Emotions are illogical, that’s why I am dead inside.
Emotions are socially key, and help higher organism bond and procreate more effectively hence ensuring species survival and also the bad emotions are good in a variety of situations, like if you are attacked by a lion fear and anger might be very helpful. In short evolution.
Hmm…interesting. How does that make you feel?
Yes, emotions are a kind of paroxysm, a madness. They override reason and so they feel like we are losing control.
The goal is to not deny them but to harness them…to control them…to use them.
Now why has the emotion of “love” become the very definition of “spirituality” and liberal enlightenment?
Why is even God equated with its power?
And how do you arrive at that conclusion Mr. Star-Trek…?
I was joking, but humour is illogical Captain?
I love this gif.
That eyebrow could sharpen pencils. 
If I was being serious I would of said women are illogical. No I mean often left unchecked emotions are illogical.
If uncontrolled emotions were illogical then why do we have them? An existence with completely controlled emotions? How is that logical? So your first kid is born and you say “That is fine”. that kid wrecks your very expensive car, you say" please be more careful" . You get the best darn cut of meat you ever had and you just eat it. Sure we have to control them sometimes but, most of the time? No way. That would take the flavor out of living.
Because they circumvent reason and make the organism behave in ways that often go against its immediate interests.
For instance a mother bear sacrificing her life for her cubs is irrational, given that she can give birth again.
Anger also puts the individual in a state of unreasoned (re)activity.
Love is called madness, has been equated to blindness or a disease.
Emotion and reason. One of them is a tool for the other. I wonder what can be inferred about somebody’s worldview by considering which one they regard as the tool…
If the term “tool” troubles you then try the word “method”.
I wonder what can be inferred about a world-view that makes divides emotions into good and bad or that places them on equal footing with reason.
Tool doesn’t trouble me at all.
And I don’t put the two on equal footing…
Bears don’t react irrationally, they react instinctively. As usual, you’re making that judgment call because your brain has the cognitive ability to identify alternative outcomes that the bear’s brain doesn’t have. You have a history of making references to animal behavior in order to support your specific views of human behavior, when it’s convenient. Everybody knows we’re also animals and that there can be (somewhat general) correlations related to evolved instinct made between our behavior and a bear’s in certain situations, depending upon a lot of different factors. But often the need to identify and qualify all those factors renders comparisons between really different species pretty much moot. So one can’t help wonder why you continue to make such observations. It seems to me more appropriate to consider only the human species’ evolutionary history when considering adaptive responses to stimuli or perceived problems, since our brains have evolved along with the rest of our bodies.
Okay, so: “We care about what we need and we are indifferent towards what we don’t.”
Got it.
But…if it’s true that we care about what we need, do you think I need to be a whore or do I just want to be one, as you claim? I’ve never conducted that particular contemplation and since apparently you have, maybe you could advise.
But…if it’s true that we care about what we need, do you think I first should know whether I need to become non-existent? Maybe, rather, it’s your need. You apparently cared about suggesting it to me, so maybe it’s about your need to express anger. Because we care about what we need and we are indifferent towards what we don’t.
I didn’t state anything about a “wish to return to emptiness.” Tsk, tsk, Sattie, you’re losing track of who said what again. It was you who said it. Seriously, look back a couple posts. See what I mean about making shit up and attributing it to the person you’re trying to…well, who knows what you’re trying to do on here. Must have something to do with your needs.
But…if both the viruses and I are already part of the – how do you put it? – the "oneness of the universe, and the viruses and I have our evolutionary histories within that same universe, then hasn’t the “oneness” thing (whatever that means to you) already been accomplished? Why do I need to go dip my finger in a petrie dish and lick it? That doesn’t change anything about our “oneness”, unless of course you can only accept that it’ll be a better, closer “oneness” and my getting infected and, presumably, ending up either sick or dead because of my immune response is something you care about. But then, because we care about what we need, your desire to see this happen would reflect your need, not mine.
Oh yeah? Where you going? Inquiring (okay, stalking) minds wanna know. 
