Feeling, Time, and Mind, Part 2 of 3

 

This morning, I had a brief encounter with a lost cyclist who I gave directions to; up until then, I’d spent more than an hour on my bike without any contact with another human being. Our exchange was longer than just a brief hello — the most typical relational exchange during a bike ride, where one nods one’s head or says good morning — because I had to give rather elaborate directions. From a certain point of view, it was nothing more than a technical exchange of information between two perfect strangers; and yet as I rode away from it I noticed a distinct feeling of satisfaction arising in me. It made it quite clear to me in an organic way that there’s a food for Being in the action of relationship that helps to keep feeling healthy. That is to say, properly fed feeling moves in a positive and supportive direction. My impression is that our increasing reliance on the Internet, email, texting, and so one is substantially depriving human beings from this form of sustenance, which explains the increasing insanity of the modern world and the collapse of social relations. Real feeling-relations have to be undertaken in person with another human being in order to provide the right kind of feeling-food for us.

The mind works more slowly than feelings; and so it can be more said that feelings help form the mind than that the mind help form feelings. This is easily proven by watching the way in which human beings form their thought patterns around intense emotional reactions, especially when it comes to politics and the nonsense that circulates on the web. In this way, time creates a fabric making feeling possible, and then feeling produces mind in conjunction with, but essentially as a product of, it. It is, of course, not quite that simple, but this is a general sketch of the situation.

In this way, we can come to understand the thinking mind as an accessory to things that take place after the fact, and is entirely dependent for its health and well-being on care, which is imparted by feeling. No thought ever arises without care behind it somewhere.

This brings us to an examination of the speed at which the thinking mind works relative to emotion and feeling-mind. The fact that the two minds work at different speeds at all highlights how firmly they are embedded in the matrix of time; and yet as we undertake considerations in this area, we need to remember the way in which Meister Eckhart insists that the mind of God is eternal, that is, existing outside of time. In the Gurdjieff cosmology, even God is dependent on and exists within time; in Meister Eckhart’s, this is emphatically not the case. Creation and all of its elements are immersed in time, but God isn’t. We see from this, preferentially selecting Meister Eckhart’s cosmology, that man’s mind in its multiple natures (body, emotion, intellect) exists within time; but because it’s a reflection of God’s mind, has the potential to manifest in eternity, that is, outside of time. This ‘eternal’ territory might be construed as the eternal now of Buddhist doctrine and mindfulness practice.

But is there a legitimate escape from time available to us; and if so, how does it relate to feeling, agency, and care?

In attempting to formulate a construct for this problem, let’s consider emotion and the feeling mind as the “immediate mind,” that is, the mind with the swiftest and most concise reaction to the presence of current events. This is how Gurdjieff characterized it; and a considerable amount of scientific research supports that contention. An emotional reaction propagates neural communication of a powerful nature that is nearly instantaneous. Characterizing it in the crude mechanism of stimulus/response alone, it appears to be nothing more than a reaction. Yet concurrent with the neural response is the instant arising of care. A simple illustration of this is road rage — an experience almost everyone has had to one degree or another. The care that arises here is negative — anger — but it is nonetheless nearly instantaneous. So care is immediate; the thought that can temper its reaction flows on a much slower timeline. If there is any part of any mind within a human being that lives in the now, we could therefore propose that it’s the progenitor of feeling and care.

This brings to mind a comment Gurdjieff made to the effect that a human being can only truly know something real through feeling. That is to say, through something that takes place in the now — perhaps not in eternity itself, but in the nearest thing to eternity which we have in us. Yet feeling is not just instantaneous (relative, at least, to the external event itself) but also works on much longer time scales when the elements of remorse of conscience and grief are at work. This suggests that feeling works much more flexibly and with far deeper tendrils throughout the entire medium of time than one might expect for a mind which is, from a mechanistic point of view, constructed to live so firmly and instantaneously in the present.

On behalf of our search for inward relationship,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.