Notes on Feeling, part 1: An Unattached Feeling

 

The first of three parts.

Never mind the things that have happened to me. 

Forget about the good experiences, the bad ones, the psychic insights, the peaks, the valleys, the discouragements and failures. 

How do I feel about my life and my work from within? 

Can I approach a feeling which exists independent of the things that happen?

Everything gets personalized. This would be absolutely correct but for the fact that it’s always about the wrong person. It’s about the person who forms themselves in relationship to all these outward things, once this and that and thinks such and such and so and so about other people. 

There's a different person within who is an actual human being, not a substitute built of falsehoods. It’s that real self, that inward person who perceives and receives, that has the real question about who I am. 

How does that person feel?

There is a quiet place within where things come to rest. This place is pregnant with the possibility of feeling; it is always there waiting for the nourishment that brings the birth of feeling about. You might say that's its main purpose.

Yet the feeling that that place is designed to receive is not the feeling of myself, my person. It's a feeling that belongs to the fabric of the cosmos. It's a sorrowful feeling that encompasses everything and has nothing to do with me and how I am. 

It comes in stillness; and it owns everything.

It ought to be possible to be present to this feeling, this receptivity, without all the noise and agitation. It's a location that can be inhabited; it's a small but persistent flame that cannot be put out. It's a truth that persists against the lies of the outside world. And I think every human being has this place that can receive within them, if only we cared.

Yet care for anything real is an expensive proposition. There's no way to manufacture it; you might as well try to build a rosebush. It can only grow; and at that it only grows if it's fed in a right way. That kind of food can only be acquired through suffering, through contemplation, through the action of conscience. 

It doesn't arrive because a peak experience made me feel good. 

It doesn't arrive because I've behaved properly. 

It doesn't arrive because I punish myself for my sins. 

It belongs to its self; and it comes and goes in accordance with laws I don't understand.

So, to examine this capacity for real feeling. What is it? Can I come into contact with it for a moment?

I always presume that feeling is “about” something. It always seems to be a reaction in me. Yet isn’t there a feeling that is not a reaction, that is in fact just an action? A feeling that is born independent of circumstances? 

Can I taste that for a moment?

May you be well today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.