Saturday, June 2, 2007

Do some people have a quicker rate of emotional & spiritual growth than others?

I think that some people don not stop amusing me of their rate of development. Some keep growing, that is fabulous. Others grow until they reach static plateau, others deteriorate and keep on deteriorating, and that is also astonishing.

As healthy food-one of many- is a requirement of good physical life, emotional life has to have healthy food in order to keep growing. I do believe that emotions are related to our humanity and one way to keep our emotional life healthy and flourishing is to look into our humanity. It is so important to be able as humans to feel, sense, to be in touch with other sentibeings feelings. Then the focus should be on our human growth instead of emotional growth.

Humans enrich their life by thinking of others.

“Altruism is the ultimate source of happiness”
Dalai Lama instructions.

Others should be other humans or things. Humans who are completely strangers put my believes into the stake. What do I see when I first meet a stranger? What do I look for?
I say to myself repeatedly that I should just keep thinking of others as human’s brothers not brothers in my country or religion or color or race or gender. Humans are humans no matter how they look different. Our humanity must not be strained by any thing whether social, religious or cultural.

I don t know exactly the right way to enrich our humanity. Maybe there is no one right way, but I m confident if there is a common bath that all these ways intersect will be to keep your eyes and soul open for others. If I have a good reception then signals can be from a novel, poem, film, picture, and gesture from a street musician in a sunny day, smile from a child, or “Hi” from old lady in a cloudy morning. Yet, thinking and contemplating these signs is essential in our growth.

Why some people develop faster? They just devote more time to think about these issues, more means to practice their humanity. They might meditate using Buddhism instructions or Marijuana. They might contemplate on the edge of a cliff or in a bus back home after tough work day.

Others don not develop because they did not think of it or may be they think of other things or they don t have enough time. Maybe it is more simple than that : some people have rich internal life ,others don not.

L
Posted by Tallal & Leway at 9:40 PM

8 comments:

YL said...

No, Love is not true, love does not exist. It is only a belief, and all beliefs are based on fiction. You can't hold, you can't weigh it and you will never feel it. It cannot be true. What is it? How can you define it?? Endorphins?? What for?? And where will it all lead?? On the other hand, hatred is istinctive, and constructive. Hatred makes wars, and wars made nations, and built economies. Wars raised competition. Hatred is so easily witnessed in primates. A bull ramping another isn't for the love of a cow. It's for the hatred of the other bull. He takes whatever is dear to him, be it a cow or grazing land. Prophets came about to spread love and peace, and all they left us was war and hatred, and once in a while periods of conflict. Even Gods (pleural) spread fear, in the form of hell fire and punishment. We live in fear, hiding under a blanket called love, which is too thin to protect from gunfire.

YL

June 5, 2007 at 10:29 AM
Tallal & Leway said...

love is the bottom line. When we stop hating others we just continue loving them, like your bull when it was not fighting the other one.The hatred is the exception , the negative.

800,000 persons were killed in 100 days in Kigali 1994 when the hatred became institutionalized , when it became the rule not the exception and we should watch out.

Sure love can t be measured .It can t be weighed like millions of other things my dear friend , I m confident that you ve a lot of them . Science can t identify teh source of it again like other mysteries of nature in the past b, present and future.

Wars might reforme nations but at the expense of the humanity as a whole.

we continue...
L

June 7, 2007 at 7:06 AM
YL said...

The death of dear one always makes one think about the aim and objective of his presence in this world. It reminds of our vurnablities. It just comes so abrupt, so sudden, and makes one think. Actually, it is only during these short momements we become human. Grief. Pause. Go back to normality. Sex, money and the city; music, prayers and excercise. All of them distract us from actually perceiving the essence of life; thoughts. Of the 800,000 dead in Kigali, how many seconds or minutes of thought has been given about them. I was sad for 1 day for a loss of a friend, if I give 1 second for each life lost in my beloved home, not from a natural cause; and not by the hand of a God, I'll need more seconds than the ones I've spent on this earth. If the 40 million of our nation pause for just one second for each life, and think, just think, of their stories, their dreams, their aspirations, or their unmarked graves. We chose to forget, but nightmares chase us. We shout, we cry, but we don't hear and we don't see. I've never seen the tears of a weeping mother, I've never heard the wails of an infant child. I've never felt the pains of a raped girl or boy. I've never remembered any of their innocent laughs. They are just a number, a stastic, most likely non significant. They don't consume, they don't buy and they don't SMS. But they sell, I just wonder, how much do pulitzer prize photographers sell their photo's for? A life??

