| Feeling vs Emotion Love uplifts feeling toward superconscious awareness. Emotion, on the other hand, produces waves on the surface of consciousness, and disturbs its clarity of perception. Emotion is reactive. Like the ocean waves, the higher the wave of positive reaction, the deeper its corresponding trough of negativity. Another simile will be helpful also, in a different way: Emotion clouds our mental skies. When the cloud-covering is dense, we see things more dimly; the denser the clouds, the greater our spiritual darkness. Calm love, not excited emotion, is the key to wisdom, for love’s rays radiate a warmth that, like summer sunshine, banishes our mental clouds. Deep feeling, and not an absence of feeling, is the key to even intellectual clarity. To suppress feeling altogether, as a means of keeping our skies uncluttered, is to deaden our very desire to look up. We must refine our feelings, not destroy them. |
