the heart and the mind

Since Goleman's very popular book "Emotional Intelligence", the two separate domain "emotions" and "reason" have been considered as a whole, at the least there has been a tendency amongst some scholars. I would like to discuss the intertwined but unclear area of emotions and reason. In other words the heart and the mind. For centuries, emotional people were seen as weak, incapable of coping with difficulties, and needy for surviving. On the other hand, people with a rigid reason without any affection were valued as great minds of their time. Surely they did some contribution to their time in someways, however their rigid attitude caused unhappiness amongst soft hearted people with high power of understanding emotions. Just think about it for a minute: Do you think Galileo would have suffered that much if one of the Inquisition members had the ability to see his ambition for telling the truth and symphatised with him instead of being too rational blind and for the sake of being so-called consistent in the name of Church (or their own positions )? Galileo, Darwin and Freud had the courage to tell the world that they were wrong. To accept their standpoint took some time, but since "the truth is out there", there was no choice but see it. Humankind have lost hundred of years just because of this stubbornness for not seeing the truth, not listening to valuable minds filled with excitement, ambition, not forcing ourselves for a chance to change. And the irony is, stubbornness was and still is an emotional attitude while pure reason and rationality described with fixed rules blamed emotions for the weakness and troubles of humankind.

Let's think about our personal lives. How many times have we got stuck between our emotions and reason? In order to survive, we sacrifice the very core aim of living, which is happiness due to the fact that we think and are taught that listening, understanding, showing, thinking our emotions make us weak and unsuccessful. We live in a kind of matrix, you know the movie, outside impulses turn our brains on and we dream of appreciation, admiration, huge success, and then the illusion of fake happiness out of success fills even our tiny veins, then we set our target and go for it. How many of us have sacrificed our loves for careers, think about it. We have become so selfish that we do not want to move a finger for a true relationship. We want everything around our plans. "There is a cultural barrier between us, sorry, I want someone like me, also my family wants me to do so." At the least, be respectful, and tell the truth like "I do not love you enough, and I want everything suitable to me." Or, "You know, there are miles between us, and I want somebody next to me. I am a human, I need certain needs, plus travelling costs a lot." Again, the irony lies in the logic. In order to feel easy-happiness, we use the reason because evaluating our emotions make us realize that we live, in fact, in an illusion called "being pure rational".

Then, what's the solution? The answer might be a bit far, but we had better start with a baby step. Sparing some time for ourselves and doing some amateur introspection would be a good start. In other words, just travel without moving in our deepest inside where memories are kept and give direction to us invisibly. Reason is necessary but only after understanding our true emotions since understanding the true nature of something is the very first basic step of reasoning.