By Jach

A Grouping of Questions with Jach’s Replies from the Online Conferences

The Tiers of Emotion

Q: Jach, would you care to comment on working with the Tiers of Emotion?

JACH:

Tiers of Emotion … During the evening workshop Lazaris talked about charting the new course for the future and for the world. Cutting to the core of it, he pointed out that the key to charting the new course was in visioning. It all begins with vision; it all begins with visioning. I find that so incredible and so amazingly powerful. It all begins with vision. Vision is the light or the Light. It is a state of mind or a state of being that is exceptional in its utter and sublime beauty.

Vision is the light, and function follows the light. Function, our function, follows the light, and thus it follows the vision … OUR vision. Ha! Function follows vision/light. And form follows function. If we want to change something, vision it. Lazaris said it so much better. [s]

The first step of visioning involves being ourselves. Oh, so obviously and deceptively simple, but it begins with being ourselves … having the courage to be ourselves. I think of the Knights of the Round. Even though Honesty was the first knight to come forth according to the legend, it was the Courageous Knight who was first seated at the Round to the left of Arthur. It all begins with the courage to be ourselves. Okay, in that, when we want to vision something … anything, we need to stand the ground of our emotion; we need to stand the ground of our feeling. In this Lazaris laid out a three-tiered grid of 21 emotions starting at the highest resonance: love. Love with its voices of individuality, joy, authority, and freedom is the highest resonance of any and all emotions. The first tier were emotions that are expansive in nature, and he laid them out in descending order: love, happiness, passion/compassion, hope/trust, thrill (enthusiasm, eagerness, excitement), optimism, and well-being.

There is a second tier of emotions that are transitional. Their resonance is lower, and they can either be expansive or constricting. They begin with boredom/impatience, and they end with anger, fury and resentment, with pity in that all-important fourth position.

And then there is a final tier … constricting emotions from fear to despair. Despair and hopelessness have the lowest resonance of any emotion. And they can be intense. Lazaris’ point: Be courageous enough, be brave enough, to accept who you are and to accept where you are … What feeling is linked to that which we want to vision? Then the plan is to lift the resonance … to lift our resonance … by stepping up and up and up. The secret is to move up one or two steps at a time. Do NOT try to move a whole bunch of steps. As Lazaris pointed out so poignantly, people can spend lifetimes trying to jump from fear, hurt, jealousy/envy all the way up to love. And they never make it. But if we will move from our lower rung emotions toward love, taking one or two steps at a time, it doesn’t have to take more than an hour and a half. [s]

I found the tiers and the concept of jumping small steps (truly giant’s steps, but often the steps of a true giant are small) to be invaluable and very exciting. So much began to make so much more sense to me as I looked at the tiers. I laughed when Lazaris talked about how being in despair and hopelessness is the lowest resonance and to get out we should lift one step (loneliness, worthlessness, hollowness). Though not pleasant, it’s better to feel lonely or hollow than it is to feel despair and emptiness. Or we could lift from despair to revenge, violence, and hate (feeling violent, not being violent). And it’s a whole lot better to be feeling that you want revenge than it is to feel hopeless. We don’t stop at that one or two steps up, but it sets in motion a momentum that can lift to love.

Oh, it is really exciting to explore the potentials. What I noticed is that Lazaris has this uncanny knack for explaining things in ways that make them sound so obvious and that make the ideas seem so beautifully obvious. The complete idea of visioning, that we are already living our dreams and that we are already loving our lives, was so foreign to me. I hadn’t the foggiest idea. But after the evening, it seems so clear and so obvious. It seems as if I have always known how to do that. [s]

And this first step of being myself with these Tiers of Emotions … well, it all seems so important, doesn’t it?