Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Feelings, or why my bio says Geek☯spiritual

Geek is the yang, my relationship to hard science and a logical approach to knowledge and beliefs. It also represents my history, and my fascination with technology (I'm a programmer by both hobby and trade). Pretty straight-forward hopefully.

Spiritual is the yin, my subjective experience of the universe by a conscious brain; deep, profound and personally meaningful - but above all emotional. There is NO 'Woo' here (see link for why personal experience does not equal ontological truth), it is a mix of emotions and an attitude and approach to life that I cannot find a better word for. It is the feeling you get when you are in the middle of the desert, in almost total darkness and the sky is filled with stars; it is beauty; it is wonderment; and it is what drives my Geek side to know more.

Feelings are important

Feelings drive our sense of empathy, our experience of pain, happiness, anger, outrage, love, and all the other spectrum of emotional responses a normal human experiences. These feelings form the absolute core of our sense of human morality and therefore they are critically important -- and yet, we are not really in control of our emotions (and only slightly more in control of our responses to emotions). So I think it's important to think about and consider our emotional health and how it is formed and affected by our experiences.

To that point: physically and emotionally abused children do not have the benefit of a healthy and 'normal' emotional system and this causes them, and the human race, endless problems. This is something we have to get our heads around and address (ending child abuse).

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