Oh sweetie, did ya think I didn’t appreciate your attention?
No, I figured you did, since so far on this ILP visit, you’ve only called me a whore. So it appears you’re either softening, afraid of the moderators or just warming up. Hey, maybe my womanly antics are working on you! Watch out, we icky women can be devious in our machinations, play with a good man’s head (the one purportedly containing the brain…I mean the one supporting the neck).
Well, it’s better than spending paragraphs making vague generalizations or twisting around other people’s words in order to then spend some more paragraphs saying nothing. And I refer to the nothing that’s already been said, mind you!
No problem, since you’ll just make up one of your own and then claim that was my point, anyway. I don’t get too attached to the stuff. Sheesh, my experience in exchanges with you over time has at least taught me that!
What is “it”? If you meditate, you should try not to get to involved with “it”. Prolonged focus on “it” will frustrate you and probably end up giving you a headache. If thoughts of “it” come along, practice not holding onto them in your mind, just let them come up and the pass on away.
Animals react instinctively and although most instincts are preprogrammed reactions (fight/flight) to specific stimuli some later evolutionary necessities create instinctive (re)actions meant to suppress or totally disrupt this original (re)action.
A bear protecting her young doesn’t sit there to contemplate the pros and the cons nor is it taken over by a deep love for her cubs because she sees herself in them, she reacts as she was preprogrammed to, despite the fact that if she were to rationalize the situation opting to die rather than sacrifice a brood, when she can have ten more, is an irrational choice.
But her first irrational instinctive act happened way before that; it started when despite her natural urge to flee she suffered the approach and penetration of a much larger male.
Her body had to trick itself into accepting this foreign member inside her.
Were she to rationalize the situation, again, would she choose such risky behavior, given that this would also put her in a later situation of choosing to die protecting the consequences of this momentary lapse in reason?
Now we can say that the bear has metaphysical considerations in mind, and that she did so knowing that she was mortal and so she chose to risk it just to ensure that at least half her genes carried on, but I highly doubt it.
Maybe having considered her mortality she chose to not enjoy what little time she had, feeding and frolicking and playing in the river…you know like many human females do, buy I guess she wasn’t as progressive as you and your lot.
The bear was more traditional, caught up in paternalistic myths concerning the role of females and genders and so on and so forth. .
As for meditation…it can be as pleasant as a drink or a fuck.
Nice distraction…brain flooding with endorphins.
But if you take it as some mystical connection with your emptiness and a transcendental relief or some profound magical event, then I suggest you put a bullet through your brain, if your aim is good enough to hit small targets, and enter into an eternal meditative state with the cosmos, where nobody can disturb your peace nor shatter your bliss.
Outside of that, you keep on talking from both sides of your mouth and you call that open-mindedness.
Like I said, if you truly love nature, the otherness, and you wish to open yourself up to the universe and to the eternal consciousness of being, you should take an autoimmune suppressant and enjoy your intimate contact with a virus or a disease.
Drop your walls, dear, open up, be fearless like acturus rising or all of you New Age chicks that have discovered the esoteric brilliance of exotic spirituality (a product of a masculine mind, no doubt)…why so afraid?
Live up to your own principles. Stop being so prejudice and intolerant. Love all creatures big and small…or is your love only directed to other human beings?
If so fuck a bum, screw your neighbor, open your legs, spread them and your spirit wide dear, let the love in…why so picky and choosy and discriminating?
How dare you?!
Isn’t the bum and you a manifestation of one and the same consciousness or emptiness or whatever you call it?
So let the bum fuck you up the arse. His penis is your penis; your arse is his arse. In essence it is the unity masturbating…no it is fucking itself, which is a good idea for you.
Tear down your walls, dear…why so defensive?
Why all closed up and scared to let go?
Spread your cheeks, let the “love” in; unite with the universe.
Why are you so anal about it?
Embrace your emptiness.
Let the otherness fulfill you or fill you full.
Because their benefit outweighs their detriment in evolutionary terms.
