Equus is a play written by Peter Shaffer in 1973. It tells the story of a psychiatrist called Dysart who is trying to help Alan Strang, a young teenager who has established that horses are his main religion. Equus explores different themes who are relatable to all of us as human beings. One of those themes is suffering, condensed in the following quotation; “Look...to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain”. We need to understand our individual pain in order to know what makes our life different from that of others. No one manages pain or responds to it in the same way so it is different for each person although all of us experience physiological and physical pain. Physiological pain is usually the most …show more content…
This is one of the reasons why humans do not normally imagine themselves living a hard future but a simple one. Therefore, we try to avoid feeling or thinking about pain as it is prefered to live a life without it. Even so, in order to try to stay away from it, we need to understand ourselves and the cause of our pain. All of us tend to search for happiness but sadness disturbs it. Could we consider happiness as happiness if we did not feel pain at all? or Could we be happy if we had not experienced pain at all?. Despite reasoning that happiness comes from pain and vice versa, we can’t avoid asking ourselves about the point and purpose of suffering. Does it makes us better people? Does it helps us to empathize when someone is going through a painful situation?. Sadness is our answer to pain and we can overcome sadness over time. But pain is always there although at some moments it becomes less of a burden for ourselves and unnoticeable for other people when we are experiencing joy. Sadness can’t be hidden, pain can. We learn to live with it and if we don’t accept it the pain conquers and defeats us. If we could not
suffering hurts man spirit is does more good then constant happiness and power. We have to beat
of suffering is most beneficial. However, answering this question about suffering becomes increasingly more difficult with the
Despite its prevalence, suffering is always seen an intrusion, a personal attack on its victims. However, without its presence, there would never be anyway to differentiate between happiness and sadness, nor good and evil. It is encoded into the daily lives people lead, and cannot be avoided, much like the prophecies described in Antigone. Upon finding out that he’d murdered his father and married his mother,
Sharon Begley, author of “Happiness: Enough Already,” proclaims that dejection is not an unacceptable state of mind and there are experts that endorses gloomy feelings. This reading explicates that even though every-one should be happy there is no need to ignore sadness, as both emotions share key parts in everyone’s life. Sharon Begley and her team of specialists provides the information on why sadness is supplemental to a person’s life.
In the play “Equus”, written by Peter Shaffer, a guy named Alan creates his own god and worships it passionately. Dysart a psychiatrist who lives a life without worship and commitment becomes fascinated and envious of Alan. By living through the treatment of Alan, Dysart realizes he is able to have passion and commitment in his own life. Peter Shaffer is able to gradually show Dysart’s awakening throughout the play with a sense of excitement, suspense, and climax through Alan Strang’s treatment.
Pain and suffering is something that we all would like to never experience in life, but is something that is inevitable. “Why is there pain and suffering in the world?” is a question that haunts humanity. Mother Teresa once said that, “Suffering is a gift of God.” Nevertheless, we would all like to go without it. In the clinical setting, pain and suffering are two words that are used in conjunction.
Are you more of a glass half-empty type of person or a glass half-full? In the essay “Happiness is a glass half empty” writer Oliver Burkeman would say he is a glass half empty type of person. In his essay he writes, “Be positive, look on the bright side, stay focused on success: so goes our modern mantra. But perhaps the true path to contentment is to learn to be a loser” (Burkeman). I think what he means in this statement is people nowadays are taught to always look on the brighter side of life. When in actuality people should be looking on the negative side of life to realize how great their lives really are. In this essay writer Oliver Burkeman uses rhetorical devices such ethos, pathos, and logos to prove that maybe being negative
Suffering is an individual's basic affective experience of pain or distress, often as a result of one’s physical, emotional or spiritual circumstance (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy 2006). Suffering can be classified as physical; for example pain caused by a dislocated knee, emotional; for example one’s grief over the death of a loved one, or spiritual; which is described as the state of being separated from the blissful nature of your divine self (soul). To suffer physically or emotionally is often unavoidable; however it can be argued that spiritual liberation...
People are biases about every aspect of their life. From religion, to the people they date, to the type of toothpaste they use, people already have a preset judgement about things because of experiences in their past. In the book Stumbling on Happiness, author Daniel Gilbert says the ability to think about our future is what separates humans from other animals. Gilbert suggests that our brains fall victim to a wide range of biases that cause our predictions of the future to be inaccurate. Due to these mental errors it is remarkably difficult to predict what will actually happen and what will make us happy.
For Mill, the goal of morality is “not solely the pursuit of happiness, but the prevention or mitigation of unhappiness”. (Mill, pp15) For many other philosophers criticized him, by arguing that if happiness means a continuity of highly pleasurable excitement, it is evident enough that this is impossible. For a state of pleasure lasts only moments or in some cases, hours or days, and is the occasional brilliant flash of enjoyment, not its permanent and steady flame. Therefore, to response to these criticisms, Mill argues that if pure happiness is impossible to be always obtained and last forever, then we should at least reduce the amount of pain that may result from our
According to Brooks (2014), people seek happiness but indirectly obtain several tests that affects their emotions in many ways. Indeed, when people are is questioned about their past, memories coming back to her mind are often the most important positively as negatively. A positive event can be the birth of a child, success. In contrast, a negative event is often links to death, failure, a dismissal, and so on. Suffering or pain also gives us an outside perspective. Without a doubt, suffering makes us human we like it or not. For example, when a friend tells that she has failed an exam and we realize that we could get it easily, it is hard to understand exactly her emotion because we have never been in the situation. But when the same situation arises and you become the concerned, you understand the effect that this failure may have on you emotionally. In this sense, we understand that suffering makes people human because it helps them to be connected to a situation already happened before or which could happen in the future.
middle of paper ... ... Being free of pain is something that we feel within us to be intrinsically joyful, and no reason can be used to explain further why we wish to be joyful, or in good health. These things we just sense, and even a murderer, who rejects morality on the social level, will do whatever he can to avoid the displeasures of his inner being. His sentiments, if only for himself, remain within him. “One thing can always be a reason, why another is desired.
Happiness can be understood as the moral goal of life or can be unpredictable and is something we create from ourselves and by ourselves. The idea of happiness was known as something we nurture on our own and is a state of emotion. Completing our everyday goals will soon bring us happiness, which seems to be very important to most humans and is what makes life worth living, but this is not certain. This conception of Eudemonia was common in ancient Greece as it is currently today. Aristotle had what he thought was an ideal activity for all those who wanted to live life to the fullest, be happy, and have purpose.
Everyone has a pain body. The voice in our head that controls our thoughts, tampering with our emotions and can lead to unpleasant actions. It gets triggered by awful memories that evoke negativity, like a dark creature that feeds off on our gloomy thoughts. Just like a storyteller, it starts highlighting the most upsetting aspects of any situation, exaggerating the details and influencing our minds to think that we have a miserable life. Once the pain body started taking control, it will be challenging for positivity to penetrate into the dark abyss within your mind. From reading Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, I realized that we can help other people be conscious from their dominant pain bodies, thus alleviating their negative thoughts.
comfort those in need and to ease their suffering when we can. But suffering is