Understanding our Emotions

 As a Buddhist I have evaluated many aspects of the human condition that drive us to who we are. Buddhism tells us that all pain is cause by selfish craving. If you consider that all our pain comes from the loss of items or people we crave this has a lot of validity.

When I evaluate all of our emotions I realize there are positive and negative emotions. Positive emotions exist like happiness, love and amusement. Negative emotions exist lise anger, guilt and sadness. I am not suggesting we live without emotions like those of the sci-fi community who love Spock the Vulcan. Even though there are negative emotions they do have a function in our day-to-day function. However I believe that there are 3 negative emotions that, if left unchecked, are incredible dangerous to us.

The 3 worst emotions we live with are jealousy, anger and fear. Fear is necessary for us to survive. Without fear we would walk into the fire. Never should we engage in anything dangerous without fear since it keeps us grounded and can keep us sharp. The problem is we give in too easily and people use fear to control us or sell us on poor ideas. How many times have we approved of a politicians actions because they inspired us with the FEAR of the alternative, or to buy a product based on the FEAR of how the competing products will kill us. Given the rising fear we give in to ideas that normally we would shy away from.

Anger also has its uses because it can give us strength to do something we would normally be too afraid to do. The problem is we let anger take over and lose all wisdom and go into a frenzy. No longer does wisdom or intelligence guide us. We may be stronger but now we are sloppy and reckless and even sometimes hurt those close to us in the process.

Lastly is jealousy. Truth is I see little positive benefit from jealousy and it can drive us to do many other levels of sadness or greed to acquire that which we are jealous of. Again we make so many bad or selfish decisions simply because we allowed jealousy to drive us.

In the end, whatever type of person you are or want to be we should be doing our best to just improve. Understanding the negative impacts of some of our drives can help us improve. Don't allow Fear, Anger or Jealousy make you less then who you are or could be.