Emotions- Strength or weakness of the soul/consciousness?

           

      Man can do what he wills

              But he cannot will what he wills

                               - Arthur Schopenhauer

The paradox of free will, you are free to do whatever you desire. But you are not free to choose your desires. What role do emotions play ? Do they solely exist to bind us as their slaves? Or are they the very fuel of our soul which drives us forward regardless of knowing what's really ahead of us. Are they the cause of illusion of freedom? I'll put forward my views on such questions.

Humans are certainly not free to choose what they want, they are free to do what they want. For example we can eat or not if we want, but we can't choose to want to eat or not. It probably depends if we are hungry or not, which we can not control. We can't turn of being hungry by free will. Emotions certainly have almost complete control over a soul/consciousness. Can we choose our emotions? Certainly no. Can we control our emotions completely? Maybe yes..but that will be the biggest feat a human can achieve, because we are slaves to our emotions. Sure emotions give us power, emotions are what makes us feel, emotions are the reason why we feel so alive..but we don't control them! So this feeling of power, to feel to be alive , to keep us going forward under the influence of emotions..it's as if someone is giving us sweet illusions and blinds us from realising that we're slaves to our emotions. Can we really say that we have emotions,they are ours? Even though we don't have control over them and they have control over us..OR do emotions have us? And we are theirs?...or whoever/whatever have command over them. Emotions certainly can make a human achieve anything..BUT they also blind us from the truth..stop us from truly being free..a man can never truly be free unless he learns to control his emotions, learns to choose what he wants. If you seek positivity, you'll also be chased by negativity... you'll keep dancing under the illusion of freedom and under the control of emotions until you give up on desires/on feeling. But who would like such freedom? Certainly not you nor any human  who wants to be alive and feel alive. But are we really alive? Or was our death announced the day we were born, we were doomed on the slow path of death? What does it mean to be alive? Does it mean being under the control of emotions and sweet illusions of happiness and freedom? Or does it mean being free to choose, being free to not be under control of anything but us, being free to choose who we are? Are emotions really what makes us feel alive or do they give us only illusions and keep us far away from the truth? It seems the latter. It seems extremely hard to break free. Emotions have got us really good. We are just puppets of a puppet master. We were never free to begin with since our birth, on top of that emotions keep us away from becoming truly free. It seems as they are the biggest weakness , the biggest chains that must be broken before becoming free. Before becoming the master of ourselves. Before knowing the truth.

On the other hand emotions played a big role in making human beings a social creature, which allowed the formation of civilizations after settling down, made humans form groups and work for a unified cause. Which allowed humans to achieve the biggest feats of science like space travel, gene editing, artificial intelligence. Certainly emotions played a big role in giving a direction to primitive humans to reach upto this point. 

But the truth remains that we're the slaves of our emotions. The next obvious progress of mankind should be to be truly free. That must be the ultimate goal of mankind. And to do that  humans need to take control of themselves, rise above from under the control of emotions. Become free and seek the truth of creation. But alas, almost all of us want to stay under the illusion, keep chasing happiness and be chased by sorrow and despair. It would require the unified and collective efforts of many humans to understand everything about our bodies and to know everything about how to break free. Until then, humans will never be free. Civilizations will collapse and be rebuilt. The eternal cycle will keep going. Humans will always be slaves, never truly free.