Logic and mood...mind and heart

I've been reading one of Bertrand Russell's books lately. It's titled, "the conquest of happiness," and all I can say is that it's a great book. Russell was a great philosopher...using simple logic and common sense to get his points across. Moreover, he was a happy philosopher. You don't see many of those around.

Russell mentions something which strikes a chord with what I've been mulling over recently. He says something to the tune of, "you can't argue with mood." Ever been blue and tried to reason yourself out of it? Tried to show yourself the bigger picture? Tried to wriggle your way into happiness using sheer logic alone? I think it's as hard as hell. I'd say it's impossible to do, but then of course, I'd be biased since I'm sure there are some lucky ones who can do it. Especially those with immense amounts of faith in Allah.

I've been observing this link between mind and heart (or reasoning and emotions...call it whatever you will) for a long time. It's a slippery rope...slithering and squirming....just always out of reach. So far, I've reached the following conclusions:

1) The heart is the dominant of the two. Your mood depends on a lot of factors, one of the important ones being the environment around you. e.g., you feel good with family around, bad if somebody cheats you, and so on.

2) The mind is heavily influenced by the state of the heart. I guess another way of putting this is that your reasoning is, by default, biased by how you are feeling at the time. More prissily, your emotions will weight the input variables to any argument, giving more importance to some of these variables more others. If my brother were on the stand for murder, and I were to reason whether he was guilty or innocent, my love for him would naturally try and skew my logical thinking. It would water down variables such as the evidence against him, and bring out his good side. On the other hand, if officials thought somebody had killed my brother, I would probably want to see him hanged. My biases would stamp his guilt.

I think point 2 is what makes logical thinking so prone to bias. If a Muslim wants to drink alcohol, he'll make the case for it. He'll interpret the Quraan and Hadeeth his own way. His reasoning is a slave to his emotions in this case...not the other way around. I want things to be the other way around...I don't want to be a slave to my emotions. I want my emotions to be there, but I want reasoning to be in control. To tell you the truth, it sometimes makes me feel very uneasy to realize how much of my life is dependent on mood. It almost makes me feel like I'm wasting this precious life Allah has given me.

Anyway, sorry if I was just stating the obvious. It's just that I find it helpful sometimes to give words to thoughts. That way, they become tangible, instead of remaining evasive ghosts inside one's head.