Beyond Feelings
Where life arises in matter there is feeling. We exist as feeling creatures and this imbues us with the sense of being alive. However from this unity of the one true feeling, innumerable feelings have multiplied as a consequence of our emotional way of life. Emotion is the energy of the past, which forever strives to enter the surface of the world. The past obviously has no place in the present but, as a race, we live well below our intelligent potential by holding on to our experience of the living process. We do this through remembering what happened yesterday or the last moment which becomes a continual movement of the mind.
A natural feeling is hunger arising from the body as a desire for food. Feelings that interpret the lack of food as any kind of deprivation are false and will actually exacerbate the hunger pangs. Feelings develop as centres of ignorance which harden in time as attitudes and prejudices expressed when any emotional button is pressed. People make some of their most important choices and decisions based on their feelings and wonder why things rarely turn out as planned.
For most people, feelings represent the epitome of creative expression and are an intrinsic way in which the experience of life is communicated. And this is true until the spiritual process disabuses an individual of their personal feelings, but in a way that introduces a finer appreciation of love and the integrity of life. Love is not a feeling, nor is the joy of being connected to the wellbeing in the body. These are natural and unalterable states of reality that are present in everybody. Feelings are personal and fluctuate according to whether someone’s either up or down, excited or depressed or winning or losing.
In the process of mastering the feelings, it’s important to avoid any self-judgement and simply observe the workings of the emotional self without thought or movement of the mind. It’s impossible to do this when the virulence of the self is rife within the body. Anger, for example, is an intense feeling which when stoked is destructive, both inwardly as a depletion of vital energy and externally to anyone else in the vicinity of such a forceful presence. The time to practise becoming accustomed to the inner state is when there’s no emotional disturbance to distort the perception. Then, when a situation arises where an emotional feeling such as anger would instantly engulf the mind, there’s a swiftness of intelligence which keeps the negativity contained within the body.
When pinned by the focus of intelligence, the negative emotions begin to die, which accounts for the intensity of pain in the transformation of the self. Some emotional attachments such as resentment or jealousy need more prolonged periods of inner processing, while other feelings are transcended in a much swifter time frame. This is done, through inner stillness. As the perception of intelligence passes through the body of the feeling self, the contortion of emotion is aligned with the vertical power lines of the spiritual being. The emotional content is then purged of its corruption and returned to its original state of love. What remains in the purity of space is the knowledge of that aspect of self. This knowledge differs from acquired learning or anything that can be known in the world. From the spiritual perspective this is known as self-knowledge which, being universal and not conditioned by the human mind, is the direct experience of reality – the most authentic source of truth in existence.
When this level of knowledge can be accessed at will, an individual is indeed in a privileged state in which to perceive the sensory world. Having passed through the band of feelings, there’s no longer the attachment to them as before. The feelings can still be registered; but unlike someone who hasn’t detached from their feeling self, the individual can now simply withdraw from the pull of the emotions and rest in the state of knowledge as an absence of force in the world.