The discovery of a new feeling can be one of life's great blessings. We're all used to the common emotions, like happiness and sadness. Other emotions are derived from them, like ecstasy and grief. (Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions very helpful in seeing where these emotions come from.) An argument can be made that emotions are the product of evolution; that as we evolved, emotions like surprise and awe helped separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom on our lone path to developing reason. If emotions are the product of evolution, then logically we have yet to evolve some of them. I believe one of them is coming into consciousness in our modern time: one born from musical exercise.
I never cared for cell phones. Always thought they were a waste of everyone's time, and people looked stupid when they used them. Now the tables have turned. I've discovered with this magical little device that I can exercise at the gym while listening to my own music. The phone is small enough that it can stay in my pocket while I lift weights, and fits nicely on the treadmill while I'm running on it.
It has, for lack of a better description, unleashed my musical spirit. The playlist I've created has outdone all the others in my short history. With it I am able to soar to the sky, plow through the rubble, run as fast as a cheetah. My spirit when exercising is so illuminated by the music that it feels like my energy increases tenfold and I am able to achieve things I never could. Life is never better than when you're running at top speed, hearing the vibrations of some cosmic Delerium mantra, or an empowering Infected Mushroom trance, or some jazzed up Mars Volta phenomenon. The feeling is indeed otherworldly, for humans were unable to afford such a luxury prior to these lucky generations.
There are many religious and scientific concepts we would understand more easily if we'd had better senses to perceive them. Indeed, some animals might already have ones we have the potential of developing (for example, detecting the Earth's magnetic field). The most amazing emotion I believe we'll evolve into is that of universal consciousness- a sense of feeling one with all that is around us. A universal emotion of awareness would probably be the apex of evolutionary emotion, though if the concept is extended to multiple dimensions, as the current science is propounding, we'll have a lot farther to go in reaching that apex. The more sensitive spiritual types may have already developed such an emotion, while the rest of us are left trying to catch up.
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