When We Talk About Emotion, We Really

If I Use The Word Consciousness, In Our Lab, In Our Institute, What We Mean Is The Special Quality Of Mind, The Special Features That Exist In The Mind, That Permit Us To Know, For Example, That We, Ourselves, Exist, And That Things Exist Around Us.

We Do Not Merely Perceive Objects And Hold Thoughts In Our Minds: All Our Perceptions And Thought Processes Are Felt. All Have A Distinctive Component That Announces An Unequivocal Link Between Images And The Existence Of Life In Our Organism.

There Is A Sequence Of Events In Our Lives And So There's A Temporal Aspect To Our Experience That Brings By Itself, Sense Into The Story. In Other Words, You Were Not Walking Before You Were Born And You Were Not Doing X And Y Before You Did Something Else First. So There's A Sequencing Of Events That Imposes A Certain Structure To The Story.

Some Of Us, For Better Or Worse, Develop Very Stable, Consistent, And Largely Predictable Machineries Of Self. But In Others, The Self Machinery Is More Flexible And More Open To Unexpected Turns.

How Can You Have This Reference Point, This Stability, That Is Required To Maintain The Continuity Of Selves Day After Day?