Sunday, January 28, 2024

Our capicity to feel

 Sam Keen says this is the way our capacity to feel works:

The ability to feel is indivisible. Repress awareness of any one feeling and all feelings are dulled. When we refuse to allow fear we correspondingly lose our ability to wonder. When we repress our grief, we blunt our capacity to experience joy.

 

It’s interesting, but is it true? I had imagined that it might be the other way around, that the inability to feel one thing might lead to an enhanced capacity to experience another emotion, just as some people who lose their sight report an increased capacity to hear or smell.

The question is not rhetorical. It seems like I should know how this works, but I don’t.

 • Source: Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man; New York: Bantam, 1992.

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