I am an open book, ask me anything.

Homo Hystericus

From Milan Kundera's Immortality -

"It is part of the definition of feeling that it is born in us without our will, often against our will. As soon as we want to feel (decide to feel, just as Don quixote decided to love Dulcinea), feeing is no longer feeling but an imitation of feeling, a show of feeling. This is commonly called hysteria. That's why homo sentimentalis (a person who has raised feeling to a value) is in reality identical to homo hystericus.

This is not to say that a person who imitates feeling does not feel. An actor playing the role of old King Lear stands on the stage and faces the audience full of the real sadness of betrayal, but that sadness evaporates the moment the performance is over. That is why homo sentimentalis shames us with his great feelings only to amaze us a moment later with his inexplicable indifference."

---------------------------------------------

My church back home is a mega church. Coloured lights, a 3D screen, a choir of backup singers and an arsenal of musical instruments accompany worship and praise. People speak in tongues, cry, raise their hands up to God and kneel in supplication. The air is charged with yearning, the prayers and the beats driving the energy up towards an undefined peak. At 7pm sharp, the pastor signals the musicians to stop playing, says a closing prayer and the lights come on. In the seconds it takes for our pupils to constrict and dilate, normalcy is restored.

I always feel a tinge of betrayal at 7pm on Saturday nights back home. The ability for hysteria, or religious fervor to be controlled with such precision makes me doubt the authenticity of it. It frustrates me to watch my neighbours put down their arms, wipe the tears off their face, and then offer suggestions about dinner. Borrowing Kundera's words, their great emotionality during worship shames my lack thereof, and the abrupt shift into indifference amazes me.

Kundera in the above passage has captured perfectly the ambiguity of feeling. Feeling, based on its etiology, when coloured by the force of will, changes in its composition. I do believe that for a large percentage of us, the religious fervor ignited in us during worship and praise is real. I believe that in our brains; dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine and a whole host of other neurotransmitters are firing at rates different from baseline levels. The feelings that we experience in church are real. They exist.

We go into church every Saturday or Sunday wanting to feel God’s presence. We pray at night, begging him to respond to us. Our worship leaders, our pastors, and spiritual authority want us to be touched by the Holy Spirit. We want to feel Him. There is so much desire to feel, such yearning, that it changes the substance of feeling into hysteria; the act of conscious want modifies irrevocably, the original feeling. I would not go so far to call the emotion, which arises in our bodies at the appropriate times during church - a show. It is though, an imitation; a lackluster substitute for the substance that arises in us, untouched by our will – pure feeling.

I do believe in the existence of pure feeling in worship and praise. I know that it is almost unchristian to call the desire to feel God's presence a pollutant of true feeling. However, the human desire to feel spritual fervour has a different etiology from the desire to be in God's presence. Wanting to feel a sense of transcendence is different from surrendering to god and the emotions that follow. I admit that it is difficult to draw the distinction. The intense desire to feel God's presence can easily be misdirected into a desire to feel hysteria as a means of satisfaction or cognitive dissonance. I just want pure feeling. I want to be able to remove from my emotions - my will, and the will of others. I want to squash my desire to feel for the sake of feeling. Perhaps then pure feeling ignited by God, will burst forth from my heart. 

Ironically, in this elevation of pure feeling, I am raising feeling to a value, which would make me a member of the homo hystericus.

- On a side note, I wonder what this would mean for cognitive restructuring in psychology. Everything about cognitive psychology involves reaching into our thoughts (which lead to feelings) and manipulating them to become more positive, or reinforcing. I cannot deny its good treatment outcomes. However, as anecdotal evidence form someone that practices cognitive restructuring a lot, I do feel that my manipulated emotions are similar to hysteria. There is forced quality to it, that when pushed to become real, crosses that boundary into oversaturation. I would think that for someone suffering as a result of negative cognitions, even hysteria would be better for their functioning than the genuine authentic feelings dragging them down. 

Over

I think it's finally over.

It has happened a couple of times before. My mind is often only one realisation away from being able to let go of someone. It's like jumping off a cliff and landing in the ocean; one minute it's dry and hot, and the next, it's wet, salty and chaotic.

It happened for me today. I was walking past these awesome shiny walls and checking out my profile when a phrase popped into my head. "He makes me feel safe." It was an answer to a question that a friend had posed to me a month or two back, asking about why I was into him. The answer still stands. I had felt safe, protected and cared for. He was like this huge and mighty harbor, and as long as I was in it, I was safe. I had perceived him as this strong, kind and passionate force.

He doesn't protect me anymore. I don't feel safe. Instead, I am scared. I am scared of his backlash; I am scared of his volatility. I am scared because taking care of me is no longer his priority, and it means that all that power he possessed can now be turned against me. He is someone that can belittle me and push me around on a whim. He has no respect for me and little compassion. He does not make me feel safe.

I have no interest in the present him.

Intimacy and Kundera

The intimacy that Kundera creates between reader and character is so poignant it is almost perverse.

---------------------------------------------------

"Agnes recalled that once as a child, she was dazzled by the thought that God sees her and that he was seeing her all the time. That was perhaps the first time that she experienced the pleasure, the strange delight that people feel when they are being watched, watched against their will, watched in intimate moments, violated by the looks to which they were exposed. Her mother, who was a believer told her 'God sees you', and this is how she wanted to teach her to stop lying, biting her nails and picking her nose, but something else happened: precisely at those times when she was indulging her bad habits, or during physically intimate moments, Agnes imagined God and performed for his benefit."

- Immortality by Milan Kundera

----------------------------------------------------

A Lifelong Marathon

A lifelong marathon.

I am someone that is intrinsically motivated by self-discipline. I love it. I get off on it. I want to see it in me, and I savor it in other people. My obsession with it probably stems from the fact that I am a lazy, floppy and chronically sleepy person.

Today as I was doing my bible reading, I looked at the date that I had scribbled on the top right hand corner of my notebook and saw 8/10/2012. I then proceeded to flip backwards to see how many consecutive days of bible reading have I managed thus far. 21 days. A little bubble of self-satisfaction was starting to emerge in me, when the phrase "A lifelong marathon" popped into my head, and squashed it. I made it 21 days. I have tens of thousands to go.

For tens of thousands of days to come, I would have to make the right choices to engage in good, healthy and godly behavior such as working, running, eating right, sleeping well, going to church and being nice. Just the thought of it is enough to make me want to crawl back under my covers. However, there is a little glimmer of light on the horizon. All of these things take a conscious effort to maintain right now, but our brains are much too clever to put us through such arduous pain for long.

- Automaticity is the result of learning, repetition and practice. It is the ability to do things without occupying the higher functioning of our mind. It is the miraculous stage when self-control turns into habit. -

I believe that we are all running a lifelong marathon. It takes conscious effort, self-discipline and self-love to continue running. There is no reward without struggle. No fit body without exercise, no knowledge gained without studying and no growth in god without first knowing his word. However it does get easier as we go along. With learning, repetition and practice, making the right choices become habitual and less effort is expended on struggling between choices. Getting good at something brings a sense of fulfillment and self-efficacy which reinforces the behavior.

Maybe a few hundred more days would get me there. ;)

P.S.

I came across this phrase in my cousin's fitness blog the other day. To credit him a little, here is the link to his page. http://www.edwinchew.com/readmore.php?id=106

Love Vs. 爱

One of my favourite passages from A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo

"Love," this English word: like other English words it has tense. "Loved" or "will love" or "have-loved." All these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is 爱(ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.