http://indymedia.org.il
Glad you missed me, RC
author: ct
I indeed picked up your signal.
Just took off some days for recreation. No intentions for a permanent leave, I swear. Yet it's always nice when someone misses you... :)
"Emotions are not rational..Emotions are on an entirely different level than that..Therefore, we cannot chose to hate or not hate.."
I agree. Yet emotions usually do not "just come out of nowhere", they are the consequences of events in and experiences with the real world. Or, to be exact, of the very way WE LOOK at these events and experiences.
And there we actually do have the choice of how we will regard them, thereby deciding which feeling we will induce within ourselves then.
Let's take the not so far-fetched example of someone trying to insult me here.
Then it is MY DECISION either to take that personally ("how does this idiot dare to say such a thing about me") or to take a view like "okay, this is his opinion, I'm not responsible for it". In the first case I will at least get angry, if not hateful towards him, in the second I will be able to maintain a neutral or indifferent attitude.
So there is a choice at the beginning; once we have made our decision about how we will regard something, the resulting feelings are beyond our control.
"No emotion is 'wrong'..."
Indeed. It's rather that some are welcome and others are not.
"...it is what we do with it that matters.."
Exactly. Just accepting the not so welcome ones already may help a lot.
BTW, I once read a definition according to which hatred is the force that arises when love is obstructed in its development, the goal of hatred being to remove the obstacles. So hatred and love would just be the two sides of the same coin. Well...
PS: I've added some comments on your posts in the "Following the Jewish values" thread too. Here's the link:
http://indymedia.org.il/imc/webcast/display.html3?article_id=72479