing you, intentional gourmandizing on emotions may help. If the emotional state is gnawed clean and thoroughly lived, the mind processes it to such an extreme that there is nothing more left in the issue to work through. The mind gets bored and finds something else. As if we turn the gas all the way up and let it burn out.
By researching your own emotions, you might also find your shadow sides. Emotional reactions tell a lot about our conception of reality. Unexplained antipathies or negative opinions of others can in fact be reflections of your own attributes. For example, a person who is afraid and blames his partner is thinking about someone else, can in fact be reflecting his own need to think about others. Admitting these features to oneself is one of the most challenging fields of examining emotions. Finding a reality anomaly is never a bad thing! On the contrary, the one who is able to find his weaknesses and take improving them as a part of their chrysalis will create a considerably more genuine and whole Imago.
Most of the pros of emotions are surely inferred with common sense. It is also important to point out that emotions are an extremely effective tool in reality shaping. Emotions are directly connected to your energy and vibration, which in turn are the foundation pillars or reality shaping. Some of my greatest magical deeds I have accomplished indeed by letting the blazing emotion wing my energy in the right direction. Especially when you want to send a specific kind of energy, it is quite beneficial if the energy was first available somewhere. It is not essential but useful. So why wouldn’t we take the advantage of all that is offered?
The Übermensch way of looking down on primitivity and emotions is amusing in my eyes. I haven’t met a single person who despised emotions and was happy at the same time. Disgust and contempt towards emotions are emotions themselves to begin with, so this kind of thinking creates an internal paradox. Indeed, pushing emotional, happy people down seems to mainly be a way for the unhappy and angry to lift themselves up. Sour grapes. I have also never met a person who would e.g. talk against primitivity and sexuality and not have any problems with his own sexuality.
People tend to try to keep their self-image as solid as possible, and admitting the experience of imperfection can sometimes be pretty difficult. Thus it is easier to say “Primitivity and pleasure-seeking is for inferior animals” than “I have mental or physical issues with my sexuality. Since I cannot deal with this subject, I denounce the whole concept as evil, so that I don’t feel incomplete.”
The human being is not created to be emotionless. An emotionless person causes anomalies among his nearest and dearest with his lack of empathy and is more likely to damage his surroundings. Emotions do not replace reason. But neither can reason ever fully replace what emotions give us. Emotions can be so abstract they cannot be verbalized. Rationalizing emotions requires understanding them at as deep a level as possible. There is no pure reason without emotion. It will be much easier for you to live your life and interact with your surroundings if you are capable of dealing with emotions and feelings.
Of course, things are not that simple. There are many mental and also physical factors in our emotional regulation and the chemistry behind the feelings. (At least every person with a womb knows this…) Having an understanding of these states helps a Chrysalid. For example, alexithymia means a set of personality traits characterized by difficulties recognizing and processing emotions. Alexithymic individuals are often more conservative, more formulaic, and “robot-like”, and processing emotions might cause an alexithymic person to feel bad. When you don’t have the same kind of contact with your emotions, emotion-based experiences of pleasure won’t arise in the same way either. The set of traits varies from level to level between individuals. Hence the concept is not black and white.
Alexithymia may be a challenge to following Chrysalis, but it certainly isn’t an obstacle. An alexithymic individual fits perfectly in with the kaleidoscope of Parthenos, for instance. This science- and structure-focused kaleidoscope offers the opportunity to serve the Temple of Chrysalis with sharp observations, explaining theories, and finding causal connections. At the same time, an alexithymic person should adopt Lamproptera as their opposing kaleidoscope, through which to get a converse point of view and to learn about another kind or reality and emotional life. And possibly Dryocampa, which helps with social interactions. However, in Parthenos, an alexithymic person can shine and sparkle with his already existing traits.
Alexithymia often traces back to childhood, but incidents during the course of your life can also tamper with your emotional regulation. I have long ago lived, from a psychological point of view, through a certain kind of emotionally deprived state. It was a trauma-based condition. In it, my mind in all its fineness decided that it is now better for Miss Luminary to shut down her emotional bank lest the system overload. In retrospect, I understand what an ingenious and magnificent defense mechanism this was. I didn’t have tools to process what had happened. So I went into shutdown mode to protect my innermost from further damage.
Even though I wouldn’t trade away my experience, I would also never want it back permanently without good reason. I was like a meaningless ghost, to whom nothing mattered. On some level, I wanted things to matter again. So I sought experiences, each fiercer than the last, to get even a pinch of something. If just adrenaline.
No matter how I tried to make this emotionless state something fancy and cool, it wasn’t real. It was the twisted reality of an unwell person whose anomalies prevented happiness. I also remember well how, step by step, the emotions became rebuilt. I had to relearn many things and to work especially on empathy. Into particular processing I took the concept of love, and really contemplated its significance to myself, others, and the universe.
On account of all these researches, I also dislike the way of some religions and systems to name love as their goal. It’s easy to throw in a big word commonly experienced as positive, and use it to make yourself a “good person™”. Due to this I also haven’t adopted love as an individual emotion into a main role in the Chrysalis system of thought. There is certainly love in Naos tis Chrysallis, and I can guarantee my own love to every Chrysalid. But in Chrysalis itself, satisfaction and building one’s own life play higher roles than love. If a person is unwell, love might be too big a thing to handle. If the mind is especially fractured, there’s a greater risk of going blind from rose-colored glasses. In such a case, one’s way of experiencing and processing love turns unpredictable and, for the other person, frightening. Even dangerous.
Encouraging emotionality doesn’t mean emotions as such would justify anything. A feeling of love doesn’t mean the object of your emotion owes you anything. Anger and aggression don’t mean you have to walk to a fish and chips stall and beat people up. Also, unnecessary “I am so very offended” tantrums have no space within the Temple, unless the one having the tantrum is ready to take responsibility for his own emotions and break them down analytically. Remember: in your reality someone may have said badly, but in the reality of the ill-speaker, the words might have had a completely different meaning than what you read into them. Envy, above all, is an emotion I want to subject to particular scrutiny in the Temple. Because it is the nature of the whole system to aim for glory and achievements, it is to be expected that pretty awesome and luminous peeps are going to assemble within the Temple. So, by all means, be envious if it somehow benefits your Chrysalis and doesn’t cause harm to anyone else. Bud gods help you if you poison and harm the Temple with your inability to handle your envy. In that event the Kyrios of the Temple may have a little chat with you.
Emotions are allowed, encouraged, and esteemed. By regulating the reactions caused by them we ensure that the gift of emotion is not nullified. If you throw a martyr tantrum because someone has decorated a cake with nonpareils of the wrong color, quite a lot of shaping the realities of others is required to allow your emotion to be seen as valid. Especially if you could just as well choose to raise your hand and pour the nonpareils of your preference. Individualism is not synonymous with being an ass—and not a justification for playing the victim.
So throw yourself into your emotions, and be sensible with it all the while. This combination will yield the best results on your journey of transformation.
With love,
Luminary
Translation: Telea Halla
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