Thursday 19 July 2007

Of One Heart and One Mind

A thought has been running around in my mind for a while now. The popular sentiment around the world is that it is the heart that feels while the mind thinks. However, I disagree. Over the last few days, I feel my mind feeling not just thinking. The emotions that I experience everyday are my mind and nowhere else. It does not make them any less intense than if they were coming from the "heart". Without the mind there would be no emotions as there would be no thoughts. Emotions and thoughts are both by products of each other - yin and yang - and they co exist in the same space, feeding on each other, nourishing, depleting.

And maybe this is why relationships are so complex - because we never identify the source of our emotions or thoughts. Nothing comes from thin air. A baby is born innocent, like a blank slate. The thoughts begin with observations, with the senses, with making the connections between the senses; emotions with the experience of the sense.

I wonder sometimes how to define these emotions that we give names to. They are so vast, so intricate, so enmeshed with opposites - a sum of every moment gone by and every moment to come; of every thought and every belief. I have felt this way more so after the last two movies that I saw. We think the choices are simple but then you wonder how a woman can accept her trans-gender husband, how a father can hate his child because he is blind and how he can then grow to love him more than life itself. What makes their emotions so enduring, so powerful?

This journey of self discovery through movies grows more wonderful each day as I reach within myself, question, find, and realise.


1 comment:

Nikhil said...

Well its all a matter of perspective, whether you say the emotions come from the "heart" or the "mind" - I think its just semantics. The point is that these emotions exist, and also that they cannot be reduced to just simple nerve impulses (which might be outward symptoms of the emotion, but not its cause). What physical location the emotion originates is really immaterial :)

 

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