The software of every human emotion has a code. There is a code for pain, but there is also a code for joy. The moment your nerve registers the code for any emotion, it automatically also registers the code for the directly opposite impulse. If God is the designer of human emotion, and if it is possible for influences outside Him to affect our emotions in ways that could lead to destruction, then He is also the doctor (the software technician) of them.

When eye contact with our own heart or with the collective reality outside us is unsatisfying, then it is our heart that needs medicine. The close interplay between thought, neurones and emotions manifesting as feelings is a soft game full of hard realities — it makes us blush, sweat, feel our hearts thump, lie awake, suffer from high blood pressure, not to mention all the faceless fears that unseen use our own thoughts against us and intimidate our nervous system until we accept this dynamic and its inner workings as if they were simply a given. We exercise our thoughts with these fear-weights until our fear-muscles bulge with health …

Politics is nothing other than the reflection of the collective behaviour patterns of a community. And therefore we must not look for change outside ourselves, but inside us. We are obsessed with manifestation and with magic. Magic, meaning that God must use one of His tricks and give us rain, and so on and so on. We make of God our grocery-delivery errand boy — we give Him our little list, and He must do the magic. The miracle, however, does not lie in what He can do for us, but in what we are willing to do for Him.

Our own neurosis — our inability to put up with the awkward and the difficult, with everyone who is not like us or does not think like us, but above all our greater love for the material than for the spirit and our expectation that the body must make us happy (which every time leads to pain) — is exactly where God's miracle happens. Because it is here that fear poisons the eye of the fountain, and neurones are fired that make our spiritual bloodstream unfit for faith and for love (in other words, low spiritual immunity), and we end up without hope.

Nothing outside us will make sense until and unless it makes sense here — here where the intrigues of one life hook into those of another, so that the chemistry of shared feelings splits its own core, depositing either a positive or a negative sediment into the seven o'clock news. Over time, all these sediments build up to bring us to a shared experience — for every day, but also for the long term.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer