Today’s topic comes from one of Gordon White’s posts on his runesoup blog.  He talks about maintaining emotional coherence in the face of, as he puts it, “where we are on the timeline.”  There is a significant amount of emotional manipulation out there, and not just on social media algorithms.  Take your basic mainstream media news website, and look at the top headlines.  A majority of the time, the majority of the top headlines are about, let’s see here, death, shooting, murder, rioting, war, threats of war, bankruptcy, violence, rape, and people not feeling safe.  Death, fear, anger, and outrage.  Now, I don’t know about you, but here in upper-middle-class suburbia in a deep blue county of the left coast of the United States, those are things which I don’t experience a lot of in person.  99.95% of the deaths I’ve experienced or witnessed in my lifetime have been on screens, through the news, through movies and tv shows, through social media stories.  This is one part of the emotional manipulation that surrounds me every day, which I must maintain emotional coherence against.  There’s a reason that Nassim Taleb mentions in his book, Antifragile, that consumption of the daily news is toxic.  Staring at it from a bird’s eye view, it is!

Today is a day where a bunch of my friends are planning to drink tons of alcohol.  They are unhappy about the election of Donald Trump in the United States.  I’ve got a couple better ways to handle my unhappiness over things outside my control than drowning my sorrows.  I have a need to maintain my ability to make good decisions, for my children’s sake, and for my own sanity.

What does emotional coherence look like?  It looks like Neville Longbottom, calmly refusing to perform the Cruciatus curse on first years when Snape is Headmaster of Hogwarts.  His Death-Eater Professor of Defense Against The Dark Arts demands it of him, but this is a line he will not cross, even under pain of torture.  Recall that Neville’s parents reside in St. Mungo’s hospital, driven insane by the Cruciatus curse.  He knows where that path leads, and he refuses to go further down it.  He stands there with his wand at his side, and says “no.”  If he were put in Milgram’s Experiment or the Stanford Prison Experiment, he wouldn’t go along with authority past where he decided was his line in the sand.

It looks like calm courage.  When the Death-Eaters take over the Ministry of Magic, when your mudblood friends are rounded up and have their wands taken away, and dementors torment them, emotional coherence is a Patronus charm against the fear and despair.  Let me tell you, the Death-Eaters throughout history are always taking over the Ministry of Magic, cyclically.  At the risk of violating Godwin’s law, history is filled with Ivan the Terrible, with Rasputin, with slavemasters and religious leaders who purchase your children and force them to do terrible things in the name of empire, as much as it is filled with benevolent government types, at all scales, from world-dominating trade federations to tribes and families.  It is filled with psychopathic bosses who love to torture their employees because they seem to think that it gets them more power.  That’s just the way things work on Earth.  Good versus evil was never a monolithic fight.  Yet, history is also filled with people who stood up to the Death-Eaters and dementors, and said “no.”  History has people who didn’t believe what their psychopathic bosses told them they were, because they knew better, because they were rooted in something greater than their bodies.

One of the things that makes animism work better than the other options, is its ability to provide emotional coherence in ways that the other major options don’t.  After all, Nassim Taleb also liked judging worldviews based on whether they worked, not whether the theory was pretty and looked good in a philosophy textbook.  Strict Materialists tend to run into problems with being aware of mythological opportunities for ways to live which have worked for over 10,000 years.  Monotheists tend to run into problems with understanding that there are more than one right way to live, more than two sides to the War in Heaven, more than one spirit to talk to and gain insight from.  With animism, you can talk to your ancestors about your emotions.  You can talk to the deities, and give your idiotic and/or corrupt government officials to them to use as playthings as they see fit in propitiation.  You can talk to trickster spirits and make deals.  You can talk to the local river spirit and have them wash away your fear and anger.  It just works better, in my opinion.  However, I understand that people believe different things than I do.  That’s great, actually.  Diversity of belief within and between worldviews is a good thing.  You can take whatever methods work for you, and leave the rest for somebody else.

I’ve been trying to think of ways for people to remain emotionally calm in the midst of whenever life sends them pain and suffering, as it always does.  You have to be able to have a core of stillness so that you can make good and effective decisions.  If you’re swayed too much by the news, by the emotional manipulation surrounding you at all times, how can you make good decisions from a place of burning anger that blinds you to your opportunities?

The first method is simple.  Emotionally manipulate yourself back by using music.  When you have the time, create a playlist of songs that make you feel a certain way.  They can even be blatant propaganda stuff like Let It Go.  It’s your emotional response, so you can use it how you like.

From there, your options get a bit more complex.  Ian “Cat” Vincent mentioned the Litany Against Fear from Dune.  He also mentioned a method where you imagine a sphere of white energy inside of you that pushes all of the darkness and badness outside of it and expand it until it is outside of your skin.  I like this one, because it helps you remember that your core is a calm place, and the anger you show on the outside when you tell people or other entities to fuck off is not who you are.  Who you are and what you do are not the same thing.

Basic mindfulness meditation will work wonders.  Even if it is only a minute a day, making time to let your thought go do their thing while you watch them dispassionately will help a lot.  Too many people are afraid of self-reflection.  Yet, self-reflection is where you have to go to recognize when you are feeding your fears and anxiety instead of feeding your passion, pride, and acceptance.  Meditation is the space in which you get to choose your emotional state.  Choosing your emotional state takes practice.  When you’ve gotten sufficient practice in choosing your emotional state, you can start to look at some of your triggering memories, things that make you ashamed, things that make you hypervigilant even without any danger in the present.

Once you’ve figured out how to choose your emotional state, you can anchor that state to something.  Some people use candles, and carry around a picture of a candle to look at.  Some people use water.  Every time they touch or drink water, they go back to a state of calm determination or calm comfort without fear.  People have carried lucky stones around with them, or anchored there emotion in touching the ground with their feet.  The hippy version would be breathing in the calm grounding energy from the ground up through your feet and throughout your body, and then breathing the panicked frightened energy back down into the ground through your feet.  The Buddhist version is to anchor the state of calm with your breath.  That way your lucky stone will never leave you.  You can anchor it to tapping your fingers, touching wood, throwing salt over your shoulder, various chakras on your body, doesn’t matter.  Pick something that works for you.

You’ll always be a little bit afraid.  That’s a good thing.  Fear is a gift that should not be cut from you.  Good fishermen are always a little bit afraid of the ocean.  That’s how they’ve learned to respect her capricious whims and live.  You’ll always be outraged at the horrors that happen, when Ghengis Khan sweeps through your village and kills so many.  Yet, you don’t have to feed these the rest of the time.  Being overwhelmed with grief has its place, being hypervigilant has its place, being righteously anger has its place, or these things would not be in our ancient myths.  These things shouldn’t overwhelm you, and need not either.  Use all of your senses, write down stories that enhance your other emotions, the ones you want to focus on instead.  Sing silly songs that make you cry with joy.  Spend time with your friends doing stuff that makes you laugh.  These memories are the core of the Patronus charm, the thing that keeps you out of the pit of utter despair, that reminds you of just how courageous, kind, loving, honorable, wise, and cunning you are or can be when you choose to be.