Ewrick's Rabbit Hole

At one point in the cult movie Donnie Darko (2001), the hero (Donnie) con­fronts his health instructor’s sim­plistic view of the spectrum of human emo­tions, based on the “teachings” of a local new-age celebrity.

Basi­cally, even if a vol­untary over-simplification and car­i­cature of some new-age philoso­phies (pos­itive part of the emo­tional scale versus neg­ative one; feels good/feels bad dichotomy), this is an inter­esting point that is being made.

In this kind of view of our emo­tions, we tend to con­sider that we are a point on an infinite line, which gives us only two pos­si­bil­ities: go “forward”, or “backward”, no matter what direction it may entail. It rein­forces our striving for getting “better”, and clas­si­fying all our expe­ri­ences as worse or better than some­thing else.

In a sense, it’s a perfect draft for all of our social systems, edu­cation being one of them.

Another view of the emo­tions spectrum is given by the age old Chinese philosophies.

This diagram is a rep­re­sen­tation of the view of the emo­tions of clas­sical Chinese med­icine. Each of our main organs are rep­re­sented by an element (there are five ele­ments in the Chinese system: fire, metal, earth, water and wood), and these ele­ments interact with each other to create the whole spectrum.

What is inter­esting is that there are dif­ferent types of inter­ac­tions, as some ele­ments are “nour­ishing” others (the blue arrows on the diagram; for instance water nour­ished the wood etc.) and some are “con­trolling” others (rep­re­sented by the dark arrows; for instance, water con­trols fire; metal control the growth of the wood etc.).

Each of the ele­ments have a pole of emo­tions which are com­posing a balance. For instance, the emo­tions of the heart (element fire) are joy/panic; for the lungs (element metal) these are serenity/sorrow etc.

How you can easily coun­teract an unwanted emotion is by using the “con­trolling” cycle. For instance, fear con­trols love/joy. Uh-uh… seen that some­where? Yes, it is rather inter­esting to notice that this line on the black­board of the teacher is but one spike of the wheel of emo­tions.
And fur­thermore, we could object to this sim­plistic teaching of going towards love as well: if you feel fear, trying to man­ifest the opposite emotion by striving towards love isn’t nec­es­sarily going to make things easier. There is a natural flow of these emo­tions, that it is one’s respon­si­bility to find out for oneself. Oth­erwise, it would be like saying “as fire coun­teracts ice, anytime you feel cold, burn some­thing to feel hot”. You may end up with no clothes at all at this rate.

Once we notice that not one emotion is more desirable, every­thing can become clearer. Going to each extreme of the arrows is only tan­ta­mount to spinning the wheel more quickly while the goal of Chinese med­icine is to restore a sense of balance and harmony.
It only can be achieved by under­standing the whole picture and accepting the whole spectrum of our emo­tions, and not touting one as better than the other and risk the con­se­quences of sev­ering its links with the rest.

Note: another more lyrical view of this dis­cussion was pre­sented in the last issue of Wisp

written by Yuki \\ tags: acceptance, chinese, emotions, health

25 years and my life is still
I’m trying to get up that great big hill of hope
For a des­ti­nation
(From 4 Non Blondes’ What’s Up)

I had an inter­esting dream tonight, well as almost every night, but this one stuck with me a bit, espe­cially as I was reminded of the What’s Up song “coincidentally”.

In that dream, the premises were about a sort of prophecy that some ruler or cor­po­ration would not be able to rule as they wanted as long as there would be children. Appar­ently, children were being kid­napped in that futur­istic envi­ronment, and the dream started with a landing.

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written by Yuki \\ tags: acceptance, children, dreams, shift