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Do not ignore your emotions. They tell you about yourself. Follow them to their source. Your emotions are the automatic summation of your ideas. If your ideas are generally rational, then your emotions will be reliable guides to evaluating your experiences.
But if you just "follow" them in the sense of acting on them without reflection, then you can make serious errors in your life.
Barbara Branden once spoke of a man whom she "liked" socially. He was a nice guy, intelligent and all that. But after several interactions, she had to admit that what she was responding to in him was a surface presentation only and that other actions revealed a different nature, and she cut off the relationship.
But her initial response to his (projected) positive qualities was the right one.
When a man responds emotionally to a physically attractive woman, he is validating very rational ideas about reality. Responding emotionally to the soliloquy of an intelligent woman validates other ideas about reality. Both responses identify his own nature. Acting without examining the roots of those emotions would be to "follow" them in the sense of the cartoon.
It is also interesting that Ayn Rand recommended writing from the subconscious mind. You do your research. You lay out your plan, make your outlines, etc. But when it comes time to put words on paper, she implicitly agreed with the time-honored advice given to all writers: "find a clean sheet of paper and open a vein." You can critically analyze it later, but you cannot write and analyze at the same time. That is what causes writer's block. Rand wrote about that in "The Simplest Thing in the World."
Leonard Peikoff gave an example of his wife expressing disapproval, if not shock, at a "rational" discussion that he and the boys were having about whether to what extent it would be immoral to disassemble a sentient robot. Her emotions were properly aligned; they were detached from theirs.
For a human to turn that thought into consistent action is sometimes, as Spock would say, "a difficult concept."
Sorry about that. It just struck me as very funny. Don't we encounter that attitude on a daily basis? Doesn't it take all your willpower to keep from slapping the person upside the head? They might as well be saying, "I turn my mode of survival over to the person who strikes me as being pretty, and talks nice to me."
Sad really.
So far no one has invented a spray to get rid of them.
Unfortunately the stuff needed cannot be put in a spray can.
You (the rational mind at the top) can't necessarily always be in control of those under-parts any more than a person riding a horse can always control what the horse does. It's an art. This is why psychology and psychiatry exist. They're about getting and keeping that control.
Somehow I grew up to use my emotions as guideposts to help my thinking. I dont know how that happened, but it would be great if it happened to at least a majority of people in this country.
+1