Emotion Astral Map — แผนที่อารมณ์แห่งดวงดาว
😊 Please find the template of the map at the end of the article, after reading this article you will know how to fill your emotions in the template and use it to overcome your emotional struggles.
This map uses various cognitive concepts to divide our emotional states into eight sections for each of the four orbital layers. When our emotional state is identified in a section, we can know or predict what emotions we have or are going to have. The small bubbles are the emotions that best (for myself) represent the characteristics of each section. Once you understand the characteristics, you can further fill in any emotion in the section that is more specific to your case.
The Celestial
We are cyclical beings, meaning our emotions and behaviors are designed to be cyclical. As nature cycles through days and nights, and seasons to seasons, our mind orbits around a cycle of emotions and we cannot force it to remain in a specific state forever. We have times when we feel motivated, and there must come days when we feel lazy, for example.
When we experience emotional suffering, it means we are living in an unhealthy cycle of emotions. It is “unhealthy” not because it has emotions we dislike, but because the excessiveness of the emotions prevents us from living fairly. We cannot eliminate certain emotions from the cycle; we have to change the factors that influence us to be in that cycle, and then the excessiveness of the emotions and the behaviors they cause will change overall.
In the Astral Map, the unhealthy cycle of emotions is called the Celestial, depicted by the outermost orbital layer. Whether we are aware of it or not, our emotions cycle through the eight sections, resulting in a specific cycle of behaviors.
For example, I have been struggling with cycles of anxiety, procrastination, avoidance, and addiction. These emotions are easily noticeable because they are the ones we usually don’t want. We deem them negative and think they are “the problem” to overcome. They are in the lower sections of the Celestial. They are the shadows inside us that we try to run away from.
Most people want to escape these emotions and the behaviors they cause but fail because they simply ignore the other half of the problem: the emotions in the upper half. We overlook them because we deem them “good” and want to retain them. They are our social masks, the ego.
We are like mice running on a wheel, aiming to retain some emotions and getting rid of the others, and therefore endlessly repeating the cycle of behaviors on the same orbital layer over and over.
The Earth
The answer to developing a healthy life is not about forcing ourselves to contain a specific set of emotions and behaviors. We MUST accept them all but reduce their excessiveness to a level we can handle.
In the Astral Map, the healthy orbital layer is called the Earth. The name comes from the ancient symbolization of the conceited human trying to challenge gods in the Celestial, going through the cycle of humiliation to learn humility, and finding their way back to Earth. If you are interested in these symbolizations, please read my previous article.
Theoretically, the distances between the Celestial and the Earth are measurable by the degree to which we resist mother nature, the degree of judging, as illustrated by the vertical axis.
Judging is our double interpretation of reality. The opposite of judging is perceiving, the direct interpretation. When we perceive an event, we score it a value, good or bad, depending on how we deem it to our spiritual life and death. We then use that scored image of the event in our emotional reasoning to decide whether we should approach or avoid it.
For example, you are going to attend a job interview. You feel anxious because your emotional reasoning tells you that failing the interview means shame or something close to spiritual death. The reality, as you “perceive” it, is the failing of a job interview. Its scored image, as you “judge” it, is shame. This might result in avoidance behavior, such as skipping the interview.
The interpretation from “failing an interview” to “shame” shows the “excessiveness” in judging. Different people have different levels of excessiveness and thus suffer to different degrees from their own interpretations. For example, another person may not feel ashamed about failing an interview; they may be “a little bit sad.” As long as it is to a degree they can handle, we can say that the person is living on Earth, in the healthy cycle of emotions.
Please notice that the emotions on Earth and in the Celestial in the same section share the same characteristics but only differ by the shade of judging language. For example, “ambition” on Earth becomes “greed” in the Celestial. “Respect” becomes “anger,” and so on.
So the goal of solving emotional struggles is to find a way to descend from the Celestial to the Earth, living in an emotional cycle where the level of judging is under control.
The Wall of Stubbornness
An emotional suffering occurs when we cannot tame our excessiveness in judging a situation and therefore get stuck in the Celestial.
And there must be a reason why that excessiveness is out of control. The culprits lie in the orbital layer between the Celestial and the Earth: the Wall of Stubbornness. There lies a set of emotions and choices of actions that are “habitual” in us, meaning we “choose” to do/think/feel something automatically in response to certain patterns of events. They are habitual due to many reasons. We may have repeated the choices over and over since childhood, or we may have emotional wounds, beliefs, or thinking and feeling patterns that were implanted in us somehow. Whatever they are, let’s use the term “karma” to refer to these concepts for convenience.
In the normal circumstances, mother nature constantly pulls us back to Earth to save our lives when she sees that we are going to suffocate in the Celestial. But this Wall of Stubbornness blocks us from returning to her embrace. Our job is to identify what karmas are this wall made of, and break them.
Many people cannot break the wall because they cannot identify ALL the core karmas that make up the wall. Attempting to break only some of them while being blind to the others is futile because they usually cause each other. We usually develop some karma as a coping mechanism to deal with other karmas. And when all coping mechanisms complete the full cycle in itself, that cycle becomes the Great Wall of Stubbornness.
