When one person laughs, everyone laughs. When someone cries, others cry. Emotions are felt sincerely indeed, but the question is what elicits the emotion? Are we feeling based on the event, or is it because someone else is expressing an emotion which then triggers our emotional response.
I was at a funeral recently, the priest, and then another person spoke, but there was no emotion in their voices or in the rest of the people, every eye was dry including the family. Then the son got up to speak, without even saying a word, (not that it mattered since he spoke English and the most people could not) he started to cry. Immediately the majority of people started crying as well. Even I could feel emotions stirring and I have no connection to the deceased, I was filming the video. That is amazing, her living or not living had, nor will have, nothing to do with my life. Nothing changed, nothing was said, and in a moment, a cool calm audience turned into a tearful crowd simply by one person who had everyone’s attention beginning to cry.
Think about how many times your laughter or tears have come after someone else started, similar to yawning. How then can we call that emotion real, even if it is sincerely felt? If it was real, it would not need to be triggered by another person, it would come of its own, and that is a real emotion. Contagious emotions are in fact intellectual.
This is why movies and TV shows have fake laughter. If the joke is not funny, since laugher is contagious, having some people laugh, the audience laughs. The same with crying, one person cries then everyone cries, this is the skill of the best actor.
Crying because you cannot help the emotional feeling, even if your emotions are triggered by another person’s actions who may just be a good actor, is as contagious as the common cold.
If you are a very strong emotionally independent person, you will not be effected by other people’s emotions which may be meant to manipulate you. The charity marketing specialists are very good at this. The importance of being emotionally independent and aware that your emotions are very often born in intellect is vital for you not to get caught up by the put on emotions of a good salesman or someone triggering your emotion to manipulate you.
The principle that the vast majority of our emotions are actually intellectual thought is simple enough to prove. Whatever you feel, could or would you have felt that if you did not receive some information that you identified in your mind, and made you ‘feel’ a certain way. For example, if you get an email that your friend’s father died and you understand those words, you will feel emotion. However, if the same information arrived in a message in a language that you could not understand, you may phonetically read the mail, but would not feel any emotion at all. You must first process the information and then react. If you got the email and understood it, you would possibly feel sad, but then moments later your friend called you up and was very happy and positive about the parents death, your emotions would change as well.
The information you receive is processed intellectually and your emotions change based on that. I am certain you can find many examples in your life or in other people. On the other hand, if you enter a very disgusting dirty public toilet in China or India that has not been cleaned in months and used by hundreds of thousands of people, immediately as the stench filled your senses, you would have a very clear, instant and pure reaction without intellect. There is no need to think and analyze, nor is there even time to do so before you feel sick. If right now you are getting the disgusting feeling brought on by the stink and mental image, you can see how your emotional reaction is purely intellectual, since you probably are in a clean environment. Emotions are not real, they are intellectual thought constructions.
Children prove that the vast majority of our emotions are not emotional at all, but purely intellectual. When a child falls down, unless it is a very serious injury, they do not react, they first look at the parent and wait for the parent reaction. If the parent jumps up and says; “Poor baby, are you OK, that must hurt so much etc etc” then the kid will cry, but if the parent just laughs it off, the kid will just get back to what they were doing. It is here we see how the mind and emotions work and form us into the person we are, highly sensitive or very robust.
This proves how emotions are not real, they are only contagious and intellectual. The value of this is to become free of the emotional swings that control our life. There are many people who live disastrous lives because their emotions are out of control, they are very emotionally dependent. What they depend on are thoughts or events they can identify and think about which then create emotions so they can feel. If life is calm they create dramas or disasters or identify with otherwise simple and neutral events, making them into earth shattering problems.
We can see this in people who fight vehemently over topics which really have no relevance to their life or anyones really, things that are simply normal and part of the world, and will pass unless you put yourself deliberately on the train track. How many times have you met someone who was terribly excited or angry about something which you found irrelevant and when you tried to find out why they felt this way, there was no valid reason other than, ‘because that guy told me about it and he was very passionate’.
A large part of our life is spent, or lost, in emotional reactions which are often negative and depressing. An event happens, it usually is minor, but in our mind we make it very big, and have a proportional emotional reaction. Not only is the emotion enlarged, but the time it lives on. Many people keep an event alive and feel emotionally effected for years after it has passed an no one even remembers it. They may claim that they feel very emotionally distressed, however it is only their intellectual activity keeping the emotion alive and ever growing. When you are depressed, if something happens, even for a moment that is very positive, in that moment your mood changes. If you had a great love for someone, and it was a pure emotion, even if you had a car accident or great stress at work, your love for that person, quite unrelated to the event at hand, would still be as strong. That is the difference between an intellectual and a real emotion.
The mark of the great snake oil salesman is to convey self-praising thoughts in a way that triggers emotions in the audience so they buy his products or join the flock of sheep by feeling great positive emotions in his presence, and also when they think of him later on. This is the trick that makes people victims of emotional manipulation without their knowing it, begin tricked into feeling and of course being told to trust their feelings.
Our emotions are very powerful, but there are two kinds, real and intellectual. When you know the difference and stop succumbing to intellectual emotions, you will have total power and control over your life.
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