I’m going to begin to address the issue of emotions, which have acquired a bad reputation, but which, in themselves, aren’t evil. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the emotions relate to the organs of the body, for example, anger is the liver, sadness is the lungs, and joy is the heart etc. When an emotion is triggered, it stimulates the H (chi) of its associated organ, which is healthy, but becomes unhealthy when over-stimulated.
The best parallel is to compare the experience of watching a something in a movie, as opposed to experiencing it in your life. The watching of a creepy movie can stimulate your fear, and thus be healthy for the associated organ, which in this case is the kidneys. But if you were to actually experience the movie events in real life, the fear would be much stronger, and therefore depleting. We know that this fear can actually save our life and have us doing things we would never otherwise do, because our survival depends on it. Also, if fear were only at the level of caution, and no more, it would stimulate kidney H and be healthy. So we know that fear in these ways is useful.
All in all, the healthiest state is a balanced state, which is a state of relaxed joyful acceptance, but over-joy or elation can be deplete heart H.
So, with the awareness of this, we become conscious that the really bad things are indulgence in, and attachment to our emotions. When emotions define our choices, our free-will is lost, and they become like drugs that we begin to depend on.
I want to state that the darkest of all emotions are those that are completely useless to life:
resentment, despair, apathy, laxness, self-pity, self-doubt, hatred, anxiety and frustration.
I may have missed a few, but you get the idea.
American History X is one of my favourite movies, and I want to focus on how the dark emotions can be exploited. All of the dark emotions, or states of mind, make us vulnerable and predictable. In short, they make us prey to stockholm syndrome: we align ourselves with a nurturing figure, organisation, or agenda.
Now, we have here the two crucial points in Derek’s journey, where he’s overcome by the dark side, and is desperate for light. On the first round, his nurturing father figure comes in the form of a racist writer of propoganda, who teaches him to become angry (as anger is more useful than despair) and to become the leader of a reactionary group of thugs. This path does give him something to live for – a sense of purpose, but he begins to see that none of the other followers share his devotion to its principles (remembering that Derek is described as its “shining prince”). He turns away from them, and is therefore seen as perhaps “unpatriotic” to the cause, and is attacked by his former jail buddies. This leads him back to a vulnerable state, searching for light, and another nurturing figure appears, luckily a noble one this time, who shares with Derek his own past, and how he found the light by “asking the right questions”.
To be in the darkness is to be a slave. To blindly follow the herd is to be a slave.
To be in the light is to be conscious of your emotions and responsible for your own thoughts and actions. When we acknowledge that the brain is a computer, secondary to the heart, we can analyse what its been programmed with and ask “Is this software cultivating joy and vitality?” or “has anything I’ve done really helped me?”.
UniThou 