When reason says that we should take control of our emotions, it’s not reason speaking, it’s fear masquerading as reason. Reason doesn’t want to get rid of emotions, emotion wants to get rid of emotions.
We are taught that the reasonable person should be in control of their emotions. But this really is the scared person hiding behind rationality, while not recognising that they are being irrational in doing so and that this irrationality is a response to their fear of their emotions.
We are afraid of our emotions because we are afraid of the unknown within us. In failing to recognise that on the human level, we can’t know lightness, without knowing darkness, we can’t contain love without containing hatred, we can’t experience happiness unless we have unhappiness to contrast it to—we live in perpetual fear that something dark, something unfathomable, something mysterious is living within us and may emerge and engulf us if we’re not paying sufficient attention.
Well, something dark and mysterious is living within us—and the fear we have of it is the by-product of our fearful refusal to see it for what it is: the world of relativity.
In the relative, nothing exists without its opposite. And so, everything, really is a spectrum and as such both polarities. Presence is presence/absence, and so is absence. Life is life/death. Here is here/there. There’s no here, without there, and as all there exists only in the here, all darkness exists only in the lightness.
And so to transcend the fear that there’s something dark and unknown that is within us is not to make sure it’s not there, but to recognise that it is.
So then, instead of asking a question that creates and perpetuates the problem it’s trying to solve—how do I get rid of it?— we can ask a more helpful one that may point us to the answer we didn’t know we were looking for: what makes me fear the darkness within?
And the most obvious answer is perhaps the most useful one: because I’m afraid of causing damage, to others or to myself. Essentially, I am afraid of suffering.
But in the world of the relative, we can’t cause anything without causing everything. Whenever we choose one thing, we’re not choosing everything else. We’re the effect of our own cause, and the cause of our own effect. Which then, begs the question, can we cause anything without the fear of causing it?