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Monday, November 03, 2014

Varieties of emotion, and variation in its intensities!

His anger his quite bad, when(ever) he is at it”... that is all they say about somebody, who is 'otherwise' a very lovable person!

What they are missing is, while... the anger-spells constitute only about 6% of his waking hours, or 4.5% of his total hours (these percentages are only for the purpose of dramatization of the comment, and have no bearing on any 'research oriented' statistical findings of mine... but yes... we can visualise, somebody getting angry once in a day, manifesting it for some 5 minutes, and the 'lava' spread out and cools only within the next 40 minutes or so!)... the missing-to-take notice of (and adequately appreciating it), is that this same person is so peaceful for the bulk of the 95% of the time (I allow a probability of 1% of time for that rare-wonder-element!)...
Maybe, the poor fellow doesn't manage to handle that peaceful-ness into a pervasive manner, while others around pass by, as if they are just passing by the cage of a hippopotamus in a zoo (it doesn't react at all.. so how long to stare at it?)...

Some evolved beings when they are around, even their calmness, peace is so imposing ... like we suddenly confront a huge 'Himalayas' into its face! Fortunate ones feel this peace of that evolved being ... being pervading too, into oneself ...

Most of us 'carry' a potential to emote in a few varieties of ways... Some are 'deaf' to music... and all that they manage is.... like that joke of Mulla-Nasruddin, who replied to a  query about his tears, at a classical concert.. The query was in two instalments: “Arey Mulla, aap, aur yahan?” (You here, at a concert?), to which he merely winked... and the next query, “Aap ke aankhon mei aansoo?” (You in tears?.. Music was so 'moving'?), and he replied: “Yes!!! I recognised it so soon... Just a couple of days ago, when the scape-goat-for-meat was separated from its herd, it could 'sense' that it would soon be beheaded, and it make 'exactly' the same kind of 'long-note-bellowing'... mei..ae..ae... ae... etc... and this vocal musician must have sensed his end too, out of that acute and chronic pain in his abdomen” ... Trying to even feign emotions, of which we do not have a potential, can land us in trouble!

Even kids, no sooner they touch the age of 2 or 3, try to specialise into an emotion, that seems to work for them, with the elders around! Maybe it is whining, crying, long-faced-grim 'hangout'.. etc.. ('the crying-baby gets the feeding..'... is the popular adage... but why? We respond to only certain 'intense-emotions' of others? Can't we try to respond to a very peaceful person, with the very same 'dynamic-yet-silent' calmness? If not trying to nag him with a 'thank you for being so-quiet'!)..

Our perceptions adapt itself, to the emotional 'specialisations' that we try to get engrooved into, (maybe inadvertently too), and then... it becomes a kind of embedded-design, into the very way of our being.. and we now struggle to even observe something as silly as mere breath-watching! Our emotional orientations, having specialised into some variety/ies.. tend to polarise us towards only that-kind-of-perceptions... hankering (for pampering ourselves), only into such inputs... An easy identification is perhaps, when we discover our own 'attention-span' to be repulsive towards something that we are 'logically-convinced' to be for our own-good! (That swallowing of a vitamin pill, for example feels cumbersome, and we put it off for the next day... 'already too late for bus' etc!)...

If watching one's own breath feels too cumbersome... why not watch that of others,.. at least when they just-finished with anger/running/tension/etc... the breath pattern is so exciting, when we see that 'heaving' instead of that nose, just taking in noiselessly, motionlessly.. the free-air-around! (and we even ask.. 'why are you fretting and fuming?').. Singers learn to handle that 'breathing-in' to be a little-noiseless, when the microphone is too sensitive... but there again that 'self-awareness' is diluted when the focus of emotion is oriented to beget a 'wah-wah' from listeners of that recording!

What, if we allow the situation to decide, what kind of an emotion is to be invoked, and then we activate that 'software' to read that 'situation' (like an intelligent computer, or a smart-phone senses the data and decides whether to invoke a spread-sheet, a word-processor, or just that 'unknown-data' response!)... I wonder!

(Long ago, a teacher said, “You can be a Yogi in two ways... like a flower, or even like a stone”... It took quite a long time to convince myself that stones do emote! It is just that we are 'stone-deaf' usually, to stones!)

In-variably-yours,

psn(3rd November, 2014)

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