Who experiences love – brain mind or soul?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So, what exactly is love? And who is it that experiences it? If you consider a three level model of the self, the soul, the mind and the body, then the soul’s consciousness is being channeled through the mind into the body and to the outer world.
So, whatever is experienced at the physical level, whatever is expressed at the physical level, will have a physical component to it. Naturally, therefore, whenever any emotion is experienced, whether it is love or it is hatred or it is happiness or it is distress, all these involve certain changes in the state of certain brain chemicals, activation of certain brain areas. Just as when we are happy or angry, there are certain facial expressions which change.
When we are happy, we may raise our hands in elation. When we are angry, we may clench our face. Just as there are physical expressions, there are facial expressions which convey certain emotions.
Similarly, there are neurological expressions. But just as the physical expression of the clenched fist is itself not anger, the experiencer of anger is someone different. Just as the frowning brows or the tightened jaw, that alone is not anger.
The experiencer of anger is somewhere deeper. Similarly, the particular areas of the brain that may be activated, the particular chemicals that may be secreted, they alone are not anger. They are simply the neurological expressions of the experience of anger or love, whatever it is, that is being experienced by someone else.
And that experiencer is beyond the brain. So that experiencer is actually the soul. So the soul is a source of consciousness and the soul is the experiencer of emotions.
Now, what emotions it experiences depends both on the perceptions that come in on the senses as well as the conceptions that are present in the mind. When, for example, there’s a cricket match or when there’s a cricket match and there’s team A and team B and say team A wins the final ball, winning shot is hit by a player for team A, the perception is the same for all the spectators. But the fans of team A, the perception is seen, the conception within their mind is, this is my team and I have won by extension.
So they experience joy. On the other hand, if there’s team B, oh, it was my team and we lost. So the perception is the same, but because the conception within the mind is different, so the experience is different.
And similarly, say when a boy and a girl, they are in love with each other, they say to each other, I love you. So what exactly is happening? It is the person, there are two persons, two conscious beings who are experiencing and expressing emotions. And we cannot have a love-o-meter, we cannot have a scientific instrument that measures love because love is not a physical quantity to be measured.
It is an experience of, it is an experience within the consciousness of the soul and consciousness itself is non-material. Consciousness expresses itself at the material level in certain ways, but the original consciousness is beyond matter. And this understanding that our emotions are beyond matter, they help us to recognize the need for non-scientific or trans-scientific means for relating with each other.
There may be the world’s greatest brain surgeon, but if he comes home and he finds that his wife is upset, he won’t tell her, let me do a brain scan to find why you’re upset. The brain scan can only tell the state of chemicals in her brain, the state of activation of the brain areas. It can’t tell the cause of that emotion.
It can’t tell the content of the experience. So we as conscious human beings have a physical component that may be partially amenable to mathematical measurement, but as it is said that all that counts is not countable. So our emotions such as love, they count, but they are not countable.
Though just as there can be no love-o-meter, there is no pain-o-meter. There are doctors who are dedicated, the whole of medical profession is dedicated to curing people of pain and to restoring them to health. But when there’s a fracture, there is no meter which can quantify how much pain the subject is in.
So when we understand it, pain, pleasure, love, hatred, these are essential emotions that comprise the heart of the human experience and they lie not in the body, not in the brain, they lie in the soul. And that’s why the spiritual side is so important for our own emotional nourishment and fulfillment. So only when we understand ourselves as souls, and understand the origin of our emotions, and then we understand how to sublimate and elevate our emotions, then we can find lasting fulfillment.