The emotions that we are familiar with is usually very disastrous. For e.g. a person in love is constantly under the fear that any moment he or she might be betrayed. The moment somebody is in love with any person, he or she feels insecurity, there is always a fear that someone can take advantage. Heart-break is many times unbearable!
Love may be a soft emotion, but when we look at other violent emotions, such as anger, hatred, jealousy and fear, all these emotions affect self and other people. You lose intellect, balance and right thinking such that one can become destructive.
Therefore, people are always wary of emotions, and the only thing they think in the name of culturing of emotions is not to be emotional, as emotions are bad! Emotions they believe are enemy to intellect and rationale.
Love may be a soft emotion, but when we look at other violent emotions, such as anger, hatred, jealousy and fear, all these emotions affect self and other people. You lose intellect, balance and right thinking such that one can become destructive.
Therefore, people are always wary of emotions, and the only thing they think in the name of culturing of emotions is not to be emotional, as emotions are bad! Emotions they believe are enemy to intellect and rationale.
The right or the real way of looking at it is that the emotion called love & compassion are born in a child before any other faculty is born. Not only human beings have love, even animals have it, and scientists say even plants can recognize emotions. In other words, we are born with emotion of love and we grow with love. A child's love for the parents and the elders, love towards the animals, love for the nation etc. is so common. There are so many things about love which are good. In reality, we need to understand what love is, and many times the experience of loving someone is something which makes you feel that the world is heaven, that the other person is God. Probably the misunderstanding or wrong understanding is the cause for this confusion. Therefore, we need to understand that love itself is not bad but probably two things, need to be understood. One is that, emotion is something we are born with, and secondly, our understanding of emotions is incorrect as we don't have any proper training or teaching to understand emotions in our education system. The emotions are looked down upon, and hence you are refusing to see an important reality of life. Brain scientists divide brain saying right brain, left brain etc. I'm not very passionate about that since I am not a medical person but my own interest is to see how we can make the best use of all our human experiences.
In my view, emotion is a very loaded word, but in Sanskrit we have a beautiful word called Bhavana, which represents the spontaneous feeling that arises without any support of logic. Dog loves you not because you are intelligent or wealthy. This is similar to a child smiling at you naturally because the child is born with the feeling of love. This only shows that we are born with love, and love is something which has an ability to elevate us and fills us with joy and satisfaction. We are transported to a higher level of consciousness. This experience can make us feel that the world around us is heaven, and we are filled with presence of divinity all around. The technique to achieve this is called Bhakti.
Bhakti therefore is not to find God, but to raise our perception to see divinity everywhere. That is the exalted expression that the Upanishad sage says “ishavasyam idam sarvam, all this is nothing but god”.
The purpose of Bhakti is to see that we can make the best use of these emotions which can take us to a better understanding and blissful way of living. When you are in love, things look beautiful and acceptable.
Intellect divides, emotions can bring us together.
All our suffering is because of our constant complaints. In the same situation one who has no complaints is fine, whereas for the other with complaints, everything is miserable. In Bhavana one can rise from the complaint mindset, to tolerate and accept, to appreciate and finally see the divinity in all. It is this Bhavana which helps us see the world as a heaven, and all are the manifestation of same divinity.
There are violent emotions or feelings such as anger, hatred, jealousy, greed etc. When the pure Bhavana is corrupted by our ego, then they come out as these violent feelings. They not only destroy the bond but they also destroy oneself. Spiritual journey or Bhakti yoga is not to find God, but to dissolve the ego.
We have such examples of Bhaktas who have walked the path of devotion, like Mirabai, Kabir das, Thyagaraja, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa to mention a few. Rather than dismissing feelings under the title of emotions, let us enrich our being with the path of one of the most important streams of yoga called Bhakti yoga.
By,
Yogashree.N.V.Raghuram
Aug 2021