emotions

Emotions are like colors. There are a handful of primary emotions from which all others are derived. Perhaps, there are only three primary emotions: joy, anger, and sadness.

Emotions, like any instinct, have a proper direction. They can be misaligned, and it is the responsibility of all individuals to strive to align them correctly. When harmonized with truth, those primary emotions are as follows.

• Joy - response to harmony between what is and what should be
• Anger - response to injustice and errors of will
• Sadness - response to separation... either from a particular object (a person or being) or an abstract concept (like justice)

Other emotions are subsets or mixtures of these. Frustration and envy, for example, are derived from anger... of feeling things are not as they should be. Despair, a loss of hope, is a form of sadness. And so on.

One cannot be ethical before being moral. Ethics is applied morality. For example, being ethical in business means applying basic moral concepts like fairness and honesty in complicated scenarios, like sales and distribution. Being ethical in medicine means applying the value of sympathy, among others.

Likewise, one cannot effectively manage secondary emotions before first correcting his or her primary emotions. Ask yourself if you are angry, sad, and happy in response to the right things. Any honest, patient person will find room for improvement. Work on training those core emotions and it will bring you peace.