The sacred duty of feeling

I’d like to talk about a different kind of attitude about the way I feel.

We feel good; we feel bad. These are facts. All the religion and esoteric practice in the world won’t change that much. 

I have to be present to my actual feelings as they are, which probably includes feelings of frustration or sorrow or anger that I feel the way I do. I ought to be feeling different. I ought to be feeling good. Why are these feelings so bad? And so on.

What is important is that I become responsible for my feelings. 

As an organism with the capability of expressing feeling which was created, among other reasons, expressly to have this capacity, I'm responsible to have these feelings. It's my duty; it's my role; it's what I'm here for. I begin there. 

There are much larger metaphysical reasons for all of that, but we can start with the ground-floor idea that I have feelings and that it's my duty to have these feelings. I need to embody them; I need to own them instead of denying them or rejecting them. That is to say, I have to accept my feelings. They’re real. I can’t use whitewash to cover them up or an eraser to wipe them off the blackboard. 

I need to be with them as they are.

This idea of becoming responsible for my feelings is very different than controlling them. To be responsible means to be able to respond, to have an intelligent relationship towards feeling that listens to it, acknowledges it, responds to it in an appropriate way. Most of my frustration with feeling arises from a denial of one kind or another. I’m not in relationship with myself; so of course I’m not in relationship with my feeling. 

My feeling is an important and delicate part of my inner mechanism — so important, in fact, that outside of the physical functions regulated by breathing and sensation (which are themselves intimately connected with feeling) feeling becomes the most important thing that there is. If I don’t have a sensitive and intelligent relationship to it, if I’m not responsible to it, everything goes off the railroad tracks right away. 

Yet I live most of my life without seeing that I have to be responsible to my feelings.

My attitude towards my feelings needs to be one that invests in them with a positive, objective, and introspective capacity that tries to see the whole of things as they are. 

Gurdjieff once described a moment of real conscience as having all the feelings that one could possibly have about something in one single moment. This is a big idea; it implies an ability to be comprehensive about feeling, to grasp all of its implications in a single deft action, somewhat like the idea of Zen enlightenment whereby 10,000 warriors are slain with a single blow.

Having a moment like that involves bringing the whole of one’s being to the point of one’s existence. This includes all of the many millions of memories, both cellular and intellectual; the action of sensation in the moment, including breathing; the feelings one has. In each instant we're a comprehensive summary of all that we have been and where we are at this moment. There's a place within the soul that can grasp this in its entirety; yet we aren't really ever in touch with that. 

We do brush up against it; it can be our partner, even if its entirety lives within a mystery that we can’t penetrate with our ordinary mind.

I am all that I am. 

Within this experience arises an attitude, an inclination towards all that I am and what I am. The inclination needs to be one that takes responsibility and assumes ownership for feeling. My feeling isn’t forced on me from other people or outside events; it arises within me and I need to be responsible for it. 

In a certain way, I often force it on myself and then blame others; so there's usually some inappropriate and excessive use of force at work here. 

Sometimes just seeing the feelings as they are, and not treating them as enemies, but simple facts, allows me to see them in a new light. For example: if I’m depressed, I’ll just accept being depressed for a little while. Having this kind of feeling is a responsibility: this particular kind of feeling needs to exist on the planet, or it wouldn’t arise. How do I become responsible for embodying and manifesting that feeling?

This may seem like a peculiar idea, but think about, for example, terror. In moments of great terror where catastrophes take place, there are always some people that embody my mother’s famous family folk saying, “when in trouble, fear, and doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.” 

There are those that do that. 

But then there are those who in the face of great catastrophe become responsible for their feeling of terror yet then go forward courageously, embodying it and yet at the same time still seeing the way forward. These are the people we call brave, courageous, and so on.

In order to further illustrate this, another family story. John Merrill, who is not a direct ancestor but married my great great grandmother after she had already given birth to my great-grandmother Annette, was a drummer boy in the Civil War. 

He was 13 or 14 years old. 

Imagine the courage that a boy of that age has to demonstrate to march in front of troops towards enemy lines who are shooting lead bullets at him. 

Surely this takes a kind of emotional courage that is responsible for the fear and yet goes forward through a sense of duty. 

This same young man later had the courage to marry a woman whose husband had flat-out up and disappeared, help her raise her young daughter, and father two additional children. We only have a single dim picture of him in the family album, but through that roughly defined black-and-white photograph emerges the echo of a man who took responsibility for his feeling. 

He fulfilled his duty.

This reminds one of Gurdjieff’s idea that an ordinary man who fulfills his duty often does more than the dreamers who think of themselves as being—either now or someday in the future—spiritual giants of one kind or another. He had a Russian word for that, the obyvatel. 

I’m not going to be a war hero at this age; at least I hope not, because if I still earn that status in this lifetime, it will mean things are about to get very much worse than they already are, and they are already quite bad enough, thank you very much. 

But I can become a human being who is honorable enough to face their real feelings as they are, and suffer them. 

There needs to be an effort to suffer feeling with dignity and intelligence, instead of rejecting it. 

If I see the act of having feelings on the human scale as a sacred responsibility, perhaps I'll meet each feeling I have with a little more respect than I do when I say to it, 

“I don’t want to have you. You crappy feeling.”

Disowned feelings get up to all kinds of mischief. 

The photograph is Annette Merrill-Hazen, my great-great grandmother, who was adopted by John Merrill after her father Edwin Lewis disappeared. Like my mother, she has an air of introspective stoicism about her. Make no mistake about it: these women were made of steel. They had to be, what with the men they had to deal with. 

Annette Merrill married John Hazen, a direct descendant of General Moses Hazen, a revolutionary war figure of colorful but questionable character. His feelings sometimes got the better of him, apparently; per historical records, atrocities ensued. Men, it must be said, do terrible things in war.

Yet later he appears to have perhaps achieved some good; may God have mercy on his soul.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Hazen

Go deep in your heart, and be well-

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.