Lecture
The concept of the "tone scale" was introduced in the 1950s by the American writer and philosopher L. Ron Hubbard to describe a person's emotional state. This scale characterizes a person's condition during different periods of life. It is conventionally depicted using numbers from 0.0 to 4.0. A person positioned high on the tone scale behaves optimally in their surroundings and feels good. A person whose position on the scale of emotional tones is low is incapable of rational action and feels unwell. Some people are unable to remain in low tones for long, while others get stuck in destructive emotions, and this becomes their problem.
A person's emotional state is heavily influenced by their environment. If a person lives for a long time surrounded by emotions such as anger, despair, or guilt, one can expect their emotional tone to drop. This can be observed at work, in the family, and on the street — a person tends to adjust to the general emotional level around them. At work, this means adjusting to the boss's emotional tone; at home, to the spouse's; on the street, to that of the surroundings. There are a great many negative emotions in our lives, coming from the people around us, from television, from newspapers.
What should you do when the people around you are showing aggression, fear, or despondency, and how do you keep yourself in a high emotional state?
To do this, you need to be able to manage both your own emotional state and the emotions of the person you are talking to. Such management is only possible based on precise knowledge of the psychological laws governing the existence and interaction of various emotions, as reflected in the Scale of Emotional States.
You can use knowledge of the Scale of Emotional States when hiring people and when choosing partners. The scale accurately shows what to expect from a person and lets you predict people's behavior. In addition, it gives you an idea of what might happen to you in a given environment or in the company of certain people — how some groups can "drag" you down into emotions such as "anger," "propitiation," or "fear," and how others can quickly lift you up to an emotional state such as "cheerfulness" or even "enthusiasm."
For example:
Each emotional state corresponds to typical human behavior, characteristic illnesses, a certain degree of psychological adaptability, and a certain ability to make decisions and achieve what one has set out to do. In the table shown in the figure, a wavy line depicts the mutual influence between tones. It's important to know that when a person remains in one emotional state for a long time, they begin to attract people (friends, staff, business partners) who are only in that particular emotional state.
In short, a person's emotional state affects their success in life, as well as their health. What's the use of following the latest methods for organizing your work if you have no mood, desire, or energy to actually do the work? What's the point of swallowing mountains of expensive medication if the root of the illness lies in your own low spirits?
By using the Scale of Emotional States, based on the psychological laws governing the existence and interaction of various emotions, you can accurately determine your predominant emotional state, as well as raise your emotional tone.
Everything in existence moves and
develops along a spiral path.Ivan Yefremov"Andromeda Nebula."
Above, I examined several theories concerning the nature of human emotions. Of course, there are far more theories dealing with the structure of human consciousness, including the nature of emotions, than have been discussed above. The theories examined represent a range of characteristic approaches to solving this question.
It should be noted that all of these theories acknowledge that, from birth, the human body — and in particular its nervous system — possesses various genetically determined characteristics. All the theories acknowledge the influence of the social factor on human consciousness. All the theories acknowledge that emotions are connected with a person's assessment of their environment. The difference between them lies in how various researchers view the relationship between these factors.
It should also be noted that all researchers of human consciousness are influenced by certain ideas, certain religions, or philosophical beliefs. The peculiarity of this situation is that the very subjects of faith, philosophical belief, and worldview are themselves, to a full extent, products of human consciousness.
A researcher's faith and worldview play a role even in modern physics and mathematics, but when it comes to the human mind, this becomes fully apparent. This fact says a great deal about the overall level of development of psychology. In physics, a similar situation existed in the time of Copernicus, when some scientists believed the Sun revolved around the Earth, while others believed the Earth revolved around the Sun.
The difference between the approaches to the nature of emotions discussed above is due, above all, precisely to the personal convictions of the researchers and the traditions of the psychological schools they represent. And this difference lies in how they each see the source of emotions. Proponents of differential emotions theory believe that emotions first developed as one of the mechanisms regulating the organism, and only later did the signals from these regulatory systems come to be perceived by the higher nervous system as emotions and used in communication between individuals. Proponents of transactional theory believe that emotions first developed as scripts for communication between individuals, and only later did the organism's physiological systems begin to use these scripts for their own purposes and come to be perceived by the higher nervous system as emotions. Proponents of information theory believe that the perception of emotions developed together with the higher nervous system, and that the assessment of a situation and the signals from the organism's regulatory systems merely serve as factors that determine the emotion. Proponents of these viewpoints quite reasonably believe that the emergence of emotions was originally tied to one single specific cause, but each school sees that cause differently.
Whereas psychological theories locate the source of the emotional mechanism in the human body, Hubbard holds a different point of view. He was a proponent of the doctrine of multiple lifetimes and believed that after the death of the body, the sentient being enters another body and continues to live, usually forgetting its past life. According to his concept, he divided emotions into two groups: emotions characteristic of the "merger" of the spiritual being with the human body, which are shown on the scale from 0 to 4, and emotions characteristic of the spiritual being itself. He plotted the emotions characteristic of the spiritual being on an expanded scale. Hubbard was not at all interested in the physiological mechanisms associated with emotions; he considered the source of emotions to be the spiritual being, which he called a thetan, from the ancient Greek letter theta, which ancient hermetic societies used to denote the mind.
