Tuesday, January 25, 2011

What are we really made of ?

How can we build a castle, if we do not know how to build strong foundations, or even worst, if we do not know what foundations are?

After getting to know more of being god, evil, self control, empathy, zenism, taoism, teaism ... I realized that the more I read, the least I understand.

If psychologists, philosophers, religious and spiritual leaders, even poets, all of them for centuries have been dealing with the same issue, our feelings, emotions, how to control them, how to behave, so that we can live "happy" together ... If so, then, WHY is that our education system has not focused in knowing ourselves more (the way we work and the things we are made of) ?

We humans are funny. It seems we cannot live isolated, so we chose to "survive" together. We need someone to love, to hate, to help, to hurt, to learn from and to teach to... isn't ironic? Full of feelings and emotions, yet it seems our knowledge on this field remains little.

Most of us have learned how to control our emotions through our parents, people around us, some school teachers, and religion in most cases. But, overall, through my own lenses, a true learning is empirical, through trial and error, through falls, loss, disappointments, suffering and pain.

"Indeed, the first law and proclamations of ethics - the Code of Hammurabi, the Ten Commandments of the Hebrews, ... can be read as attempts to harness, subdue, and domesticate emotional life ... Despite social constrains, passions overwhelm reason time and again ..." Daniel Goleman ("Emotional Intelligence", 1995).

"What really torments civilized people is that they are full of feelings and they know nothing about" D. H. Lawrence ("Sex Literature and Censorship", 1953).

So, I have come to an answer of one of my multiple questions:

Apparently, our human nature is neither good, nor evil. Instead, we are are able to feel and develop different emotions, which along our long history, we have failed to domesticate through ethics and religion. It might be due to our inability to accept or to understand that we were built to develop different and opposite emotions, which can be translated in either good or evil according to our own categorization of concepts.

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I am about to finish Daniel Goleman's book: Emotional Intelligence, hopefully I get to post something the next coming days ... really interesting BTW ;)

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