Most people concentrate on the bad side of emotional excess also. What causes us to give a million pounds to a group of people in some country we have never been and whos people we have never met?
No one has said that have they, we are just trying to explain why they exist and their utility. Good and evil are irrelevant. But you can make a case that they make us more social and more able to co-operate in groups, and also acquisitive and fearful of strangers.
Yes, but everythnig you just menions is a later utility.
It begins as an evolutionary method of overcoming a previous one: fight/flight for the purpose of turning a single-cell division into a heterosexual combination of genes and multi-cell reproduction.
The later social implications are an outcrop of this and they reflect multi-cellular cooperation.
Multi-cell evolve to multi-individuals.
The emotion of love is so fundamental that it has become a mystical force for most. In fact it’s only function is to enable heterosexual copulation and the subsequent rearing of dependent offspring…and later this turns into social behavior and the tolerance of alien organisms as part of a cooperative group, in larger brained organisms.
The subsequent evolution of ideologies that condemn ego and self so as to promote an identification with a larger ego a bigger sense of self, akin to assimilation, results in kin selection, tribes, city-states, nation-states, the concept of humanitarianism or God.
It feels like a relief because it unburdens the particular mind from responsibility and the risks of self-preservation.
They refer to it, the romantic mindless ones, as an “expansion”…an “enlightenment”…as the organism feels lighter. The natural fear associated with caution is shared, some comfort due to habituation ensues - herd psycholgoy comes to be.
Now this social behavior requires a certain degree of self-restraint or self-censorship of submission. A compromise.
Especially in organisms where social strategies develop after a period of independent evolution has occurred and the organism has a more developed sense of self. With the others, like bees, ants, termites, the process is easy because each individual had little sense of self, self-consciousness, and so it was integrated, assimilated easier.
I call this process feminization (if you notice in these lesser species the members are all female) because it utilizes the same evolutionary methods that enable heterosexual copulation…particularly risky and costly to the female in a species, under natural circumstances. I call it feminization not because I hate females but because the method involves utilizing the already evolved method that makes heterosexual reproduction possible…even amongst non-social species.
The traits the female requires to carry out her natural function - which is why she is called female to begin with - are the same as the ones required to endure and be incorporated into larger unities.
The feminists like preserving the title of female while selecting what aspects apply is the height of human absurdity.
If females or men wish to create a total uniformity, equality, then the notion of sex has to be done away with altogether. In fact this is what is occurring at a slow rate.
Social (mimetic) evolution happens at a slower rate than genetic evolution. Much of the stress and confusion is a result of this discrepancy in evolutionary speeds. This is another topic.
Of course man intervenes in this process, decreases the risk and costs to females in particular and so produces promiscuity the loss of severity and so makes of sex into a game with no real consequences.
Then the individuals feel unfulfilled.
More communication in the world and true.
One author writes, “We use the word daily to describe something that can be readily identified, a definite feeling in the mind that is both a reaction and a driving force.”
They didn’t evolve for any inherent reason, and they serve no inherent purpose.
Nothing, unless you or others would like them to serve some purpose. To that end, it is important to realize that emotions are not mere givens, beyond our control. Nor can they be overtly controlled. So there’s an art to establishing a workable relationship with our emotions. For example, unbridled anger is literally blinding, and a person under the influence of unbridled anger will often destroy that which he doesn’t actually want to destroy. So it’s a form of stupidity. On the other hand, a person who has suppressed anger has also engaged in a form of stupidity. He is unaware of what is actually occurring in his mind and therefore cannot use it to his advantage. A healthier relationship to anger is possible.
That hits it - a feeling, a sentiment; emotions are essentially chemicals/drugs that the body-brain manufactures. We then experience these drugs as subjective feelings, passions, sentimental states. The essence, it seems, of these states is that they are imminent, non-rational (do not obtain of thought/image-representation in the mind) and very linked into perspective… a single emotion can alter our entire perspective, on everything. Another interesting trait of emotions is their short-lives nature, as well as their spontaneity - you cannot “will” an emotion like a thought, although certainly we do have some indirect control over our emotions.
