Feelings of intense fear, rage, sorrow, and exhilaration are alike a step outside the limits of reason, of "clear" thought. Thus, to think clearly, turn off emotion and be cool- and clear- headed.
What's wrong with this picture?
What's wrong with this picture is simple and precise: it is the denial of feeling which brings about its exaggeration and ultimately its compulsive and irrational nature. The feelings that sweep people off their feet in an exaggerated wave of irrationality are those exact feelings which have been parked outside the gentle center of awareness, as a result of a judgment against them by that center -- "too much to handle", "too painful", "confusing", "overwhelming", and so on. These are judgments which children are prone to, both because of the crushing belief that they are their bodies and therefore under-sized and incompletely formed, and because of the constant reminders foisted on them by so-called adults that they don't know and have to learn and must be protected and might get hurt. Protecting bodies, as a policy, is lethal to the soul in some ways, because it convinces a being that careful restraint is the only right path of action.
Clear thought is accompanied by clear emotion; clear emotion is the willingness to feel what one is feeling NOW. If one meets the moment with that willingness, he will not thereafter be condemned to feel what he was feeling THEN but refused to.
It is a stack of refused feelings that make up irrationality. Whether these refused feelings include unconsciousness depends on their provenance, and certainly those that do contain unconsciousness are the most persistently refused. Hence, the relief of engram running -- not because of the data it recovers but because it enables the conscious will to re-contact its own creative act, its decision about existence at that time.
The only feeling in the final analysis is the feeling of Self-as-Source creating for the experience of Self-as-Result. That flow of energy is infinite in its variety.
We could use the term mis-feeling to describe the backlog effect of carrying out all the suppressed feelings that hang around waiting to be felt; these are not "what one is feeling now", exactly. They are "feeling now what one felt then because one can't resist it forever." The rage of the psycho in the bell-tower or lacing a McDonald's with heavy artillery is apparently directed at others and actually directed at self. The others are those who refused the space and time to experience in -- abusive parents, oppressive teachers, suppressive priests, and so on.
The self-directed wrath is aimed at the creating one is doing -- creating against feeling while creating the feelings to be felt.
Mis-emotion was described at one point as emotion not appropriate to the present-time circumstances. This is a handy definition in the normal human run of events but once one relinquishes the conviction that one is a born, body-bonded human, the nature of present-time vs.. other time gets a little fuzzy.
So in the place of emotion vs. misemotion we would do well to use the terms feeling vs. mis-feeling. Specifically, feeling is the complete immediate appreciation of perception. Mis-feeling is the refusal to appreciate perception because of judgments about its credibility, force, magnitude, acceptability, goodness or badness, beauty or ugliness, or any other opinion. Feeling hampered by opinion is mis-feeling.
Thus in the lexicon of harm only those who insist on opinion against experience need apply for employment as harmful. The murderer's sin lies in his entanglements against himself, which so magnifies and distorts his ordinary heart's capacity for healthy anger. The rapist is a grotesquery of exaggerations of ordinary love and deep, respectful passion denied by misguided judgment. The judgments can be disguised as religious truths or moral codes or peer pressure; but the harm they do out weighs any cuteness of category.
Open feeling in the instant is the path of total integrated rationality.