Love and Emotion

 Love and Emotion

Love is more profound than emotion. The fundamental difference between the two is that love never causes pain, whereas emotion creates all the problems in the world. Emotion is the mind’s concept of love, which is conditioned by the feelings generated by the self-interest of the person. The difficulty is that, as human beings, we are raised from birth primed for emotional conflict as a consequence of our parents’ and society’s adherence to an emotional way of life.

Emotion is personal, which means it only affects a particular person at any time and is therefore not universal. In other words, it’s subject to external influences which are always changing. Emotion has no power of endurance, whereas love is an impersonal state and not subject to the caprice of outer forces. The mass of emotion gathered in time is imbued with an intelligence which arises from the consciousness inherent within the body. The nucleus of this emotional body soon establishes a position of mind which is affirmed by the prefix ‘I’. Its other name is self. This becomes a self–fixated entity which is likely to agitate the emotions and react at any moment to anything that crosses its desires.

The self consists of all the unhappiness gathered since birth which, unbeknown to the person, is the body of pain through which many of the choices and major decisions of life are made. Little wonder that so many lives unfold in a fragmented fashion, having to rectify the error of previous choices. It’s because of our emotional conditioning that we’ve become slaves to the spectrum of emotional feelings. Feelings arise as interpretations of past emotional experience and create movement in the mind. This disturbs the equilibrium of love, resulting in doubt and confusion.

Since emotional suffering is endemic, why is it so rare for someone to come out of the emotional tunnel? The reason is that people become dependent on their feelings as a measure of their love and wilfully refuse to give them up. Whereas love lets go every moment, emotion craves the repetition of experience. The source of frustration and all extremes of cruelty, greed and violence is emotion attached to existence. This is the uncomfortable and cloying feeling people live with in varying degrees. For most, this source of tension is a background vibration diffused through the distractions of the world. It’s only if a particular button is pressed that the negative energy rises to the surface – and usually released in an argument or exchange of emotional force with another.

Emotion is a contortion of matter that hooks into the vulnerable areas of the body, such as the soft tissues of the chest, shoulders and throat. As inner stillness penetrates the resistance of the self, the weight of emotion is gradually reduced. When connected to the source of love there’s no desire to hurt another, whether physically or emotionally. Real love demands nothing from the world, only to serve the good of the whole. Those afflicted with deep emotional negativity are unable to feel anything, apart from their own frustration at not being able to connect with love. To compensate, they make it their business to make others suffer and, in so doing, reduce them to the same level of hopelessness as their own.

The idea is to transform throughout the life, as much as possible, the backlog of human experience into the present. This is done through the transformation of emotion into love. Love is not an emotion but a state of being which never changes, and is the same for everyone who enters this purified space within the body. Why, then, does love appear to leave us, often at the moment of supreme pleasure and delight? Love never departs; it’s man and woman who leave love and are unable to dwell in its rarefied air for long.

Nevertheless, everybody touches the realm of pure love, even if it’s just fleetingly. This is because love is our stock as beings of the earth; without its restorative quality we’d be unable to function in our daily activities in the world. But without the stress and conflict that only close relationships can produce, there would be no way to detach from the pain of personal love. To transcend emotion and unite with love itself is the true destiny of everybody on earth.

Lance Kelly