Made in Japan, Outsourced Globally

Since Kirk and Erica have started talking about astrology around me, I have started listening closer to horoscopes. However, I subscribe more or less a biological school of personality testing. My source is merely a dialogue between a chiropractor and a novelist, but you can believe anything, right?

To contextualize, the dialogue is in a book called "Karada no Himitsu (Secret of the Body)" - written in Japanese (obviously) and talks about anything and everything about the body - birth, sex, pelvic exercises/theory, sleep, disease, death, psychosomatic connection, child development, adolescent destructiveness and recklessness, social paradigm of sex and gender. One chapter that I especially found intriguing was this theory of organ typology.

Humans cannot help but behave in a certain way, depending on what "organ person" you are. There are 5 types: Lung, Heart, Liver, Spleen, Stomach - and a person's emotional response to a situation reflects what "organ" you are most connected to.

Lung - Sadness
Heart - Happiness, Hyperactivity
Liver - Anger
Spleen - Melancholiness
Stomach - Fear

For instance, if you were to be in a car accident, what would be your first response? A Lung person would immediately think of how sad people would be if he/she were to be hurt or die - or wonder if anyone would be sad. A Liver person would probably well up in anger towards the driver that bumped them from behind. You get the idea.

It's not that you don't feel other emotions, but you cater to one emotion more than others. And this is connected with the organ - so naturally, an angry drunk will feed on the anger by drinking more (like adding oil to fire). Emotions are magnified through how you behave with your organs.

I tend to be a Lung person most days. My lungs ache in emotion. (pulmonary distress is not so poetic, but cardiac hyperactivity is left for happiness).

But to be honest, over the years, I have found that these personality tests are often useless for me. Conclusions from most tests or horoscopes I take (formal, informal) point out that I am a little bit of everything. It is either an indication of my lack of character or that the universalist tendencies come out strongly - I cannot tell. I am still an enigma to myself by the yard sticks of external categorization.

// posted by sakit @ 9:02 PM