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                              %RITUALISTIC EMOTIONS 800219

     Many of our emotions are learned from our culture. By
watching others we learn how to feel when saying  good-bye
to  a  friend who is going away for a long time,   perhaps
never  to return.   We are taught now to feel about adults
who  show  inclinations  towards excessive  intimacy  with
others than their spouse.   Patriotic emotions are  passed
on  through  appropriate gatherings  and  celebrations  on
national  occasions.   The behavior of close ones  on  the
occasion of a death in the family tells children what  the
proper feelings on such an occasion are.   We learn how to
feel  by  watching others feelings,  and how  others  feel
about each other's unconventional feelings.

     Often we rationalize our emotions, and then engage in
cognitive arguments about our differing  rationalizations;
as  if  the variety of emotions we have---flowed  from the
variety  of  rationalizations.   We behave as if we  could
change  each  other's  ritualistic emotions  by  arguments
which  are  designed  to  get each  other  to  change  the
rationalizations  which  we have invented to  explain  our
respective   emotions---assuming  that  by  changing   the
explanatory  rationalizations  would occasion a change  in
the  ritualistic emotions which are thereby  rationalized.
We  try  to  each  other that  certain  ways  of  behaving
(emoting) are not reasonable,  and try to argue each other
out  of behaving in such unreasonable ways.   Little do we
recognize that to change ritualistic emotions will usually
require participation in new emotions transmitting rituals
of power equal to the rituals which interjected the extant
ritualistic emotions.  The power of a ritual originates in
the  power  of the sub-culture which sponsors the  ritual;
and how central to our being that sub-culture is.   If  we
have been cut off from the sub-culture which empowered our
ritualistic emotions and are not participants in any  sub-
culture  of  comparable  power,   it  may  be  exceedingly
difficult for us to transcend the ritualistic emotions  we
learned in our former sub-culture.

     Healthy   growth  in  ritualistic  emotions  involves
participation in a healthy sub-culture which has power for
us,  and which empowers us to fulfill our unique  personal
potentials.  Stagnant sub-cultures and alienation from all
significant  sub-cultures imprisons us in the  ritualistic
emotions of an earlier era.

                                                                                                                               
                         (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in      
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