Expansion

Reading through the Common Ground Magazine I picked up while volunteering, I came across an article on emotional addiction. All About how we trade expansion for only survival. From Evolve Your Brain by Joe Dispenza:

Feelings are the past memories of experiences; learning is making new memories that have new feelings...

The explanation is simple. A new experience evokes a new feeling. An unknown experience might expose us to an unknown feeling, so it initiates the survival mechanism of the personality. Because we have not experienced this novel event, the 'self' runs through its databases of prior experiences, looking for familiar patterns and associations to forcast what feelings that situation might bring. The neural nets attempt to evaluate the future. When we run out of options, we will simply steer clear of the unfamiliar experience. The chance to experience a novel opportunity is now overrideen by the firing of our old neural hardware. In other words, it is outside the limits of our comfort zome. And so, we fear the unknown.

Sharing weekend stories over dinner my friend and I agreed, a drink in hand really does facilitate new experiences...