For example, in my case, I have a karma of an “ideal fixation” on being academically excellent and successful in life due to pressure from my childhood. As an adult, I have a fear of being exposed as incompetent. To cope with this fixation, I “over-exert” myself to achieve anything that can prove to people around me that I am excellent. Eventually, I face reality and cannot always keep myself to those expectations. The excessive fear of being exposed as incompetent causes my “avoidance” habit. And as I avoid, the situation becomes worse and more painful. To cope with the pain, I yield myself to pleasures and become addicted to them through the karma of “indulgence”, thus completing the cycle and forming the Great Wall.
At first, I struggled to overcome my avoidance and indulgence head-on. I tried to overcome my avoidance by putting more and more energy into over-exertion, and responded to my indulgence by punishing myself harshly when I failed to retain the ideal, resulting in more and more fixation on the ideal.
As you can see, this head-on solution only makes the situation worse.
We cannot fix a karma by feeding other karmas in the coping mechanism chain.
To break the Great Wall, we have to break every karma all together. We have to redirect our choice of karma toward a more perceiving direction by mixing the color of “acceptance” into our actions and thinking/feeling processes.
For example, when I find myself trying to avoid being incompetent in front of other people, I pause the habit of avoidance and reanalyze my automatic excessive judging interpretation. Instead of feeling shameful, I learn to steer my feeling toward “respect,” which means I “acknowledge” people’s expectations but with the understanding that it is not so important to my life and death. Thereby, I transform my vital perspective of being incompetent toward more perceiving than judging and become closer to the Earth.
Breaking other kinds of karmas is similar. You first have to identify which section it is in, fill the target emotions in the Earth plane in that section, and then keep redirecting your karma toward that emotion little by little.
The Primal — And Tree Rings of Human Emotion
Tree rings are the evolutionary history of a tree. One ring is a life of the tree in a year. We can tell its life story by analyzing its rings and get to understand many aspects of its life.
Similarly, this Emotion Astral Map is the “emotion rings” of humankind. It tells the history of our emotional evolution. One cycle of it is based on how we navigate life in four seasons in a year. Understanding this history is crucial to fully understand the meaning behind each emotion at its root.
- Our history began at the center point where the resistance axis crosses the time-attitude axis. This is the world where we have zero resistance to our mother nature. We also did not concern ourselves with the past or future, only the current matter. When mother told us to eat, we ate. When mother told us to die, we died.
- But as mother nature cycled through days and nights, seasons and seasons, decades and centuries, we started to develop “ambition”, a little bit of resistance to the death order from mother nature. We wished to survive a little bit longer. So we started investing some effort in Summer and gained some food supplies in return.
- Because we now had some assets to take care of during Spring, we developed “responsibility” to prevent the natural loss that would come.
- But eventually, we could not resist the great force of mother nature to balance herself and her children. We lost our endearing assets in Fall, but to be able to survive, we developed “contentment” to stand strong in the face of loss.
- During the cold Winter, we had to try our best to endure the temperature and hardship without any supplies, so we developed “compassion” and embraced each other to fulfill our spiritual hunger amidst the lack of material.
And finally, when Summer returned, we started our ambition once again. And the cycle repeated, on and on.
The Humility — The Basic Colors of Healthy Emotions
After many thousands of years of repetition and as humankind lived longer and longer, we developed a more complex emotional system, dividing the four seasons into eight sections by inventing “humility”. This established the basic “colors” of healthy emotions.
These basic colors constitute the Earth, the world of humble, ambitious beings.
When we enter the Celestial, our emotions lose the shade of humility and acceptance and become highly judging language. It means we are stubborn toward mother nature. When we lose hope in mother nature, we escape into the Celestial and become highly judging persons.
- Acceptance is the belief in mother nature.
- Humility is the belief in ourselves but still with a high degree of acceptance of mother nature.
- Highly judging persons believe only in themselves in some contexts and reject mother nature and, likely, other people in those contexts.
- The plot twist is that each of us is a copy of mother nature. When we reject her, we reject ourselves. Rejection happens in our emotions first, then expresses itself in our behaviors. In other words, we must have rejected emotions in ourselves before being able to reject others. When we are hard on other people regarding some issue, there are always some emotions inside ourselves that we are running away from, leading us to the unhealthy cycle that affects our lives overall.
It is important to know that we cannot run away from or get rid of any emotions. It is the nature of our mind to cycle through all colors of emotions. It is only the degree of rejection or acceptance that determines the shade of emotions.
Conclusion
A healthy life is about controlling our double interpretation of a situation to relieve our vital perspective about it.
- Safety and Danger => Gain and Loss
- Uncertainty and Certainty => Challenges and Accomplishment
- Worth and Shame => Sustainable and Embraceable
- Security and Insecurity => Acknowledging and Celebrating
We struggle in a cycle of unhealthy behaviors because we are mice on a wheel chasing supreme emotions and behaviors, running away from the others.
Practicing equanimity and humility is the key to controlling our orbital speed to stay healthy in the shade of emotions we can handle. We cannot choose some emotions and reject others.
Just as you cannot have life without death and gain without loss, you cannot chase bliss while avoid misery.
The template
