Quote:
Originally Posted by The Cloud  To have good emotions, you have to have bad ones. There's nothing wrong with depression, because it balances happiness. There is nothing wrong with any emotion. What becomes wrong is when I tell myself that I shouldn't be feeling a certain way. Once I stop accepting what I'm feeling, that is when pain turns into suffering.
I can't control my emotions, not directly. I can only change my perspective. My emotions are what tells me that I'm looking at things from the right perspective. If I'm depressed and unhappy, then I know that it is because my perspective isn't serving me unless that is what I want. There's nothing wrong with the feeling, it's simply telling me something about the current state that I am in. If happy were universally good and sad was universally bad, then mania and heroin addiction wouldn't be diseases. Both make you feel good, to a fault.
As a side note, I am also extremely skeptical of the LoA. My opinion is that things don't work in the way that it proposes, and even if they did the only people that would be able to use it without pushing the things they want away are the people that didn't bother with it. |
We must be talking of different types of happiness because depression is certainly not the opposite of happiness in my experience.
Depression (although I guess I've probably only experienced it mildly) is when nothing seems to be going right and there is practically no hope. Where thoughts and feelings put one through a spiral of increasing negativity.
Happiness on the other hand I don't find to be caused by a spiraling increase in positive thoughts and emotions (although it does produce an enjoyable state I call it something else, just don't have a name for it).
What I call happiness is a natural state that occurs free from any thoughts and emotions. It starts with peace and then grows.
I change my perspective if I find myself unhappy to. I am only ever unhappy when caught inside a series of thoughts and emotions, so I change to being outside of them and send them on their way.