Feeling
The nature of the soul is such that when a feeling arises, we can experience that feeling from within the feeling itself. We can intimately mix our consciousness with the specifics of our experience and recognize directly what the experience is. This is the ground of knowingness, which is direct knowing, and it is necessary in the process of understanding. Without this kind of knowingness, this gnosis, there is no possibility of real understanding; understanding remains only a mental operation, which is good for mathematics but is not enough for spiritual transformation.
Spacecruiser Inquiry, p. 333 • discuss »
Spacecruiser Inquiry, p. 333 • discuss »
Usually, people are totally taken over by the experience of jealousy, but it is actually possible for jealousy to arise without it influencing you in a way that hooks you. If you pay attention, you will see that jealousy can arise as an image, as a thought, as a feeling, or as certain physiological responses in the body. So you could recognize jealousy to be simply the arising of a particular state that you are experiencing. It is possible to be aware of whatever manifestations of jealousy are arising and choose to experience them fully, allowing your awareness to make them transparent. If you could be present in the awareness pervading it, jealousy would transform itself, naturally and spontaneously, to reveal its underlying nature. However, we usually end up using these experiences in a way that traps us; we get stuck not because of the feeling itself but because of how we are relating to it. We are not just experiencing jealousy; we are burying ourselves in it. We define ourselves by it: “I am a jealous person and I know that is who I am.” Sometimes we recognize that jealousy is controlling us and determining our feelings and actions, and other times we are taken over so much by it we don’t even know that we are jealous. We just express it in our behavior, words, and actions.
We call this identification.
The Unfolding Now, p. 140 • discuss »
The Unfolding Now, p. 140 • discuss »
But what is feeling free from the conceptualizing mind? If we suspend our conceptualizing minds for a moment, we realize that the only thing we know for sure about our inner experience is that sensations arise. If, for a moment, we do not use the mind and do not say this sensation is anger or hurt or fear, if we just forget about these names for a while, we will have the chance to see what “annihilate mind in heart” means. To see what heart without mind is, we need to be willing to let go of our sense of being an entity. When we do that and simply look at our feelings, what we actually experience is nothing but sensations. The conceptualizing mind singles out certain intense sensations and labels them as various emotions. This is the ordinary way our experience happens, and there is nothing wrong with it. This is how human beings have always operated, what we have always known. However, if we want to meet the guest, if we want to leave the realm of the day and have a glimpse of the true night, we need to go beyond this normal experience of things. We need to see the mental quality of what we call our feelings and emotions, and allow ourselves to suspend the conceptualizing mind that distinguishes and labels them.
Diamond Heart Book V, p. 161 • discuss »
Diamond Heart Book V, p. 161 • discuss »
Pure feeling turns out to be something like nondifferentiated sensation, just an ocean of sensations. We can be aware of the differences within this ocean but, if the conceptualizing mind is not operative, we simply experience the waves as inseparable from the ocean. We experience an expanse, a field with no boundaries and no content. We experience the sensation of sensation, the feeling of feeling, the consciousness of the expanse itself as an expanse of feeling or sensation. We are then experiencing pure consciousness, a field of presence that is self-aware. It is awareness of the presence of the field, with this presence being nothing but the ocean of sensation. The awareness of the field is identical to the field, for it is a field of awareness. There is no duality in the awareness or pure consciousness that is an expanse of sensation.
Diamond Heart Book V, p. 162 • discuss »
Diamond Heart Book V, p. 162 • discuss »
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