Why are emotions as addictive as heroin if we are to overcome them?

Question

Why were we "designed" this way?

Answer 1

Some spiritual philosophers and mystics (eastern ones in particular) observed that emotionality results in pleasure and pain and also that duality (the I-thou phenomenon and sense of individuality and separateness) goes hand-in-hand with the pleasure/pain crisis. Thus, these philosophers thought that one could be more spiritual and freer (um . . . "enlightened") if emotionality and its effects (desire) could be overcome. On the one hand, this is unnatural and life-denying. On the other, it recognizes that human beings are products of artificial and provisional conditioning and that they are continually projecting illusory and masochistic ideas (desires) out onto objects outside of themselves in the false belief that acquiring those objects of desire will provide pleasure instead of existential pain.

Human beings have a nervous system that is designed in a certain way: to survive to procreate. The neurochemistry of the brain, however, is designed to modify itself in accordance with memory and experience and, thus, establish a kind of behavioral "conditioning" that then orchestrates how a person behaves and thinks ("enlightened" persons are considered to be those who overcome this conditioning and thus have true volition). The epiphenomenon of human consciousness (as opposed to instinctual consciousness of lower life forms) has complicated things such that we human contemplate such things as the question you have asked.

Answer 2

since they are a natural phenomenon, that's a gross inaccuracy. emotions are part of us and we should embrace them as the life affirming things that they are.