The Functional and Spiritual Nature in man, Part I

 

Partial Solar Eclipse, over the Hudson River

June 10, 2021

The difference between emotion and feeling is as great as the difference between ordinary and organic sensation.

We have ordinary sensations all day long; to be ordinary means to be of an order, belonging to a certain level and structure, and our ordinary sensation belongs to this level and the functional structure of our body. When I say the functional structure of our body, I mean its average ability to sense the things that are around it and respond to them effectively.

Organic sensation of being is not the same thing. It’s of a completely different order; it’s a tissue that connects the ordinary body to the astral body. The astral body is a metaphysical entity that draws the substance of its relationship not just from the magnetism of ordinary life, but from the gravity of the planet. Thus we could say that organic sensation is a function of gravity and not magnetism, as I have explained elsewhere.

It’s not just easy but inevitable that without an actual experience of the organic sensation of Being, one confuses ordinary sensation with it and so the word sensation, as I use it when I write and speak in group work, is consistently misunderstood. So consistently that I suspect no more than a few percent of the people I speak to actually have a specific idea of what I am talking about; everyone else begins with misinterpretation, and things go south from there on… all the way to the swimming pool bar at the resort.

The best way to approach this, of course, if one doesn’t understand the difference, is to first and foremost assume that one doesn’t know anything at all about the subject; when my teacher first introduced the subject many years ago and gave me clues as to the difference, that’s how I approached it, because I understood that she was talking about something from a different level. Then again, ever since I was a child there was always an undertone of sensibility on this subject; and so perhaps you could say I was predisposed to eventually acquire an understanding. As I mentioned to someone yesterday, you can’t actually teach anyone anything they don’t already understand. And that is a tricky thing because if you don’t do the work yourself, no teacher can ever do it for you.

In any event, emotion and feeling are separated by the same enormous chasm, belonging as they do to two different levels. I haven’t spent a great deal of time contemplating the relationship of magnetism and gravity to emotional feeling; yet it’s clear enough that emotion is subject mostly to the laws of magnetism and that feeling can only arise from the function of gravity. In this sense the concentration of gravity within the universe has a greater force than the simple force of physical attraction; and so while atoms are built of electromagnetically attracted particles, they begin to manifest the subtle influences of gravity as soon as they arise. As we all know, greater concentrations of atoms form molecules, and molecules form subordinate physical structures of endless variety. All of them acquire functional relationships at one level or another to the force of gravity, which is the root of awareness and consciousness.

The important take-away from this is that feeling is an essential function of consciousness; more important, in some ways, than the intellectual function of consciousness. Swedenborg gave them what amounts to parity in his seminal work, Divine Love and Wisdom;  and all of the great medieval Christian thinkers were aware of the functional relationship between these two elemental aspects of awareness, which combined together to make the water of the universal consciousness. Meister Eckhart’s mysterious reference in the Book of Divine Comfort, “emptiness makes water run upward and performs many other miracles of which it is not the place to speak now,” refers not to ordinary water but to consciousness. The water of universal consciousness is on the level of the physical universe; but the wine that it can be transformed into (run upward) is on a divine level. When Christ changed water into wine during the marriage at Cana, it was the transformation of ordinary consciousness into its metaphysical counterpart. This is traditionally seen as the first of Christ’s miracles (John 2:11); and the reason it’s first is that this is where the beginning of what Swedenborg called regeneration—and what we today call spiritual transformation—takes place.

The changing of water into wine, in other words, is not just a higher level of intellectual understanding. It’s a functional and fundamental transformation of the embodied and physical consciousness of the universe into the metaphysical consciousness of the divine. Ordinary consciousness and all of the ordinary universe on this level is a mere reflection of that divine consciousness, a tradition embodied in most metaphysical systems, and strongly rooted in the West in Neoplatonism, by far the most muscular of the Western world’s classical metaphysical traditions.

Yet the intellectual and academic understanding of these matters, while fascinating, does not address the fundamental need within ourselves to understand the difference between emotion and feeling. 

Be well today.

Warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.