"Good" and "bad" emotions

"Yes, a Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will, as it did Obi-Wan’s apprentice."
-Yoda

Emotions, with out them the world would be a plain place to live in, without emotion we wouldn't have art, or music, we would be without most literature, we wouldn't have movie or tv shows(at least not in the way we perceive them now) and the list can go on and on. Emotion is as key to humanity as is the spirit/soul, it breathes life into the mundane, allows us to appreciate the fine details and crevices of life. Emotions can also be negative, wounded pride and anger have caused more then one war in our history. However does this mean emotion can easily be classified as "good" and "bad"? Most would argue yes, and for fairly obvious reasons, anger in a raw form can be a devastating force, uncontrolled yelling and name calls to people so enraged they lash out physically; ergo anger must be a "bad" emotion. Happiness in a raw form is intoxicating, overwhelming joy fills you up because your sports team just won the big playoff finals, or the person you love just said yes to marrying you; you feel invincible, untouchable, as if the universe is smiling down on you. I intend to discus my own thoughts on the ideas of both "good" and "bad" emotions, and my view point on emotion.

There are six core emotions as described by Dr.Paul Ekman, anger, disgust, sadness, fear, surprise, and happiness. And those are the core emotions I'll be talking about as they are emotions that have been hard wired into us; basic building blocks for more complex emotions. To start I ordered them from extreme to extreme, starting with anger and ending with happiness. Think of it as you would a scale, with anger being the extreme "bad" emotion, and happiness the extreme "good" emotion. Disgust following anger in the scale, as disgust is often an off Shute of anger, and normally attributed to intense feelings of dislike. Sadness is next after disgust, as sadness on its own my seem fairly harmless, but of course can become a snowball effect when paired with emotions like anger or disgust. Fear and surprise are next, and I have always seen these two as "on the fence" emotions. Both fear and surprise can illicit positive and negative reactions, depending on the circumstances one finds themselves in. Fear and surprise are often attributed to survival instincts, like the horse who is surprised by the wolf emerging from the forest, that surprise puts the horse on alert the fear then kicks in telling the horse to run. It's the same in humans. Of course both can be bad, for example if the horse was surprised and over come by fear and freezes on spot. Which brings me to happiness as the extreme "good," as normally when one is happy it is not a negative feeling, no one who is truly happy sits there and wishes they weren't.

When looked at like this we are only viewing emotion on its surface level. Like human beings emotions are far more complicated than simply grouping them like I have just done. Just like we are taught not to judge a book by its cover, so to should we not judge an emotion on its surface appearance. This time I'll start with happiness; when one is truly happy and full of zeal towards life, it's like being on a drug, it's euphoric and intoxicating. However this overwhelming feeling can be a double edged sword; as the saying goes, what goes up must come down, depending on what happens happiness can leave us open and vulnerable to getting hurt as we tend to be less on guard for things when we are truly happy. In an instant happiness can become sadness or anger or disgust. Anger on the flip side, in a raw state is "bad" yet anger can at times provide a celerity, and that anger can become an intense focus; a young boy watches his parents murdered in front of his eyes, first it's deep sadness, followed by intense anger, but then he uses that anger as drive to become stronger, so that he can protect people later. The point of all this is to show you (yes you!) that emotions like the force are give and take, "bad" can be turned to "good" and "good" can be flipped to "bad." Emotions are neutral in essence, and it's we the people who perceive them in a positive or negative light. Like the force, good and evil are perceptions Jedi and Sith see. Force lightning a dark side power; but is a Jedi evil if he learns this power and uses it to stop an army of droids to save a village of Wookies? A Sith who learns how to use force harmony can then twist it to gain destructive power over any and all who try to oppose them. In the end it's not about "good" or "bad," but simply about perceptions.

I worked for four years with a company called Kerry's Place Autism, where I worked with several different "low" functioning autistic youth, after that I ran a group home for 16 individuals with schizophrenia for just over a year, before finally leaving the field to pursue other avenues. It was here that I began to understand my own views on emotion. Thank you for your time in reading this, look forward to seeing others opinions on this subject.

May the Force be with you all