The fourth layer is emotionality, sentimentalism. It is pseudofeeling, much ado about nothing, much fuss. The female mind is expert at this. It is kind of empty; it is just on the surface. It is impotent sympathy; it does not do a thing. If somebody is ill, you sit by their side and you cry. Your crying is not going to help.** The house is on fire and you cry—that is not going to help either. This pseudo kind of feeling has to be detected; otherwise you will never know what real feeling is. - Osho

This made me pause because, on one hand, it is how I’ve always thought, what good does it do to cry about your house burning down. Yet it seems like you are grieving, grieving for the loss of your house, which is extremely healthy and freeing to do.

His point is:

Whenever you really feel something in your heart, it immediately transforms you; it becomes action. That is the criterion—your feeling becomes action. If your feeling just remains a feeling and never becomes an action, then know well that it is pseudo. Then you are deceiving yourself or somebody else. - Osho

Emotions are for acting. They naturally have a purpose. This purpose could be calling a loved one to tell them you’re grateful for your relationship or it could be having a difficult conversation with someone. The more in-tune you are, the more you make the leap to that purpose.


Setting this aside, the following day I came across the concept of stigmergy. Stigmergy (or stigmergic cognition) is a mechanism of communication between our body and our environment. It’s a way our minds offload cognition to the body.

We don’t see valueless entities and then attribute meaning to them. We perceive the meaning directly. We see floors, to walk on, and doors, to duck through, and chairs, to sit on. It’s for this reason that a beanbag and a stump both fall into the latter category, despite having little objectively in common. We see rocks, because we can throw them, and clouds, because they can rain on us, and apples, to eat, and the automobiles of other people, to get in our way and annoy us. We see tools and obstacles, not objects or things. Furthermore, we see tools and obstacles at the “handy” level of analysis that makes them most useful (or dangerous), given our needs, abilities and perceptual limitations. The world reveals itself to us as something to utilize and something to navigate through — not as something that merely is. - Jordan Peterson

We are active beings, evolved to take in information and act. Our body sees a computer chair and knows to sit in it without mental cognition. I think Osho is expressing the same thing. Emotions should from the environment, not from your mental cognition, and not only that, but they should lead to purposeful action.

Actually, just days ago, I spent an entire counseling session in this state of puesdofeeling. I entered the session, unsure what I wanted to talk about. I had a lot on my mind. I felt like I should talk about my recent breakup, but I had no idea what I wanted to talk about concerning that. I wasn’t in touch. So instead, I spent 30 minutes, not committing to a subject, until my body just shut down. I remember, after we had decided to talk about the breakup, emotions poured into my chest, wanting me to sob, really sob, loudly. Instead I squeezed it down, knowing if I even opened my mouth the slightest, if I exhaled at all, a dying calf would sound out of me. Squeezing, my head felt like it was going to explode. And on the brink of passing up, I succeeded, the pressure went out of sight, and I could talk again. Afterwards, I spent the rest of the time in a child-like state, silent, unwilling to do anything, even though I felt I wanted to get past this. In those moments, however, the puesdofeeling of resistance was too comforting. I completely blocked myself from properly communicating with my environment, and I left the session no further along my journey than before.

* * *

I’m sorry for the wide ranging and long piece. This morning, I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.

Next: [Repression.](https://silencevosh.github.io/2020/11/06/intuition-corrupted-by-repression.html)