We wish to explain that when you experience an emotion — for example, when you get angry — there's just energy moving that identifies as anger through some definition or picture that helps you to remember that feeling. In other words, whenever that feeling, that energy, was present before, there's some memory, some way that it got identified and labeled, and those identifications become pictures of emotion. Those pictures get stored inside of you like files in a folder.

What causes the energy to get uncomfortable or in some way cause distress are the pictures associated with it. Ultimately, energy is energy until you divide it into particular feeling states and identify it in terms of words and pictures that have something to do with your past or your fantasy of the future.

Identifying with Past Emotions

The energy that you identify as anger immediately pulls the pictures of other situations in which you have been angry, and you become engaged in looking through all of those pictures; then in a split-second, lots of memories and projections are there to give you a handle on what the energy is about. If there are many of them you find engaging, they become something that you unconsciously attach to because they're so interesting and fascinating.