Excerpt from the movie ” What the Bleep Do We Know?”; reflection on emotion

“  The brain is made up of tiny nerve cells called ‘neurons’. These neurons have tiny branches that reach out and connect to other neurons to form a neural net. Each place where they connect is incubated into a thought or a memory. Now, the brain builds up all its concepts by the law of associative memory.  For example, ideas, thoughts and feelings are all constructed and interconnected in this neural net and all have a possible relationship with one another. The concept and the feeling of love, for instance is stored in this vast neural net. But we build the concept of love from many other different ideas.  Some people have love connected to disappointment.When they think about love, they experience the memory of pain, sorrow, anger and even rage.  Rage may be linked to hurt, which may be linked to a person, which then is connected back to love.  We build up models of how we see the world outside of us. And the more information that we have, the more we refine our model one way or another. And what we ultimately do is tell ourselves a story about what the outside world is.
   Any information that we process, any information that we take in from the environment is always colored by the experiences that we’ve had and an emotional response that we’re having to what we’re bringing in.  Who is in the driver’s seat when we control our emotions or we respond to our emotions?  We know physiologically that nerve cells that fire together wire together.  If you practice something over and over, those nerve cells have a long-term relationship. If you get angry on a daily basis,if you get frustrated on a daily basis, if you suffer on a daily basis, if you give reason for the victimization in your life–you’re rewiring and reintegrating that neural net on a daily basis. That neural net now has a long-term relationship with all those other nerve cells called an “identity.” We also know that nerve cells that don’t fire together no longer wire together. They lose their long-term relationship because every time we interrupt the thought process that produces a chemical response in the body–every time we interrupt it, those nerve cells that are connected to each other start breaking the long-term relationship.   When we start interrupting and observing–not by stimulus and response and that automatic reaction–but by observing the effects it takes, then we are no longer the body-mind conscious emotional person that’s responding to its environment as if it is automatic.
   Does that mean emotions are good or emotions are bad? No, emotions are designed so that it reinforces chemically something into long-term memory.  That’s why we have them. All emotion is, is holographically imprinted chemicals. The most sophisticated pharmacy in the universe is in here.  There’s a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, and the hypothalamus is like a little mini factory and it is a place that assembles certain chemicals that matches certain emotions that we experience. And those particular chemicals are called “peptides. They’re small-chain amino acid sequences. The body’s basically a carbon unit that makes about different amino acids altogether to formulate its physical structure.  The body is a protein-producing machine. In the hypothalamus, we take small-chain proteins called peptides and we assemble them into certain neuropeptides or neurohormones that match the emotional states that we experience on a daily basis. So there are chemicals for anger, and there are chemicals for sadness, and there are chemicals for victimization. There are chemicals for lust.There’s a chemical that matches every emotional state that we experience. And the moment that we experience that emotional state in our body or in our brain that hypothalamus will immediately assemble the peptide and then releases it through the pituitary into the bloodstream.  The moment it makes it into the bloodstream it finds its way to different centers or different parts of the body.
Now, every single cell in the body has these receptors on the outside. One cell can have thousands of receptors studding its surface, kind of opening up to the outside world.  And when a peptide docks on a cell it literally, like a key going into a lock, sits on the receptor surface and attaches to it, and kind of moves the receptor. And kind of like a doorbell buzzing, sends a signal into the cell.
   What happens in adulthood is that most of us who’ve had our glitches along the way are operating in an emotionally detached place, or we’re operating as if today were yesterday. In either the disconnected place, or the overly emotional reactive place, because they’ve gone to an earlier time in reality, the person is not operating as an integrated whole.
    Along the outside of the cell are these billions of receptor sites that are really just receivers of incoming information. A receptor that has a peptide sitting in it changes the cell in many ways. It sets off a whole cascade of biochemical events, some of which wind up with changes in the actual nucleus of the cell.  Each cell is definitely alive. Each cell has a consciousness, particularly if we define consciousness as the point of view of an observer.  There is always the perspective of the cell.  In fact, the cell is the smallest unit of consciousness in the body.
    My definition of an addiction is something really simple: something that you can’t stop. We bring to ourselves situations that will fulfill the biochemical craving of the cells of our body, by creating situations that meet our chemical needs. The addict will always need a little bit more in order to get a rush or a high of what they’re looking for chemically. So my definition really means that if you can’t control your emotional state, you must be addicted to it.  So how can anyone really say they’re in love with a specific person, for example? They’re only in love with the anticipation of the emotions they’re addicted tobecause the same person could fall out of favor the next week by not complying. My goodness, doesn’t that change the landscape of our emotional outlook on personal needs and identities?
     We are emotions and emotions are us. Again I can’t separate emotions.When you consider that every aspect of your digestion, every sphincter that opens and closes, every group of cells that come in for nourishment and then moves out to heal something or repair something–those are all under the influence of the molecules of emotion. I mean, it’s this total buzz. So you ask if emotions are bad. Emotions are not bad. They’re life. They color the richness of our experience. It’s our addiction that’s the problem. The thing that most people don’t realize is that.  When they understand that they are addicted to emotions–it’s not just psychological. It’s biochemical. Think about this: heroin uses the same receptor mechanisms on the cells that our emotional chemicals use. It’s easy to see then that if we can be addicted to heroin…then we can be addicted to any neural peptide, any emotion.  “

– from the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know?”