YL

June 7, 2007 at 3:19 PM
Tallal & Leway said...

And this confirms what I said . You can not be sad longer than what you felt for the death-or shall I say the early unexpected depature-of your friend because you are human being and your bottom line is to seek happiness and in order to do that you need to reduce anxiety to the minimum and what is more effective to do that than forgetness.

But the duration of your grief depends on how close your beloved to your soul; hence the differentiation between normal grief and pathological one when it does not match with the extreme of our range as humans.

Death produces all thess emotions because it reminds us of us. When it comes abrupt and unexpected it reminds us of the details we could have enjoyed it with our loss but we missed it. Life is the details. We missed his/her laughter , walk in a quite evenings, intelligent conversation about a book, swim in the nile , coffee in the early morning , movie in cinema , relaxing in a beach , a smile , an elegant gesture , a question and lots of details. Remember we lose friends , relatives, beloved while we are alive and we keep losing them without notice and when we hear about their death we become sad whereis the fact they are dead to us long time before that.

Expected death gives us the chance to think about it.

I believe the issue is not how long our grief before going back to our daily activity but this particular daily activity. Somehow most of us believe that this is where happiness lies : sex, money, career and the city . And we don t discover this fact until lately , hence the real sadness.

And because of this reason and the mad career pursuit then we don t feel the pain of others esp. we as doctors we consider them as subjects when they die they become possible legal sue then we look for our faults. But I challenge you , dear friend to remember the days in Bantiu and compare it by your days now , and ask yourself about the difference ?
When you question yourself ,then it doesnot matter in my opinion whether you felt that pain or not cause you can start now to feel it .

More important is to work activily to stop further killing , further genocides whether in Kigali or Darfur , whether by words or acts or remembering the victims...

I continue ..
L

June 8, 2007 at 5:12 AM
Anonymous said...

Hey bros,
First of all I have to thank you for this interesting discussion; however, I don’t think it is the only path the question raised may take. As a matter of fact, the way your discussion is going could be separated in two or three other posts, in which we can share our experiences, convictions and troubles with Death, Love and Hatred.

We need to rethink of the initial question “Do some people have a quicker rate of emotional & spiritual growth than others?” I believe such questions are problematiques. By probleatique I refer to “quicker”, “emotional” and “growth”.

First of all, there’s a reference point of quickness and slowness which has not been established; only assumed. The position of this reference point determines the extent of the comparison. I, rather simply see it as a matter of difference, which implies no normal rate of growth but rather a different one. This reference point raises a serious problem, if we accepted the question as is, of judging on both sides; the “quicker” – I don’t agree with the words and its implicit meaning, but let’s accept it for the sake of argument – and the “slower” based on non-established criteria.

Secondly, I think the question mixes the issues of emotions and spirituality, and put them in an uncomfortable confusing corner. Emotions; being uncontrollable, and spirituality; as a conscious act, are two different entities that need to be separated and defined in order to get objective grounds of discussions. They both intersect on their subjectivity, which, in turn, depends on personal experiences and socio-cultural backgrounds with all their complexities.

So, though the question deserves to be raised within oneself ‘as a reference’, I don’t think it can be answered but rather it leads to more confusing results/conclusions, which might lead to another set of confusing questions. The above argument goes also to the last two paragraphs, which start with the same question: “Why some people develop faster?” One of the serious - but natural in regard to the problematique - conclusions that I disagree with entirely is “some people have rich internal life, others do not.” Only God, if there is any, can make such statements.

On the other hand, I could not understand why YL has started with negating the existence of love in response to the questions raised and the contemplations that followed. If I'm off-point, please, execuse me! I think this response has deviated from the focus of the discussion. It is impossible, for me at least, to discuss all kinds of love, hatred, sexual motives, personal experiences of deaths, mass murder and genocides in one post. PLEASE FOCUS!
tallo

June 9, 2007 at 3:11 AM
Tallal & Leway said...

welcome back , thought you vanished.

I agree too many -unrelated topics- but i have to say it follows the same famous pattern of " CTRL+N without ALT+ F4".

Reformulate the question to be : If some people grow internally and others don t ?