I would disagree here. It seems to me that emotions, being such powerful ways of relaying information from the unconscious/sensory structural mind immediately and recognizably up to the self-awareness, in terms of perceived environment, is highly useful for survival. The sight of a predator elicits fear; the sight of a potential mate elicits sexual desire. I think these more “raw” or primary emotions probably evolved in order to facilitate group cohesion among early man, in that we developed the social instincts such as compassion, empathy, anxiety. These more subtle emotional states are refinements of the most basic, more physical states of pleasure/pain (and desire/aversion, i.e. the imagining future states, expectation, of pleasure/pain).
I think man has been a progression over his evolutionary history of possessing more and more refined, precise emotional states. Not that this is the “purpose” of his evolution, of course, but I do think it is one side effect of it. We require more and more precise and imminent ways of communicating subtle situational cues and needs t ourselves, in how we judge and react to social settings. Thinking is insufficient in this regard, as the nuances and fluid, vague nature of these situations/needs cannot be rendered into images in the thinking representing mind. So imminent awareness is called for. In this sense, emotions attain a unique status as perhaps the best (least prone to error, most immediate and genuine) means of communicating our inner states (of unconsciousness/preconsciousness/needs/desires/conditionings) directly to our self-awareness, to the subject itself.
In this regard, emotions, being such wonderful facilitators in this regard, tend to intermingle with our deeper human ideas, meanings, values, and cohere there; emotional states such as happiness, love, compassion, novelty become their own raison d’etre in the mind, as they move into a causally primary position among the hierarchy of our desires/motivating impulses. Emotional states come to tend to define what it is to have human meaning, to be-meaningful, satiated in terms of our self-actualization as human beings.
In other words, emotions were/are (along with thinking/ideal representation) an essential aspect of the process of the sublimation of the initial pleasure/pain states into a more refined, imaginal-fantastical happiness/sadness, and from there diverging into all of the subtler, more precise states to reflect the deeper intricacies of the human experience/subjectivity… we are (generally speaking) with time becoming grander, deeper, wider, more comprehensive, in terms of our self-experience, our awareness, our whole subjective world. We grow more and more able to contain vast, great experiences and perceptions within ourselves.
Very true. Good and bad are relative terms to the valuer, to whatever the valuing subject deems good or bad, consciously or organically speaking. These are fairly consolidated when we look at pleasure/pain and happiness/sadness in terms of organic cohesion/health, seeking what is beneficial for the organism and avoiding what is dangerous/harmful for it. Beyond this, to the higher realms of more subtle emotional states and the social spheres (real or imagined) in which we exist and to which these emotions have come exist as responses-reactions, the good/bad of emotions dissolves into the subjectivity of our relative abstract experiences; the needs of the present moment, the associations more salient in the mind, our limited perceptions of things, our conditional expectations, and of course all of the diverse psychological mechanisms of utility operating just barely within and below the conscious level, all of these things determine the value-judgments we will ascribe to our various emotions. Generally speaking if we experience an emotion as pleasurable we deem it good, the inverse, bad, but this gets more muddled when we ascribe utility value to these emotions - such as, pleasure is good but too much of it is bad, or can lead to detrimental effects in my life. Likewise, some discomfort/pain is necessary in order to achieve my long-term goals, or in order to function as I have been socially conditioned to think is necessary or normal.
In essence, emotions are both good and bad, as well as neither - they serve a function of rendering up to self-conscious awareness those more undefinable and unthinkable inner states of desires/needs/conditionings/habits/values/meanings/expectations that all underlie our essential human experiences, and in many ways are determining of them. Emotions are a valuable, essential and wonderful part of the human experience. Without emotions, what would life be like for us? Ask someone on heavy mood stabilizers; everything is “bland”, the same, no highs, no lows, just “there.” Without emotion we lose our primary means of attachment to life, to others, to ourselves, and therein goes most of our potential to create and sustain human meaning for ourselves.