Imagine you could feel no pain, where no matter what happened, the nerves in your body didn't transfer the signal of pain to your brain, so it never registered. Does that sound like a good thing? What about if when someone criticized you harshly, but you felt nothing, water off a ducks back - no negative feelings at all.
I think that most people would like to switch off negative feelings from time to time, but most of us don't actually think what would happen if we could. Negative feelings are information about our environment, yet we are constantly looking for ways to avoid it. If we feel nothing physical, we would injure ourselves without knowing it. Similarly if we feel nothing emotionally, we are also going to do harm to ourselves and harm to others, as we will not be able to recognize the consequences of our actions.
Over the last few decades, we have been encouraged to show "our" emotions unrestrained, uncontrolled and without thought as to what damage they might do to ourselves or others. We have been told that the most important thing in the world, is how we feel about the world, not about the reality of it, or the actions we make. It used to be a person was what they did, now we have decided that what we do is not important, it is how we feel about ourselves that is the imperative component.
Not only this, through culture we have not only distanced ourselves from others, we have increased the focus on ourselves, and reduced the importance of how others feel, including the ways we treat them. The golden rule is dead.
My daughter is having growing pains regularly now, where her legs are aching at night, so I sit there and rub them and sing her to sleep. I was talking to a friend and they just said, "give her pain killers before she goes to bed so she won't feel it and wake up", as if that is the solution. Two million years of evolution, developing our senses, and the answer we have to it is, medicate.
What do we learn when constantly numbed?
And I feel that this is what we are doing, when rather than facing conditions, we are looking for ways to escape them when they get uncomfortable. We are there for the good times, the times that make us smile and feel good, and then avoid the negatives as if there is nothing to learn from them, as if they don't train our senses, teach us how to be stronger, more resilient, as well as more caring. People love to go on about empathy, but what are people feeling in regards to others when they have spent their time avoiding the negatives themselves?
There there - I know how you feel....
A lot of people think that I am quite negative these days, because i talk about a lot of negative things, while they think that I should just concentrate on the positives. Filtering only for the positive doesn't stop the negatives from happening, it makes them worse. Being ignorant is not an excuse.
Is it?
I believe that one of the reasons that so many people are struggling emotionally, is that they have spent so much of their time avoiding discomfort, that when it inevitably catches up with them, they don't have good enough tools to deal with it. And when they can no longer ignore the negatives, they see how shitty the world can be, and how difficult it is for them to do anything about it and then, they fall into a depression.
No where left to hide.
Just imagine learning to use a knife without being able to feel pain, and then realizing that fear of cuts is a necessary evil. Evil. Evil is anything that makes an individual feel bad these days, and people will openly speak out against everything and anyone that makes them feel bad, that makes them feel uncomfortable in even the slightest way, as if the lowest grade pain, is equivalent to the loss of a limb, an arrow through the heart.
Pain isn't evil, nor is fear. However the inability to deal with pains and fears, to overcome discomfort and face challenge, leads to all kinds of harms in our world and at extremes, evils from the human perspective. Yet, we keep getting told to do what makes us feel good, avoid toxic people, avoid discomfort, choose what makes us happy.
No matter what.
If we feel nothing, what do we experience in this life?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
