I stated one can have a neurosis [as defined above] and still cultivate and maintain a state of equanimity.
Where a person suffer EXTREME mental illness [e.g. extremely serious dementia, alzheimer’s, loss sense of reality, loss of mental faculty] as defined, it can be easily observed the person is incapable to maintain a state of equanimity.
What is wrong with such a point?
I believed on hindsight of past mistakes, psychologists/psychiatrists do take extreme care to do their best in assessing mental patients in accordance to the DSM. But being human, mistakes will and did happen.
excitement … I don’t think I want to get rid of that.
distrust … which can be a reasonable attitude.
doubt … again a reasonable attitude.
fear … often useful.
uncertainty … welcome to life. Seriously.
Let’s concentrate on “excitement”. A person is in love. If the person does not have equanimity, then he fully feels the excitement of being in love. If the person does have equanimity, then what? He feels no excitement? He feels only a little excitement? He feels contentment? He feels apathy?
The person without equanimity may write a great song or story about that love. What will the person with equanimity write about it?
Now you’re making it into some kind of magical state in which a person cannot become addicted to chemicals?
Maybe a person ought to grieve the loss of a loved one … fully, emotionally, irrationally.
Why can’t you be stupid and ignorant and still have equanimity? It is after all, a particular attitude towards events and therefore it does not seem to require any wisdom beyond adopting that attitude. (If that is in fact wisdom.)
A statement that exists comfortably within the bosom of equanimity.
What about the individuals who believe they never make mistakes? Irrational people???
Perhaps these individuals ‘see’ what others refer to as mistakes as indispensable “teachers”.
In my case … most who know me believe either my first marriage was a mistake or my first divorce was a mistake. Ditto for my second marriage and so on.
Most people believe a serious case of epilepsy is both painful and undesirable. OTH … Dostoevsky stated he preferred epilepsy over normalcy because he believed his epilepsy was the vehicle for his deeper insights concerning “being.”
I like Jordan Peterson’s statement … “Life is a catastrophe … accept it … work with it … not against it.”
Pain is a teacher … why the propensity to avoid pain?
I had a pause when I read ‘excitement’ in the list, but I realize there if a difference when one is excited like a monkey and not being able to modulate it.
A person who has equanimity will naturally and definitely feel excited over a new job, first time visiting a country or anything that is novel [positive] but such a person can modulate the natural excitement effectively.
When a person is in love, s/he could be with the partner who is or not reciprocating, or
fell in love with some one merely based on sight without the other being aware of it.
A person who is in love but does not have equanimity will be overwhelmed by his emotions and likely to do the silliest things to the extent the potential lover could even reject all his moves. To such a person love could be blind.
If such a person were to write a song, story or poem, it will not a presented smoothly due to the unmodulated excitability in the brain.
A person who is in love and have equanimity will definitely have his love circuit activated with the standard chemicals oozing and body triggered to react accordingly but s/he will not do all the above silly things. If such a person who were to write a song, story or poem it will be one that has high quality and reflect the appropriate intensity.
Yes, a person with equanimity will not be addicted to drugs if s/he happened to try it. There is nothing magical about this.
All normal humans experienced grief naturally and where they do not have equanimity, they could fall into deep depression, various mental sufferings and all sort of other related problems.
A person with equanimity will definitely suffer grief naturally when triggered by death of a close one or others, but s/he will understand it is just a natural psychological reactions and let the effects wear off without amplifying its effects.
I did not deny ignorance. Nothing wrong is I am ignorant of certain knowledge I am not interested in. As for stupidity it depend on degrees.
If one is stupid to the lowest degree, then one is stupid enough not be able to cultivate and develop a state of equanimity.
The fact that one has equanimity by default some degree of wisdom in one’s ability to develop the state of equanimity and practice it.
To topic re above, in general, qualified psychologists/psychiatrists will be drilled in their studies and practices, plus they will have the intelligence to understand no human can be infallible.
In the military, they use a peculiar self assessment stress test. I’m not sure what model it’s based on (maybe Holmes and Rahe) but it reminded me of this topic. The test has a list of lifetime events most of which mark some type of defining change in ones life, like a death in the family or getting a new job. In the test, if an event applied to you you added points to your score. The thing is that the test does not discriminate between positive or negative events, so if, for example, you had a positive event, like marriage, birth of child, or a even just a promotion, you still add “stress” points to your overall stress score. The overall stress score does not discriminate where the points came from, only how high your overall number is, so the higher your overall number the higher your health risk. The presumption there appears to be that the less lifetime events (or changes) you’re experiencing, the better your overall health will be in the long run. Personally, I think this test is a little absurd by not differentiating the stimuli, but it doesn’t even address variables like the presence or absence of composure or self-control, it disregards it completely too.
