Feel it

Feeling is a wonderful thing. We feel sweet when we are in love, we feel sad when we lost something precious, and we feel joyful when we have achieved something important. Feelings not only allow us to realize how to react to different events, they also can protect us from danger. We feel burn when we put our finger over a candle flame, we feel painful when we over use our muscle and we feel sick when we eat something bad for our bodies. They are all warnings our body give out to prevent us further in doing or taking what may be harmful for us. Feeling is a great piece of software God has given us. However, like many software, there are bugs in feelings.

c:/programme/feelings/illusion

Feelings is something we experience internally, an emotional respond according to our understanding about the world. It is not an external fact. I feel that a grandma-looking lady whom sits across in the subway is looking at me angrily, but may be the fact is that she is looking at the offensive poster behind me on the subway wall!!!
A lot of women who stay in an abusive relationship because they "feel" that their spouse loves them, but the truth is, the very act of violence is not an act of love.
Love nowadays is very fragile, one reason is because we always feel we love or we are loved. But then, when we are asked what ground are we based on for those feelings, we are left with silence.

For Christian, including myself, in many nights, don't feel the companion of God. We feel that God is not with us. That happen for different reasons, for many people, it happens because of depression. When you are in that stage, it's hard to pull yourself out when you are in the mist of depression. It is as if you step into a swamp, unable to pull yourself away from those thoughts. Sometimes you don't even know you are half way down the swamp.

I am usually a very joyful person. But in the mist of depression, I am literally not quite myself. Usually, when I am with friends, or almost everyone, I guard myself up, maintaining myself in a normal state. Only my very best friend will I leak out the sphere of my darkness. When I am in that sphere, my brain denies God. Denying His love, that is, if He loves me, He won't let me suffer like this. If He is with me, I won't feel this loneness. If He is with me, all those voices in my head that deny him will disappear. In those moments, I don't feel God's existence, because I suffer from great pain, I am still lonely, and those voices are still telling me to give up. As an imagery, I see myself knee height down the swamp, and having an other me trying to pull myself up. But then, I saw the drawn one shushing myself away.

I tried to force quite of the frozen programme.

To force quite, press

"Ctrl" +"Alt" + "Del"

But then, still, the programme denies it and refuses to quite.

Now, the feeling programme is running in a more dangerous stage because it is running with a bug, a bug that deactivate the data of past event that I have encounter with God.

file> open > c:/programme/rationality

Warning: File cannot be opened, memory is running low.

I am overwhelmed by the feeling of sadness, unable to rationalize my body, mind and soul as a whole.
Negative thoughts from depression can vary, it can be based on past events and it can be totally arbitrary. One can feel horrible about him/herself and feeling they do not worth living. And sometimes on may feel the whole world is full of sin and sadness and suffering, why doesn't God wipe up the whole human kind. If one allow him/herself to indulge in the depression, more negative thoughts will come in more arbitrary, it is like a fly found a piece of pooh, and other flies just keep coming. One may start feeling life is horrible because the grass is green and the stars are shinning.

When the programme of feeling is running with error and unable to pull out rationality, we need to reboot the computer, but we are too fade up to do so, we need our friend to press that button for us.

So I know I must call someone who is from CS background, I don't mean computer science, I mean Christian Spirituality. My friends keep telling me how God loves me and how He has changed and heal my life spiritually and physically. People who are trapped in depressed thoughts sometimes needed these words as a ladder or rope to be pulled away from it. We all need affirmation from others. And like wise, we should try to say thanks in any chance with your sincere, "mum, thanks for the cooking", "Joe, I appreciate you brining the bibles back after services", "Sir, thank you for cleaning our city". My friend would tell me how I am a blessing to my friends to just be their friend, showing my affection by taking them around the city, inviting them to my house for a dinner, or even just a joyful smile. All these little acts I did could also light up someone else's darkest moment.

Sometimes we are blinded from how wonderful we could be, they become hidden data by not being mentioned often enough as a response or an affirmation from others. Although in the mist of my friend telling me all those wonderful things about me and the world, I may keep on saying that how negative things still are and keep on and on "reasoning" why I should stay irrational and hate anything I see, even myself. But internally, all the programmes are trying to reboot and rerun, although it may take the windows a little longer time to run.

c:/programme/rationality/past_events

Feeling prevents us from dangers, but it is also dangerous. That is why God gives us rationality. For some people, including myself, lazy on counting grace of our daily life, is not exercising our rationality. Rationality is a logical processing system which help us to react reasonably. Some people who went through traumatic experience usually detach their feelings from reality without knowing, because that how they get through the past painful events. That is by not allowing him/herself to bury and not allowing him/herself feel sad or painful although being beaten up (physically or emotionally) because it is too hard to bare. This detachment is like shutting down the electric fuse, you don't know when you are shutting down the kitchen light fuse, you are also shutting down the fridge, buy the time you find out, all the food inside became roughen.

Then how, should people who are too emotionally detached get to "feel" God's existence again?
That is to exercise our rationality. Keep telling people how God has our lives, what miraculous thing God has done for us. Keep those memories stronger than feelings, so when you don't feel God is with you, it's ok, because you KNOW He is with you. Sometimes the detachment is too great that it will take a long time for us to output a rational feeling. So when we don't feel it, we need to rationalize it.
An other thing is that, to me, I think, the feelings we pick up from our physical senses are greater than mental feelings. That means, when I eat a chili, I feel hot and burning sensation on my tongue (unless I lose my taste of course), and if I am stinker by a mosquito, I feel itchy. Children learn that they did something wrong when mother gently hit on a child's hand or buttock, they learn through feelings of their skin. So we, too need to learn the feeling of love though our skin. Lately I have develop an exercise for myself, I say thanks to what I have and than hug myself and shake like little children when they are happy. Saying it and hearing it is not enough, we need to hug yourself, have a good laugh, let our body feel loved as we count on the blessings from God. Sometimes our forgetful mind can forget the greatest healing and changes God has given us.

Feelings and rationality are like monitor and mouse. If we turn of the monitor and move the mouse around clicking the way we want, most likely we will miss what we really want. And if we only see the screen without having our mouse pointing to what we want, we are not moving forward either. We need to look at the monitor to see the truth of where things are, and react accordingly of what we feel we want to open.

Feelings can be totally irrational or it can be on a balance with rationality, sometimes it may not be a choice that one can make because of circumstances like depression or other mental blocks, but exercising our rationality and having great CS companions help us from crashing. However, if the situation is too serious, that is you have a severe computer virus that just keep interrupting your life, you may need to consider formatting your computer by going to see a minister or spiritual retreat, restoring back normal programmes.


Cherry
7th April, 2005
Toronto, Canada

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here is a short interesting link about emotion and decision.