Question: Are emotions like anger, greed, sorrow, happiness and jealousy symptoms of the ātmā?
Answer: No.
Question: But a robot does not have emotions. Isn’t that the difference between human beings and robots? Robots cannot feel sad or happy.
Answer: Why? If you program a robot to respond to a certain stimulus in a certain way, they will express sadness or happiness or other types of emotions. There is even a name for such robots: affective robots.
Question: But they cannot feel those emotions. We can.
Answer: Feeling is a type of awareness. It is ultimately a type of thought. Thoughts are not felt by the ātmā. Thoughts occur in the mind. Thought is a particular state of the mind.
Question: Isn’t there a difference between a robot and us?
Answer: The difference is that there is an ātmā in our body, which identifies with the body. How do we know this? We know this because the Bhagavad Gītā says so.
Question: So are our bodies basically like robots?
Answer: Of course. Bodies are very sophisticated robots. Śrī Kṛśṇa Himself states that our bodies are yantras- machines.
Question: So ātmā does not experience any emotion? Who experiences it?
Answer: The jīva, which refers to the ātmā-mind-body complex, experiences it. The ātmā’s “I” animates the mind’s “I”. When we state the sentence, “I feel sad”, the “I” in the sentence is the “I” of the ‘ātmā’ expressed through the mind’s “I” or ahaṅkāra. We cannot say the pure ātmā experiences anything because all experience is external to ātmā. What we can say is that the ātmā’s existence enables the experience of the composite jīva.
Question: What is the pramāṇa for this?
Answer: See the verse in Gita 13.5-6
mahā-bhūtāny ahaṅkāro buddhir avyaktam eva caindriyāṇi daśaikaṁ ca pañca cendriya-gocarāḥicchā dveṣaḥ sukhaṁ duḥkhaṁ saṅghātaś cetanā dhṛtiḥetat kṣetraṁ samāsena sa-vikāram udāhṛtam
The five great elements, the conditional I-sense, the intellect, the unmanifest [prakṛti], the ten sense faculties and the mind, the five sense objects, desire, aversion, happiness, distress, the aggregate [of the elements, called the body], awareness, and fortitude — all this is described in brief as the field of action along with its modifications.
As you can see, Śrī Kṛśṇa is saying that all emotions are in the kṣetra, which includes the mind-body complex, and not in the ātmā. Therefore, arguments that infer the ātmā purely from the existence of emotions as opposed to quoting śāstra, are fundamentally flawed.
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