City Squares: The city’s simple geometric figures, squares and rectangles, vertical lines and nothing more interesting than that. No place for a mind to wander, certainly. With grey sky and empty sidewalks it becomes heavy and painful. Only the leaves in the trees to anchor the mind to life and reality.
The Heart’s Eye: “Seeing” is actually the brain’s interpretation of external forces acting on our eyes. The brain organizes ocular information, synthesizes it with what else it knows about the environment and the world, and the imagination fills in the blanks. Thus sight.
Emotions are also interpretations of the outside world, and you cannot control your emotions any more than you can control what you see when you open your eyes. Happiness, fear, anger, spiralling depression, ecstatic love- all signals, non-verbal intelligence which gives depth to the rest of the mind’s insights.
Emotions are a part of us, and like other parts, they may be exercised and improved: fears overcome, anger outgrown, love refined from childish fantasies to spiritual union. And like other neural signals, emotions may be ignored (the mind overriding the heart). The human faculties relate to one another in complex ways which are impossible to ever fully explain.
Heresy Lives: The reign of Christianity has ended, and people are no longer shunned for religious heresy. But people are still systematically separated, excluded, and hated for having unpopular beliefs. Human beings are not programmed to seek truth, but rather to confirm their beliefs, and so they overemphasize things they see which confirm their beliefs, and lash out against anything which undermines their beliefs. This applies in politics and sociology just as much as it applies to religion.
People never described themselves as heretics. “Heretic” was the Christian’s slander for pagans and non-believers. It’s the same with the words racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and terrorist: they’re just labels for people whose opinions aren’t university-approved.
Reality isn’t moral, i.e. you can’t make an arbitrary set of rules regarding right and wrong and expect nature to respond accordingly. Reality persists, human ideas rise and fall depending on their relevancy. We as a civilization should be beyond the point where we have to seek administrative approval before we speak our minds.
Closing Note: The only group of people who may acceptably be mocked in the media is the rednecks, and they’re mocked OFTEN. Clue to nature of media benevolence.