Love and Emotions: The Cause and Effect / PART ONE

Understand love and you will have unlocked the door to a meaningful life. Let us begin by dismissing the greatest misnomer of all; that love is an emotion. This misconception has surely been the center of many philosophical and religious debates. However, love is the cause while emotions are the effect. To the learner, love is the stimuli and emotions are the mental responses that inevitably leads to action. To better understand love we must examine emotions.

The Anatomy of an Emotion

Emotions can be defined as *a mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling of sorrow... *(for more info. please refer to http://www.answers.com/topic/emotion#ixzz1Q0YkgihG

An emotion motivates, signal others, and is used for internal signalling:

Motivates: It’s a call to action. It directly prompts you to take action.

Signal Others: We signal others by our visual expressions. This help others determine what action to take. If someone appears angry, then staying away from them might be the better choice.

Internal Signalling: Emotions have left such an imprint in our memories that they cannot be  disassociated from their respective event. Fear wont let you forget that touching fire is a bad idea. Nor will it permit you to forget the  warmth of an embrace. Internal signalling is your power of recall. It helps you to reason things out; to take better action.

After everything has been said and done, we are left with the fundemental purpose of emotions; "Emotions are to motivate you to directly or indirectly take action

Here is how the process works:

1. You are faced with a Stimuli or a cause (such as approaching a fire);

2. Assessment is made (such as danger);

3. Emotional response (fear);

4. Action or reaction (flee); and

5. Result (survived)

Stimulus bombard us each moment. Some are intense while the majority are “flatline”. Emotions are fleeting, forever changing to its stimulus. It is as if they were standing on deck waiting to be queued by a stimuli. The emotions live fast and sometime die hard, only to be replace by another. Now does this sound like love? Was love meant to be temporary and subjugated to other emotions? Isn’t true love forever? For many, love has been nothing more then a whimsical sentiment clinging to happiness for refuge. It's impossible and delusional to expect happiness 24/7, however unconditional love demands that you invest each moment to it!

We will conclude this topic on my next blog.

© 2011 Unlimited Harmony - Tricotomas