Which is the purest emotion?
One of my colleagues had this written on his whiteboard – ‘Every Emotion has impurities only revenge is pure’, and when I passed by, he asked my opinion on it.
This got me thinking since frankly I never really thought of it before. I mean .. Revenge well… revenge implies anger. But that is as far as my thought had gone to prior to this. I never actually thought of revenge as an emotion.
And I never had any opportunities to take revenge on other people either. So I am not really in a position to say if it really does feel pure or not. Thinking of it now, I guess I should have asked him whether he had any previous experience with revenge 🙂
Emotions
We encounter a wide range of emotions in our day to day life. Right from being irritated at the traffic in the morning, to being joyous of meeting that secret crush, to being afraid of clearing some exam/job interview, to being shocked at watching the latest Game of Thrones episode.
Emotions are present in our daily life, real as well as online. Every single messaging app or social networking website has the so-called emoticons with endless emotions. Emotions? What are emotions really?
Emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgments, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure. Such are anger, pity, fear and the like, with their opposites. – Aristotle (384–322 BCE)
Emotions are essentially all that we feel. Searching the internet about emotions got me a lot more information than I even wanted to think about.
Supposedly, one can also classify emotions into positive and negative ones. For example, Anger is negative and love positive. But do you really think that is true ? All this pre-determination that an emotion is positive and negative. How can one exactly predict it? Doesn’t intent and the outcome determine if that specific emotion was positive or negative?
There are times when anger really is required in a situation and there are times when love can get you in serious trouble. But I digress from my original thought..
Which is the purest emotion?
Ask any couple who are very deeply in love with each other, and they will most likely say love is the most purest emotion. Nothing can compare with love.
And that is a hard argument to refute. I mean think of a mothers love for her child. If that is not selfless, I do not know what else is.
But if you really think of it. Love is not as pure as it seems. Even love can get corrupted. When the other person you are in love with does not return your love as you expect them to… Well, feelings of heartbreak are not far behind. And sometimes even a bit of hatred gets involved. So when obsession gets involved love gets as corrupted as it can get.
But what about Mother’s love or a father’s love [to keep things equal]. Can that be tainted? Well sometimes, yes. Because of the same reason as I have mentioned just now. When a parent is obsessed with getting everything perfect for the child. The love is tainted with something else. It is not pure anymore. The need to make life perfect for the child rules more than love for the child or what the child really wants.
Since love is out of the picture, what about grief ? Grief is an absence of joy or happiness. And the feeling of grief when a loved one dies, or when something is snatched from you.. the pain you feel… it cannot really be described. But even grief can be tainted. The anger or rage one feels at one’s inability to stop a loved one’s death. Or the need to seek revenge when what you had was lost overpowers grief.
How about fear? Isn’t fear pure enough? I think fear leads to grief or anger depending on the situation. Fear of something leads us to be sad or it makes us lash out in anger in some cases.
So since rage or anger corrupts love, grief as well as fear. Does that mean Anger or Revenge is the purest form?
Revenge is a form of anger. Because of some reason or the other, people tend to take revenge on the person who have wronged them. People bent on getting revenge just seem to have one thought. Get revenge for so and so reason at any cost! Revenge just is and nothing seems to corrupt the feeling of Anger or rage.
But like love, I feel revenge/rage can also be corrupted. You feel anger at someone and once you have accomplished your act of revenge, you feel content or satisfied with it. You don’t let the anger or revenge keep festering once the act is done with. So that means something else can corrupt even revenge. That is satisfaction.. or Contentment [I’ll use the word satisfaction also for the time being]
Your feeling of revenge is complete only if you are satisfied with it. If not, you would go off on another bout of revenge taking till you are satisfied. So the need for revenge is to be content.
I think, we do everything for some form of satisfaction. Whether for ourselves or for someone else. Take, for example, something simple… Eating. We eat to live, yes. But if that is the case we can eat medicines to give us all the nutrients to survive [which might very well happen in the future]. We don’t need to relish the food we ate.
There wouldn’t be a KFC or McD out there if we eat just for the sake of eating. We eat, to enjoy the taste. We eat to enjoy the feeling of a full stomach [sometimes]. We eat to feel satisfied in some form or the other.
Every single emotion can be tracked to satisfaction. We love people. We want them to feel happy, we want ourselves to be happy. And if they or we don’t end up happy, we are not satisfied. We keep trying to accomplish that by any means.
Take Love, Love reaches its peak only when the individual is satisfied that he/she is showing/giving love. So even love depends on satisfaction.
In the end, I feel that satisfaction or contentment is what makes our life what it is. Satisfaction is not tainted by any other emotion. And almost all emotions lead to contentment in the end.
To be content is to have achieved the purpose in life.
Or so I think… What about you?
Which emotion do you feel is the purest?
Why do you believe it to be so?
Nice Blog 🙂
Thanks Mamtha 🙂
Great! That’s your best post yet!
Thanks 🙂 Hope to write better posts in the future…
wonderful blog:)
Thank you, Renu!
Perfect.. I loved it.. Thats how you write a blog.. Specimen.. 😉
Thank you!