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.
Despite explaining, for some of us, it’s too difficult.
I hope some are able to do this.
Thank you, Lance – I never tire of your exploration and elucidation on this topic, as I’m often ensnared by emotion, like so many others. I also have brief moments where I’m not, and that is so exhilarating in the sense of feeling released from a painful and constant weight. Perhaps it is just my filter, but I find this particular piece to be closer (than usual) to the tenets of Buddhism regarding release form suffering/attachment. Clearly, much of humanity is deeply attached to emotion – i.e. the past – and it wreaks such profound havoc on a personal and global scale. Buddhism uses a variety of techniques to loosen these attachments, mostly various forms of meditation and Metta (loving kindness) practices. In your work do you apply any specific techniques to soften and re-shape this problem of emotional attachment? Clearly, you have special gifts of discernment that allow you to see a more refined truth – but how would you assist the more average mind in reaching these heights of consciousness? Like so many who are at least aware of this struggle – and painfully self-conscious of often being stuck in emotion – I’m hungry for techniques to purify my experience in this life. Thank you.
Yes, clearly the whole spiritual life comes down to finding something that works to be free of the emotional tyranny of the self. Buddhism clearly doesn’t do the job; otherwise there would be millions of enlightened followers of the Buddhist way of life. As I’ve said many times, the only barrier to uninterrupted enlightenment is the human mind. It’s the rational force of the mind and its crazy notions of truth and reality which keep the emotional self firmly attached to the world. The mind wants to know, when the truth is nothing that can be held onto or remembered. This is death to the part of us that craves experience and that is unconscious of the purpose of life.
Until such a time when the search for truth becomes the main focus of the life, there’s little chance of success in breaking through the emotional resistance beyond a certain depth of the subconscious. The whole emanation of the life needs to be radically altered from the normal outwardly fixated focus to an inner awareness of the reality within the body. The restless mind needs an anchor on which to fix its attention; otherwise it will roam aimlessly in the memory.
The pure sensation of the body, which is most noticeable as the tingling at the tips of the fingers, is a good place to start. From there it’s to put the attention inwardly on other parts of the body such as the shoulders, knees, face and back. The idea is to bring the entire sensation of the constituent parts of the body together as the body consciousness as a whole. Once this is achieved (and it can take time to do this) the next step is to be the pure sensation of the body, which is nothing that can be quantified or described. This is the introduction to being, through which the emotional pain of the self eventually surrenders as an action of humility to a source of power greater than itself.
This is the spiritual life as lived by the true devotee to the inner truth. For only I in each body can make the ultimate sacrifice through being willing to endure the ordeal of the dissolution of self. While the inner battle rages, the emotional edges are softened through the external actions in the life. Whatever an individual does in the world, there’s the opportunity to serve the overall negative condition of the one self – which is the world. Gratitude uttered silently within for what’s been provided and for all that’s good in the life is an acknowledgment to something greater than the self and transforms negative emotionality back to love. The next post is called ‘Living Consciously’ in which I’ll give more examples and guidance.