But we need to agree if there is god or not. It needs another post to determine but I do think we should put God outside the brackets as his presence don t effectively change the reality .Then your phrase will be
if there is ,then God is the one to say probably alone but if not then we can be gods and observe who has internal life or not . I agree it s relative as no currency is available to measure it.But it reflects on his external life, on his eyes and gestures . It can be read from his logic dealing with things. Our internal conflicts is part of our internal life and it s sure that we can t see it unless we are close enough.Internal life can mean a parallel life inside our brains where questions should have to be asked in the right way and answered frankly. These answers if correct and honest should reflect on our external life which result in changes n our paths . I consider emotions is byproduct at some level to this process.

Emotions can be controlled to certain extent , specifically through its interaction with sprituality. It s the state of mind that can affect positively or negatively the emotions and our state of mind can be formed and reformed , not inclusively , thru sprituals.

Now emotions of hatred , for example , can influence back our state of mind.Conclusion to this hatred can be drawn at one extreme end is genocide, which should be our next post.

L

June 9, 2007 at 9:22 AM
YL said...

Dear Tallo,
In respect of the original post; I have to admit, I was off point; completely. So Here is my objective opinions to the questions raised:
1. Emotional Growth: This in itself has to be defined. I would be dissapointed if we don't reach a definition to emotional growth, for it as well is very fluid. We also need to set a reference point for be it height, weight or size, there is always the zero upto infinity to relate to. But emotional growth is completely undefined, and what L might consider growth, T might regard as complete immaturity or nonsense. An example would be the recently posed question by L regarding the presence/absence of a God. Back home posing this question would place you in the ranks of ignorent and immature. In other places/situations you could be awarded a nobel prize (e.g. Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins).
2. The importance of an emotional life cannot be ignored; but just a small comment would be emotional satisfaction does not necessarly mean growth, on the contrary, those with least growth are more likely to be satisfied; and this is the tone that religious preachers play on. Psycologically, if you are kept away from thinking you are promised a healthier emotional/spiritiul life, and this has functioned for too a many years to be disrupted now. Jesus Christ has died on the cross for our sins, he made the thinking, and the decision making and had to bear their burden by dying on the cross.
3. Regarding Altruism: It is completely against human nature. I strongly believe in evolution and that evolution is greatly influenced by competition, essentially to preserve ones own. Love itself is determined by utter selfishness to pass over our genes to next generations. Altruism does not exist unless it improves the chances of our own long term survival. An example for that would be the famous spider that would allow the wasp to poison him after having had sex and passed over his genes.(btw I strongly advice the following blog spot http://scienceblogs.com/loom/).

3. Regarding the rate of development of different peoples, quality is surely better than quantity in this aspect. i.e. a very rapid and non systematic development is certain to be deformed. As to why some people are stagnant, many reasons, foremost on top of the list would be they might be satisfied the way they are; and are working the philosophy of if doesn't itch why scratch.

TBC.
YL.

June 11, 2007 at 10:19 AM
Anonymous said...

• In response to the emotions, I’d like to make two comments: 1) I still think emotions are not controllable. What’s controllable is the expression of emotions. Whereas some expressions, like anger, need not be controlled, others should be stopped at completely by oneself; such as hatred. The expressions of love, joy and anger, are what we reveal or hide; not the emotions themselves. 2) when reading that response, I couldn’t help but recall Coelho in ‘The Dialogues with the Master’ referring to an extract from a Russian poet:

Conscious faith is freedom.
Instinctive faith is slavery.
Mechanical faith is madness.
Conscious hope is strength.
Emotional hope is cowardice.
Mechanical hope is sickness.
Conscious love arouses love.
Emotional love arouses the unexpected.
Mechanical love arouses hate.

• I’m not sure if the new formulation of the question has changed my point; however, I think YL has made it crystal clear by referring to the relativity of the question of the emotional growth; which you’ve later stated.
• It is not my intention at all to get God ‘into the brackets’. I used the traditional perception of God metaphorically to say that there’s nothing human about this approach.
• YL: you’ve given a vivid dimension to this space. Thank you.
• I think an interesting post should be open separately for YL’s comment “Hatred makes wars, and wars made nations, ... We live in fear, hiding under a blanket called love, which is too thin to protect from gunfire” . I think this idea should be pursued thoroughly. I don’t think that WARS is the origin of nations, economies, etc; it could rather be the other way round, or better a dialectical cause-result relationship. Living the mess of the world around us, I can understand such feelings and theories; but we need to, practically and theoretically, resist them.
• Although I completely agree with the evolution theories (thanks for the link, btw), I don’t see any contradiction n agreeing with that ‘Altruism is the ultimate source of happiness’

June 19, 2007 at 9:09 AM

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