The Deadly Seven

 

Remember the nerve jangling thriller, Seven, and how the psycho killer stalks the trail of those guilty of the seven capital sins? Its not just in the movies that a person gets victimized and used as a living personification of sins. We’ll make a slight twist and go to the more relevant emotions in real life. In a sense, there are the seven deadly sins which continue to corrupt and consume the very being of those enslaved by them. This is no Biblical allusion for them this time, so we’ll refer to them as the

Usually, emotions connote someone who’s disturbed, lying in a couch with a psychiatrist sorting, unwinding, and unknotting intricate webs of emotional traumas and neuroses. Western emotions attributes exclusively to the workings of the mind. In our times of high specialization, the study of the mind has been compartmentalized as Psychology. Interesting to note here is the etymology of Psychology. It originally comes from the Greek word “psyche”, meaning soul. But with the more materialistic outlook with which everything must be quantified, psychology has now been converted to the study of the human mind. As for the soul, this is within the realm of belief and mystery, the scope of religion.

In the early 1900s, Freud attempted to resolve psychological conflicts by reverting to the patient’s childhood. Skeptics viewed Freudian attempts of regressing to one’s childhood as futile, as a solution was quite difficult to come by.

How is person trigger to respond with a certain emotion? The ancient book, Bhagavad-gita, elucidates, “While contemplating the objects of the senses, a person develops attachment to them, and from such attachment lust develops, and from lust anger arises, and from anger, complete delusion arises, and from delusion bewilderment of memory.

When memory is bewildered, intelligence is lost, and when intelligence is lost one falls down again into the material pool (Ch.2:26:63).”

We can understand that all emotions start from that to which the senses are exposed. From the external, the internal is affects the external. A vicious cycle goes on and on.

This vicious cycle is also corroborated by the Chinese saying, “Contact with the external world generates internal emotions”. It is simply the external affecting the internal. Our senses, as active cameras and tape recorders, capture the sense-objects from the environment and then send electrochemical impulses to the brain. These are projected into the movie screen of the mind which is viewed and reacted upon by the self, you.

Aversion and attraction is at the base of the projected emotion attached to response. This response of the self enters the mind, then ethers the body mechanism as energy. So, human emotions are nothing but energy in motion traveling through the body’s energy channels.

With each emotion comes secretion of particular hormones, discharging certain electrochemical activity in the nervous system, causing alteration of the pulse and blood pressure, adaptations in respiration, and stimulation or suppression of digestion. Only when the emotion is smooth, swift, and well-balanced does the person experience a positive stimulation to his system. But should be the emotion explosive or extreme and prolonged, the body’s energy mechanism goes into some kind of shock, causing serious damage. The body’s immune system becomes impaired, thus affecting the internal organs of the body. Disease, degeneration, and debility are rooted in offensive emotions.

Wilhelm Reich, in the 1950s, was the trailblazer on the frontiers of the obvious link of emotions and psychological pathology. Yet his studies on human bio-energy have pathetically earned not just a Nobel Prize but a term in the prison cell. The controversial statement of Reich was that, “fixation and conflicts cause fundamental disturbances of the bio-electric system and so get anchored somatically. It is impossible to separate psychic from the somatic process”.

Dr. Wider Penfield, meanwhile made extensive studies on the brains of epileptic patients. He was able to map out the certain biological movements and emotions of their corresponding part in the human brain.

These “controversial” ideas boggled minds of the people in the West. It was yet to be realized that traditional Chinese medicines and Ayurvedic system had already developed a whole system of monitoring, controlling and curing the ways of roller-coaster emotions people inevitably encounter.

The Seven Deadly Emotions have always been there affecting us, making it very easy for us to relate to them. It is sad to think though the psycho-psychological link up between emotions and health has been known by the Oriental and Indian world since ancient times, Western doctors have failed to properly understand or correctly treat the ailments accompanying such emotions. Western medicines needs to first grasp an understanding of the basic dynamics of human energy.

Greed, Anger, Anxiety, Envy, Grief, Fear, and Lust are the Seven Deadly Emotions. How many people have hyperventilated and fainted because of as upsurge of emotion? How many widowers have succumbed to diseases and other fatal ailments due to the extreme grief of losing someone they loved? When we experience these emotions, how exactly do your bodies become affected? Answers to these on issues to follow. Thanks to Marilitz “thoughts”.