As for "putting things in the right level"...
Please read Re: MD Things and levels Christopher McClain (Sat Jul 28 2001 - 18:01:13 BST)
http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/0107/0228.html
Pigeonholing is a dangerous thing.
Emotions seem to transcend the static breakdown of moral evolution. There are biological emotions, social emotions, and intellectual emotions, at least. Consciousnous, too, exists on many levels. There is biological consciousness, social consciousness, intellectual consciousness, and the buddha (whose name means "awakened one" with the root "buddh" which means awake) achieves dynamic consciousness.
Consciousness (and I do not mean self-consciousness at this time) is not a trivial matter. It is true that it is complementary to "sleep", but the level depends upon the type of consciousness. It is a property, I think related to the ethics-morals-emotions trinity introduced in the above referenced post, but at this time I am not quite sure how. The reason is that ethics, morals, and emotion may or may not always go together. For examples, ants exhibit social behavior, but possibly not social emotions (although I am not 100% certain). And self-consciousness may be the first spark of intellectual consciousness.
So now I am reminded of the saying, "Think before you act." The necessity of this statement suggests that there is often acting without thinking, so perhaps my concept of morals (behavior) need not depend upon ethics (ideas). Perhaps on level X (inorganic, biological, social, intellectual, dynamic), first come X morals, then X ethics, then X emotion. And perhaps X consciousness requires a bit more than X morals, but maybe not quite X emotion.
The idea needs more thought, but the point is that I don't think emotions are restricted to the social level. There is more here than meets the eye, and we should not be all too comfortable attaching labels to ideas and placing them in our pre-sorted, pre-labled storage containers. Pirsig fell into this trap a few times, and we should be careful of the same thing.
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