Wow.. just 2 days after i replied to Shamou and this thread has so many discussions!!
After reading through all the messages, I have a new understanding here.
Majority of the population, including.. ahem.. me myself believed that we all have a passion for something within us, and the external factors, be it a sport, an item or whatever, must be in sync with our internal love and that will sparkle the passion out of us.
While most of us change the external factor to be in sync with our internal.. hm.. let's call it.. love, Shamou has offered a school of thought which challenges the very fundamental belief system we have, which is, instead of changing outside factor, why don't we change our internal mentality state to be in sync with whatever external factor we are dealing with??
I didn't quite get it at first, especially Shamou's example of swimming is very irrelevant! hahaa ( no offense my friend
) But after all these messages, it finally dawn on me.
What Shamou is trying to say is a higher level of self mastery. It is similar to self hypnotism, or self motivation through visual, audio and actions to keep oneself always in a positive mental state, so when he is doing something, even if it is something he hated, he still can do it with lots of enthusiasm and motivation.
Shamou, please correct me if i have interpreted wrongly.
But i would say the reason we cannot accept that we can have passion for anything at will is because passion comes with love. Love is something that we do not want to give to everything and anything. It is something special, if we hated something, we prefer to continue hating it!! If we love something, it must be special to us.
That's why Shamou, even your "one night stand" example does not associate with love.
Therefore Shamou, I think the appropriate word to use here is enthusiasm and not passion.
But the very fact that you are able to get enthusiastic and motivated to do everything you want, including things you hated doing (jogging), you have a much higher level of self mastery than most of us and this alone earns my respect!!
Cheers!
Albert Lee
P.S. hm.. this thread discussion is very meaningful and thought provoking, I will post about it in my
self development blog!
