A few minutes before 4 a.m., I came back (from drowsing) with the thought that emotions overlay feelings, like a localized storm in a weather pattern. Is that right?
So we have reached Dirk’s first question, you see, only we come at it within a model stressing the flow of forces through you, rather than exaggerating your independence from “external” forces within or beyond 3D. And as we promised, that change of viewpoint is going to be the key to many things.
What would it mean, to consider emotions to be like localized storms, and feelings like weather patterns? This is worth pursuing, only first realize that you came back with the general idea, but not with an accurate phrasing. What you recorded was an orientation. Let’s put a little clarity to it.
- Everything must be considered in the context of 3D experience of time as an ever-flowing present moment. Everything passes.
- It must also be considered in the context of the all-surrounding mental stuff that is everybody and everything else, as experienced. Here too, everything passes.
- Hence, don’t look for anything to last forever. The Buddhists are absolutely right to insist on the impermanence of things. Everything passes, and that’s as it should be.
If you keep in mind these three simple background conditions, you see that you may look at your 3D life as a limited series of sequential experiences that can never be actually lived in isolation, but can rarely seem to be anything but in isolation.
That is, we’re never alone but we often experience ourselves as being alone.
Correct. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It is part of the pressure-cooker environment, and has its advantages for the process. Nor does it need to be that way all your life. Once you awaken to the knowledge that you are not, because you could not be, alone, your life becomes a different thing, an easier and more fulfilling thing.
We live in faith that all is well no matter how things appear.
You could put it that way. Now let’s look more closely at feelings and emotions. To do that we must look at the background upon which things manifest. This is why we went through our brief review of how your 3D life appears from outside.
It is a mistake to consider your 3D life as if its default position were one of neutral being. It isn’t, ever. Just because you aren’t aware of emotional background does not mean it isn’t there. You are created emotional creatures, far more than thinking creatures. Thought is not primary in your lives but (at best) secondary. Feeling always precedes thought because it wells up from the subconscious processes moment to moment. It is your psychic weather, meaning it is the environment in which you breathe. Anything you think, experience, enjoy, suffer, is an overlay on the necessary background that we will call feeling.
A baby lying in a crib in the sun may experience whatever it experiences, without thought, without emotion. Maybe it merely enjoys the comfort or even pleasure of sunlight and gentle warmth, as it interacts with whatever else is going on within it. That is feeling, and there is no need to define it.
If that baby then experiences sudden discomfort – colic, say, or panic arising seemingly from nowhere (but often being a resurgence of awareness of separation), that leads to an emotion. The baby cries. Why, because it has had a thought? No, because it has experienced – is living – an emotion. The baby wasn’t crying when it was living in a feeling; it was the emotion that led it to cry.
And so through life. A child before the age of reason (commonly set at about seven years old) is not a rational creature. It does not think, except in isolated moments as it learns the mechanism. It feels.
Then comes the age of reason and for a few years there is this burst of interest in things seen in a new way. There is a sense of self and a sense of self in the world. This is a fundamentally different experience from the preceding years.
Then comes sexual awakening, and again it is a new world. Can anyone maintain that sexual awakening is primarily a matter of thinking? Neither is it primarily a matter of emotion; it is a development of feeling that changes the background for the child, and everything that is experienced from that time is changed. There is no going back.
Now, within those years of feelings are moments of emotion. You see the distinction we are drawing?
We live against a background of feelings. Anything we think or do is done on top of those feelings. Any emotions we experience are momentary by comparison.
Good enough. Of course there are complications, but we will get to them in due course. At the moment, a more important question is, why? Why do you live your lives against a background of feelings. For that matter, how?
I read somewhere long ago, feelings are the language of the soul. It didn’t say emotions, and it certainly didn’t say thinking.
Which means, to you?
Oh, I take it that somehow our 3D life is guided, or anyway can be guided, if we listen to it, by the non-3D portion of ourselves, that sees wider and longer and is not hampered by blindnesses and astigmatisms caused by 3D predicaments.
Very good. And feelings are the interface between the non-3D’s non-rational awareness and the 3D’s attempts to know what to do, what to be. That interface is the nature of feelings.
I can accept the statement, but I can’t say I have any idea of the process.
Well, we haven’t begun to address that. It was something of an achievement to show the connection. But if you are willing and able to see your 3D mental life and physical life and emotional life as all depending from feelings, we may proceed toward greater clarity.
And I heard you, as if in an aside, grumbling that mental and physical and emotional were all the same thing seen differently, only you didn’t want to interrupt the flow.
It is a continuing condition, that occasionally rises to the nature of a problem, that everything connects to everything else, so the potential for asides is endless.