I am bold enough to state that pretty much every mental illness can be cured using nothing other than meditation. Equanimity is the polar opposite of neurosis.
I am bold enough to state that there is pretty much no such thing as mental illness.
I like your confidence in meditation … for me, meditation is simply a process that facilitates the appropriate reconstruction … usually not an exact replication … of the brain’s neural pathways and circuitry.
Emotions are stress. Apathy is sort of like fasting. Whereas fasting cleanses the body of toxins, apathy cleanses the mind (or nervous system.) And again, whereas fasting increases the appreciation for food, apathy increases the appreciation for emotions.
It’s like how CPU’s need a cooler in order to prevent over-heating. The more heated your brain, the more cooling you need. Emotions generate heat, meditation generates cold. I’m now beginning to sound like Aristotle. The two processes must occur in parallel. When they do not, emotional disorder happens.
Mental illness implies the brain is not functioning properly … one could argue for any illness the brain is not functioning properly … being the brain controls our wonderful immune system.
More specifically, many years ago I had the privilege of interviewing a respected psychiatrist who spent his adult life dealing with serious cases of schizophrenia … as a patient. … long story.
The most shocking thing he shared was his belief that mental illness has a spiritual component … he went on to lament the psychiatric community’s inability to understand or treat spiritual issues.
In the above anecdote substituting the word “spiritual” for “evolutionary” is appropriate.
I would call it transmutation pain experienced in the brain.
Transmutation … a zillion fragments of the evolutionary process … in the human species is involuntary and unavoidable … and self evidently painful/uncomfortable.
So he “controls” his excitement. How much control?
Irrelevant.
You seem to think that there are only two kinds of people in the world … those who have equanimity and those who go crazy out of control.
Trying something “once” does not make you addicted but I think you are saying more … you’re saying that those with equanimity don’t become addicts. And if you are saying it, then equanimity is magical because it overcomes physiological processes.
There are the two types of people - two types of reaction - those with equanimity who have an appropriate reaction and those who are out of control.
It really comes down to this : you have defined equanimity as “an appropriate” reaction, an appropriate feeling, an appropriate emotional level. Anything that seems appropriate to you, shows equanimity and anything which seems inappropriate shows lack of equanimity.
It does not commit you to any action or feeling in particular. And no wonder you think that everyone ought to pursue it. Heck, everyone ought to do the most appropriate thing and have the most appropriate thoughts.
But that really says nothing.
Contrast that with the Stoics who actually said how you ought to act. For example, one ought to be indifferent to death, even the death of your own child or loved one. That’s pretty harsh. It’s spelled out in concrete terms. It means something as a directive.
Not really. If a virus or bacteria in your body multiplies faster than the immune system can mobilize and destroy it, then that has nothing to do with the proper or improper functioning of the brain. It’s a limitation of the immune system.
Or to put this good question another way…The Finnish advocate of equanimity might think the American advocate of equanimity is manic.
Irrelevant. or to come at this from another angle…or the person who is trying to balance his or her emotions does not get the information about the other person one gets when one is real and expressive around that person. And so does not realize they are _______________some negative thing that comes out later in the challenges of real relationships.
and in addition to this nice observation, the person who is afraid to do silly things - not defined her - may not be letting another human being (that is a social mammal) know, meet, feel, understand who they are, what they are feeling and so on.
yes, it is good you keep pointing out his binary thinking. But further, a person need not view one’s feelings as ‘natural psychological reactions’ to have them wear off. In fact they may wear off in a more healthy way if, to the person who advocates equanimity, the person grieving seems out of balance at times or even often. And how long is the appropriate grieving period for everyone, given all the possible relationships and given the different other facets of the survivors’ lives the death happened amidst?
How does one determine the appropriate level of emotional feeling, expression and duration? how does one take into account cultural and personal factors? How does one look at another person and judge this? How can we know what their relationship with their deceased parent was in comparison to our own relationship with ours? It becomes this vague floating criterion - really well abused by pharmaceutical companies - where people who prefer to control their emotions can judge their own sanity and that of others. At what point does equanimity as a priority become pathological? Is it possible that different people will have different levels of healthy expressiveness and what would be judged as pathological by the equanimity crowd is often actually healthier than control based and/or detachment based guidelines would indicate?
