Tag Archives: Thoughts

Love and Other Emotions – My thoughts on the subject

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

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The first mistake that I think people make is they think emotions are binary. Are you in love, yes or no; do you like something, yes or no; do you hate that person, yes or no; whatever the emotion people tend to think it is on or off, yes or no, binary.

I don’t think love, or any emotion is binary. They are analog, filled with millions of shades and intensities. There are an infinite number of ways to feel the same emotion.

Digging deeper into this, I also don’t believe emotions are distinct. They all sprout from the same well.  I almost think of it as a color wheel. Sure there are groups, reds, blues, yellows – same as emotions where you have groups of love, hate, happy, and sorrow. But they all come from the same place.

On the pin wheel there are infinite shades or hues in between the colors, just like emotions. The difference between Liking someone and loving someone is a different shade of the same emotion.

The other variable is intensity. If we move from a color wheel to a bulb that can be dialed to any shade/hue, we are now closer to describing emotions. Not only are there shades of love, there are intensities of it. I can love two things or people, and potentially even have roughly the same shade of love, but have different intensities.

Let’s put this into some context – You love your mother, you use the same word to describe how you feel about your girlfriend, your child, your favorite shirt, etc. How can they all mean the same thing? They don’t, not exactly at least, they are different shades, and potentially different intensities.

I mentioned something critical just now – context. Before we continue we need to understand, context is critical to how we understand things. Everything we here, see, taste, touch, feel, etc. we compare it to our previous experiences.

To demonstrate this, imagine someone was born in a cave, pitch black, and lived there his whole life. Now imagine one day someone lit a candle. He would consider that the brightest thing he had ever seen in his entire life. Clearly nothing exists that is brighter than that. Next week someone brings in a 40 watt light bulb and now that is the brightest thing that has ever existed. Walk him out into a very bright summer day and you have blown his world.

The same goes with emotions. You are a kid and get a crush on someone, you have never felt that emotion before, but you are sure it is love. It feels intense. How many times has a teenage said to an adult “you don’t understand love like this!” Then one day they fall in love and look back and laugh.

The other thought I have is that we have an infinite supply of these emotions. That is not to say you will always feel the same about someone, every interaction we ever have with that person adds context, shifting the shade of the emotion in one way or the other, and even intensity.

To put this in perspective, I thought I knew what love felt like, regardless of it’s shade. Then one day my first son was born. I realized in terms of intensity everything I had felt to that moment was a candle and he was staring directly into the sun. The intensity overwhelmed me, crushed me.

Then an interesting thing happened. I had another child on the way. I can’t describe the torrent of emotions. One of which was actually betrayal. As odd as it sounds I felt like I was somehow either going to be cheating out my first son, or the next one on the way. I thought I surely had reached the limit of my ability to love, so another son would mean either I would love the first one less to make up for it, or not love the second one as much.

Well, the day came, and that’s when I realized I had infinite capacity. I loved the second one with just as much intensity. I am not saying the shades were identical, but they sure as hell we the same intensity. I realized I could have 100 children and have the capacity to love them all with the same intensity. Now patience to deal with them – that is an entirely different thing!

I realized though, that this doesn’t just end there. I can hate multiple people, and love multiple people. I don’t think any two people or things are ever the exact same shade or intensity, but I can have feelings for many people.

Thus love, and other emotions are analog, not digital.

Life and Death – My thoughts on the subject

02 Wednesday Apr 2014

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Before I start on death, I should explain my views of life. I feel that we are more than the sum of our parts; in short, we have a soul of some sort. Our brains are nothing more than complicated electro-chemical batteries. A thought, in its simplest form is an electron passing between two nerve bundles. Say I want to raise my arm, an electron in my brain fires, sending the impulse down to arm, which responds. But the question is this – what causes the electron to fire in the first place?  I believe there is an underlying force, an element of our being that we cannot see, nor explain with current technology, and perhaps technology is the wrong place to look for the answers.

It is assumed by modern science that all matter and energy in the universe began from 1 single entity. It then it seems logical to me that we are still a part of that single entity, that we are a part of a larger unit, in this life, and after.

To make my thoughts easier to explain, and understand, let me use a metaphor. Imagine that underlying force I spoke about as a great single ocean. Obviously in life we are all different, in one way or another, but how different? Consider our bodies as glasses, or some other container, but each container shaped differently.

In life, we are filled with the life force of the ocean; we are born with little of the force, but as we grow, as our “containers” grow, it fills more and more with the fluid, and in death, our container is broken, and our force returned to the ocean, to become one with everything once again. When this force is in the “container” we would consider that our soul.

To expand on the metaphor, consider the base of the container as our more important functions, and the lesser functions towards the top – if u crack the top of the container, you might lose some of the force, but it can be repaired, and fluid returned. However, the lower the crack, the more serious, and the harder it is to fix.

The reason I make this distinction, is because I don’t agree with the most common theory of the soul – that when it passes to “the other side” we retain out individuality. It is human nature to want to preserve our individuality, but consider this: a person has an accident, and his container is cracked, namely his brain is damaged. This would be towards base of the container and thus serious.

I personally have known people who simply are no longer the same person after suffering an injury to the head. If our soul is our personality, how can damaging our body have an effect on our personality? Therefore, it seems logical that our individuality is a combination of our soul and our body/container.

So if when we die, our container is destroyed permanently, what of our personality? Here is the focal point of this my thoughts. I believe that when we die, and our container is broke, our force is returned to the ocean. This next part is the hardest to explain, and describe, but I don’t think our personality is completely lost.

If you pour a glass of water into an ocean, it is dispersed and mingles with the rest of the ocean. Some of that water may wash on the shore of the US, and some in the shore of Australia, it is spread all across the ocean, the essence of what was in the glass has mixed with the ocean, it adds back to the whole from where it came. It becomes one with the rest of the ocean, and yet, still it is the same force that filled the glass.

In other words the force that was the force that was in a person, what contributed to his individuality is added to the ocean. It spreads, its knowledge is added to the ocean, and at the same time, it becomes able to draw on the knowledge of the rest of the ocean. Everything become one thought, or essence, and still there are currents – signs of individuality

All of our loved ones before us, all that they were, are part of the ocean; and we are reunited with them, in the most intimate way possible. We become one with them and share share all of our memories, all of our sense of being, everything that made us, us.

So ultimately I don’t think we retain our individuality, but I don’t think it is exactly lost either.