Human Touch in The Age of AI – 4 Emotions – Chapter 1

One of the things that makes us uniquely human, and so different from AI, is that we live in a body and we are moved by emotions. It is our vulnerability and our ever-cloudy and confused consciousness that make us so different. And just to be clear, this is a human named Gyan writing. I do get assistance from AI for editing and brainstorming, but these are my ideas and my language. Everything here comes from my very real human experiences.

Emotions in this body, my body and your body, are what move us through life. Let’s look at them.

Desire and Fear

Desire pulls us toward things: love, sex, money, fulfillment. It pushes us forward and makes us take action. This is what helped me meet and get together with my beloved wife Punita. Desire also led me into all kinds of stupid experiences (which, sorry curious reader, I am not going to describe here) that I actually needed to go through in order to learn, experience, and become the very imperfect man I am today. My strong desires pushed me into unusual professions too, like being a street performer, and later choosing what many friends and family considered career suicide: becoming an alternative body therapist.

Fear, on the other hand, is desire’s neurotic spiritual twin. It protects us from being hurt, physically and emotionally. I love riding motorcycles. If I had only desire and zero fear, I would have been dead, or at least severely injured, a long time ago. Fear is my friend when I lean my bike into a mountain curve. Fear also shows up when I want to launch a workshop that only I seem excited about. It asks me to slow down and think again.

Let me say this clearly. I have no judgment about emotions. They are part of us, part of being alive, and it is silly to say they are bad or “not spiritual.”

As I observe emotions, I notice they always come in pairs, like opposites. Desire and fear. One is positive, making us move forward into the world, and the other is negative, making us stop moving and protecting ourselves from the world.

 Happiness and Sadness

Happiness and sadness may be the most basic pair of emotions. When we are small, these emotions run freely through us. But as adults we often try to dampen this dramatic and wonderful polarity. We still enjoy funny or heartbreaking movies, but only when they are safely on a screen, away from our real selves, away from our hearts.

 Anger and Contentment

Then there is anger. It can be destructive, but it is absolutely necessary so we can get out of danger or shake off the cobwebs of some old and useless belief. What is the opposite of anger? I think it is contentment, the feeling that I am satisfied with my situation and with the ideas that guide my life. I can accept and cherish them.

One emotion is negative, one is positive, but we need both. Many religions say anger is bad and contentment is pious. To me this is ridiculous. We need both. They are essential parts of who we are. Sometimes we lean too much toward one pole and need a gentle reminder, a reality check, but that does not make either pole evil. And yes, anger usually gets cast as the villain.

 Pain and Pleasure

What about pain and pleasure?

We all hate pain and love pleasure. But they are a tantric pair, completing each other. Most of us don’t understand that our capacity to feel one directly affects our capacity to feel the other. In the modern world, many of us run away from pain: physical pain, emotional pain, and the deeper pain of being disconnected from spiritual life. We escape through painkillers, antidepressants, and most commonly through our phones. There is nothing like a short kitty video to distract us from our existential misery.

Pleasure sounds wonderful, but most of us do not have the capacity to feel it fully. A person who really enjoys pleasure can seem different from the rest of us. She or he seems too sexual, too bright, almost like a rock star. They love and enjoy life passionately, and many of us find this threatening.

Let me share a little secret here. To experience real pleasure, you must pay a price. You must learn to feel pain, to accept it, to breathe into it. The two always go together.

The Invisible Puppeteer

Emotions rule us like a puppet master, but the puppet master works in secret. We rarely admit how much power emotions have over us. In the darkness, their favorite place, they become the engine behind our actions and our thoughts.

How exactly this happens, and how we can still find freedom within this human condition, is what I explore in the next chapter.