You know, there are many shades of love, too. As they taught us in Bible School, the Greeks had many words for love. I will let you look them up, if this idea is unfamiliar to you.
I was thinking of my two kids. I love both of them, but in what respect does it even make any sense to say I love them equally? I love them differently. We have slightly different relationships, both strongly positive, both nurturing. They have different personalities. They are different people. They both have their own distinctive beauty.
It makes some sense to have hierarchies in some things. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, for example, is likely useful.
But is Beef Stroganoff superior to Lasagna? Would your view change if you had to eat one of them daily for a year?
I think when it comes to feelings hierarchies make no sense, not least because emotions are continually shifting, if we let them. And even the so called negative emotions have their own charms. Sadness. Anger. Even despair. You cannot end a long dark night of the soul without going through it, and you cannot get the feeling of having ended it without having begun it. Even despair has its purpose, its place in a good life.
And I think much unhappiness in this world comes from trying to regulate feelings, to impose feelings, to saying “I want to feel this, but not feel that”. Well, the feeling that you are pushing away comes back as a ninja in the night and finds ways to get expressed anyway. If you make it, which is unwise. Far better to give it a place at the table, and the light of day, and full recognition and acceptance.
Feelings are the shifting ocean. Rest, and stable peace, lie far below.
I think of my dreams. I never know what I’m going to dream at night. I have no control over it. I have had lucid dreams on a number of occasions–awake in a dream with full body sensation, aware I am dreaming–but decided that that was not what was most useful for me. Far better to listen to what something larger than any self I can conceive has to say to me, and try and hear what it is saying, and learn from it, and make useful adjustments in my awareness and following behavior.
Perhaps enlightenment, so called, is the gradual falling away of useful things your emotional intelligence has to say to you, such that you are fully paying as you go, through full presence. No debts. Nothing left behind. Free.