The interface: The primacy of feelings

The gist of our explanation is that you as a 3D being are part of your environment in ways that are not obvious. You know yourselves as relatively isolated units in 3D. You pretty much have to experience yourself that way, because of the nature of 3D. We’ve reminded you of this more than once. But you are also an extension of a larger being that is not limited to 3D and is in fact mostly not in 3D. You know this too, once you have educated yourselves to get beyond the materialist fallacy. The third condition, that we have been sketching for some time, is that you as 3D individual are reflected by 3D conditions that appear to you to be different from yourselves. That is, those parts of yourself of which you are not conscious may be seen in a mirror when you learn to use the circumstances of your life in that way.

Yes, I think we have absorbed all that, even if we sometimes forget.

Well, that 3D environment that serves you as a mirror does not remain constant. It moves, and therefore the underlying conditions of your life move, in ways your localized intentions, your will, has no say over. This is only common sense, of course. Life always has the potential to surprise you, and even in the absence of surprise, it moves and you cannot stop it moving, changing, replacing this with that, steamrollering some things that perhaps you would very much wish to have preserved. You as 3D individual (with all your complications caused by how far you extend, in so many directions) react to these changes. For that matter, you react to what doesn’t change, as well. The one thing you know is that 3D life is not under your control.

That won’t come as any news bulletin.

Not in theory it won’t, no. But as soon as you consider your lives in any other context, you forget it. So bear it in mind now.

Feelings and emotions connect you to the world. And this is a vastly more important sentence than may appear. At first blush, perhaps you read that and you say, “Of course, it’s obvious.” Well, it mostly isn’t obvious, and this needs going into. Dirk asked what was the purpose of feelings and emotions. This isn’t exactly their purpose (in the sense that means, “They were created to do this”), but it is their function.

I don’t grasp the distinction between purpose and function. They seem functionally equivalent.

In this instance, “purpose” carries a nuance, an implication, that we are at some pains to avoid. Describing how something functions is straightforward. Describing its purpose implies a designer behind the scenes. We aren’t saying there is or isn’t a designer to be considered here, we are merely removing that background question for the moment, as best we can.

Why?

Why? Because it suits our expository strategy to keep the discussion at an emotionally neutral level, as best we can. The question of mind and brain and (in general) of 3D and its relation to non-3D forces and conditions is highly charged in your time. We are continually aware of people ready to dismiss any given statement as “merely.” Some will be afraid we intend to drag God into the discussion. Others will be afraid we intend to define God out of existence. (And think how many definitions, how many gods!) And bear in mind, we have to think about future readers, not only those presently engaged in the exploration.

I see. All right, so –

So your functioning 3D awareness may be divided, for the purpose of analysis, into what you know you experience and what you don’t know you experience. The latter is vastly greater than the former, even in the most introspective of you, if only because of the sheer volume of incoming data from the world, which is much greater than consciousness could ever process even if it were interested in doing so.

I read somewhere, long ago, that our senses act more as reducing valves – restricting what is allowed to impinge our consciousness – than as the straightforward inputs they appear to be.

That’s right, and if you think about it, it has to be so. Given the vast amount of data absorbed and noted by your mind and not allowed into consciousness, you can see that it is absolutely essential that some mechanism exist to sort it by some criterion or other. By several criteria, of course, not merely by any one.

The rather absurd analogy that came to mind is a movie star with an unlisted telephone number. If the number were available to anyone who might want it, the phone would be continually tied up, the star would have no moment of peace, and in effect the line wouldn’t exist to be used selectively.

Is that an absurd analogy? It seems fairly close, to us. Or would you want to have to process every license plate number, every stray bit of background noise, every reminder? That is, would you want your life to consist so entirely of stray thoughts that you had no RAM available for purpose? The question answers itself.

As a thought experiment, you may consider feelings and emotions in their context. They, not abstract thought or conscious self-interest, are the gatekeepers. Thus philosophic schemes that attempt to explain human life in terms of intellect alone, or even in terms that assume intellect’s primacy, go ludicrously wrong. If you doubt it, spend some time looking at the philosophers of the Age of Reason, perhaps. (Not that your contemporary philosophy is less erroneous, but that distant errors are more easily seen as errors.)

It is important that you realize the even the most intellectual of you do not experience your lives in primarily an intellectual way. Before anything else, is feelings. Someone in rigid control of emotions will nonetheless be a creature of feelings.

Because feelings paint the world for us.

Meaning, they persuade you that “The world is thus,” yes. You come into the 3D world and immediately it affects you. From before you are born you are living in an environment that is pouring signal into you. That is, it impinges so completely as to persuade you of its primacy. You are the center of your interest, but you experience that center as existing in a vast ocean of otherness, all of it affecting you.

From the beginning, you live making sense of it all. How? By thinking about it, when you are three days old, or three weeks, or three years? No! By feeling. From the time you are being formed in the womb, you are reacting to an overwhelming 3D environment. Depending upon what happens (and also partly depending upon what disposition you are bringing to this life), you form a set of feelings. Those feelings may or may not change as you live, and they may or may not make your life easier, but they are your primary experience of your life in the maelstrom. They form a stable orientation, and thinking has nothing to do with it. As you go along, you may come to do a great deal of thinking about your live, but depend upon it: The thinking is tacked on after the fact. Long before you start out to shape your life by thought, you shape it willy-nilly by feeling.

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