Death to emotions .

[china]

What do we mean by emotion? Is it a sensation, a reaction, a response of the senses? Hate, devotion, the feeling of love or sympathy for another - they are all emotions. Some, like love and sympathy, we call positive, while others, like hate, we call negative and want to get rid of. Is love the opposite of hate? And is love an emotion, a sensation, a feeling that is stretched out through memory? ...So, what do we mean by love? Surely, love is not memory. That is very difficult for us to understand because for most of us, love is memory. When you say that you love your wife or your husband, what do you mean by that? Do you love that which gives you pleasure? Do you love that with which you have identified yourself and which you recognize as belonging to you? These are facts; I am not inventing anything.It is the image, the symbol of "my wife" or "my husband" that we love, or think we love, not the living individual. I don't know my wife or my husband at all; and I can never know that person as long as knowing means recognition. For recognition is based on memory - memory of pleasure and pain, memory of the things I have lived for, agonized over, the things I possess and to which I am attached. How can I love when there is fear, sorrow, loneliness, the shadow of despair? How can an ambitious man love? And we are all very ambitious, however honorably.So, reallyto find out what love is, we must die to the past, to all our emotions, the good and the bad - die effortlessly, as we would to a poisonous thing because we understand it.

 

[jimmoyer]

Perhaps most emotion is tied to the ego ?

The ego, tender as a child, needy, sensitive to hurt, must defend itself.

 

[karrie]

emotion is one of the key forms of communication amongst people. Lose that, and you lose much of what makes humanity human.

 

[Praxius]

What do we mean by emotion? Is it a sensation, a reaction, a response of the senses?

To me it is a value given to a certain experience through our lives.

Hate, devotion, the feeling of love or sympathy for another - they are all emotions. Some, like love and sympathy, we call positive, while others, like hate, we call negative and want to get rid of. Is love the opposite of hate? And is love an emotion, a sensation, a feeling that is stretched out through memory? ...So, what do we mean by love? Surely, love is not memory. That is very difficult for us to understand because for most of us, love is memory. When you say that you love your wife or your husband, what do you mean by that? Do you love that which gives you pleasure? Do you love that with which you have identified yourself and which you recognize as belonging to you? These are facts; I am not inventing anything.It is the image, the symbol of "my wife" or "my husband" that we love, or think we love, not the living individual. I don't know my wife or my husband at all; and I can never know that person as long as knowing means recognition. For recognition is based on memory - memory of pleasure and pain, memory of the things I have lived for, agonized over, the things I possess and to which I am attached. How can I love when there is fear, sorrow, loneliness, the shadow of despair? How can an ambitious man love? And we are all very ambitious, however honorably.So, reallyto find out what love is, we must die to the past, to all our emotions, the good and the bad - die effortlessly, as we would to a poisonous thing because we understand it.

emotion is one of the key forms of communication amongst people. Lose that, and you lose much of what makes humanity human.

To me, being human is to think logically and objectively about the situations and experiences presented to us on a daily basis throughout our lives..... emotion is placed on those experiences to give those experiences an identity which relates to your own personal reasonings/understandings. I feel that for proper understanding of a situation one has to first look at the situation objectively and logically.... when we can not come to a logical or accurate conclusion which satisfies us in an unbiased manner, or our conclusions seem to contradict or conflict with something else, then we break the tie with what level of emotional effect that situation has on us and what our emotions/personality tell us it should be.

Without a balance of both forms of communication we lose what makes us human. If we rely too much on logic and facts then we're just robots....... if we rely too much on instinct and emotions, then we're just animals.

 

[china]

Thanks for all the above posts .It's 6:30am just got up ,perhaps will find time this evening to place the answers , thank you.