Stany Austinson

Two thousand years ago, a man was put to death for being kind, for speaking the truth, for refusing to bow before authority. We are certain that we know that man and what he stood for. We tell ourselves we stand on his side. We know the story and how it ends. We know who was right. But I sometimes wonder whether a greater tragedy followed his death.

Emotions are complex subjective cognitive states that govern human behaviour and interactions. In the early stages of our evolution, before we had the vocabulary and apparatus for thought, emotions were all we had – which is why they still feel so raw and hard to process, because they predate thought. Emotions, in a sense, are just thoughts of a different kind. Think of them as proto-thoughts lent corporeality by your body. This becomes clearer when we look at how emotions actually function.