Bearing in mind, of course, that Simonov was a committed materialist, while Hubbard was an even more committed opponent of materialist philosophy, I would like to note that Scientology's theory of emotions is closest to the informational concept of the emotional mechanism. Both concepts view emotions, above all, as an assessment of the current situation. Hubbard believes that this assessment is carried out by the thetan, while Simonov attributes it to certain structures of the brain. Nevertheless, there is a definite correlation between Hubbard's emotion scale and Simonov's classification of emotions.
In analyzing this correlation, I plotted the emotions identified by Simonov onto Hubbard's emotion scale. Emotions that Simonov classified as involving "a small need" did not make it onto Hubbard's scale, with the exception of the emotion "indifference," which I equated with Hubbard's tone of "apathy." I placed the remaining emotions on the scale in a way that achieved the closest possible match. I equated liveliness, triumph, and inspiration with Hubbard's tone of cheerfulness, and the emotions of confidence, courage, and fearlessness with the tone of enthusiasm. This produced the following tables:
From this figure, it is clear that the spiral makes two full turns over the interval from 0 to 4. At the points 0, 2.0, and 4.0 of this spiral lie, respectively, the tones "Failure," "Antagonism," and "Enthusiasm." At these points on the tone scale, a person is actively changing something. In the tone "Enthusiasm," they change their environment by creating something new; in the tone "Antagonism," they change their environment by re-creating something that already existed and correcting its shortcomings; and in the tone "Failure," they change themselves.
At the points 1.0 "Fear" and 3.0 "Conservatism," a person seeks to preserve something. In the tone "Conservatism," this means preserving the existing state of affairs, while in the tone "Fear," it means saving something from harm.
Other tones on the scale with similar characteristics are 1.5 "Anger" and 3.5 "Cheerfulness." In the tone "Cheerfulness," a person feels they are in a position of cause in relation to the object. In the tone "Anger," they are striving to attain a position of cause, working to achieve it. In both tones, a person is active and does not perceive their surroundings particularly well.
At the points 0.5, tone "Grief," and 2.5, tone "Boredom," a person is passive and is, for the most part, a receiver of communication. In boredom, a person takes in their surroundings. In grief, a person perceives a loss, or the prospect of a highly likely or inevitable defeat.
All the other points on the scale, located between the key points mentioned above, likewise correspond to the pattern discovered. For example, the tone "Mild interest" (2.8) is located between the tone "Boredom" (2.5) and the tone "Conservatism" (3.0). This tone is characterized by the following. The person is, to a greater degree, a receiver of the flow of communication. They perceive the object but react to it sluggishly. In communicating with the object, they prefer to leave things as they are, tending more to preserve than to change. But if necessary, they will not object to changes.
The tone "Covert hostility" (1.2) is located between the tone "Fear" (1.0) and the tone "Anger" (1.5). A person in this tone is characterized by a slight excess of outgoing communication over incoming. And they are afraid of the situation changing, since this tone is close to the tone "Fear."
Many discoveries of recent decades occur at the intersections of different sciences, such as physical chemistry or chemical physics, which approach problems in a comprehensive way. This fully applies to the study of phenomena connected with human consciousness. In order to move further in this direction, it is necessary to take into account not only data from physiology and psychology, but also to consider human consciousness from the standpoint of the laws governing complex information systems, and to take into account data that can be drawn from non-traditional methods.
Contemporary psychologists do not consider information obtained from sources such as Osho, Hubbard, and a number of other researchers to be reliable material. In much the same way, Hubbard, in his own works, states that modern psychology is antisocial and warns Scientologists against using information obtained from psychologists. The truth is that there are serious researchers of human consciousness both among psychologists and among the proponents of non-traditional approaches. They use different terminology and hold different philosophical and religious views, and, in describing the same phenomena, explain them with different causes, but what unites all of them is a genuine desire to understand what human consciousness actually is.
I am not trying to idealize any of them. Hubbard, in his denial of the existence of objective reality, seems to me just as irrational as the scientists who deny the existence of certain phenomena simply because "that cannot be," according to their beliefs. For example, back in the nineteenth century, the French Academy of Sciences, at one of its sessions, decided not to consider reports of two kinds — about the invention of a perpetual motion machine and about stones falling from the sky — precisely because "that cannot be." While the first part of this decision still holds true today, the second part had to be reversed after the next meteor shower.
In order to make sense of the spiral-shaped pattern on the emotion scale described above, I had to conduct my own research, drawing equally on the works of psychologists and on the works of alternative researchers.
The totality of all the vibrations of the body.
High vibrations are bright thoughts (love — 150 Hz, gratitude — 90 Hz).
Low frequencies are destructive thoughts (pity — 3 Hz, grief — 0.1 Hz).
With positive emotions, the muscles relax and blood flows freely. A person's vibration frequency rises.
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