The Axis of Being, part IV—A Better Connection to Feeling

Rocamadour, France

 Many years ago, my teacher Betty Brown pointed out that we can’t work directly with feeling; and while there's a great deal of truth to this, when feeling undertakes its proper role as a voluntary support for our work — one that arrives on its own, rather than superficially showing up when we poke or prod it in one way or another – then very different things begin to happen, and our capacity for receiving our inner work changes. 

So perhaps we could say our feeling can work directly with us.

But before all of that, I would just like to remind everyone that to live very carefully and attentively within sensation, with the clear and intimate attention to detail that a molecular sensation brings, already we create a ground of Being, a fertile and fecund field of material, within which mindfulness and feeling have the ability to manifest.

This means attending very carefully to the tiniest details in our lives, and being present as much as possible within each passing moment to the simple things that need to be done then. 

If I bring a relationship to my Being and my sensation to the action of breaking open an egg, of picking up the newspaper, of seeing the responsibilities I need to attend to at each moment this day, I'm already better fulfilling Being-duty, meeting the responsibility of my life in a new way that is somewhat deeper than the way I do it when I'm just reacting to everything around me and my centers are not collective participants in my action.

I suspect that as you read this, there's a colossal struggle going on in you due to the intellectual habit of trying to grasp this set of ideas with the mind, which obstacle constantly interferes with our sensation itself. Sensation ought to have an entire range of motion within Being at this instant that can have an action contributing to a deeper understanding on this point. For the time being, you'll have to accept this, because we all labor under these conditions, whether all the time or from time to time. 

But there needs to be an awareness of the concept first; and then there needs to be a better connection to feeling which begins in stillness.

Understanding that we can’t escape from conventional emotion and its requirements — that we have to be immersed in it and suffer it, that we can’t sit on a pedestal above it — is the same as understanding that we cannot escape from the agitation of the mind. 

It is, however, possible to form a silent core of Being that emanates from deeper in the heart and the center of Being than all the superficial actions in orbit around the center of my Being. 

Meister Eckhart speaks a great deal about what is created versus what is God’s, and when he does this  he is indicating the difference between the outer — that which is in orbit, and does not belong to my inner planet — and the inner — which belongs to the emanation of God within Being.

 I’m going to quote a rather lengthy section from sermon nine below, which has been considerably edited to try and focus some of the complex meaning in it a little better for this conversation:

The masters say that God is ready to give every man full satisfac­tion of all he desires, both of reason and of the senses. That God gives us satisfaction of mind and of the senses can be clearly distinguished… Satisfaction of the senses means that God gives us comfort, joy and contentment - and over­indulgence in these things does not occur in God's true friends in their inner senses. But mental satisfaction is of a spiritual nature. I call that mental satisfaction, when the summit of the soul is not brought so low by any joys as to be drowned in pleasure, but rather rises resolutely above them. Man enjoys mental satisfaction only when creaturely joys and sorrows are powerless to drag down the topmost summit of the soul. 

'Creature' I call whatever a man experiences under God. 

…Life understands better than delight and light… whatever, under God, man can attain to in this body, and in some ways more clearly than the eternal light can. For the eternal light makes known oneself and God, not oneself apart from God; but life makes one known to oneself, apart from God. 

When one sees oneself alone, it is easier to tell what is like and unlike. 

St. Paul makes this plain, and so do the pagan masters. St. Paul in his ecstasy saw God, and himself in spiritual fashion, in God, and yet each virtue did not there present itself clearly to his vision, and that was because he had not practiced them in deeds. 

By practicing the virtues, the masters came to such profound dis­cernment that they recognized the nature of each virtue more clearly than Paul or any saint in his first rapture. 

 Eckhart makes it quite clear here that the inner and the outer, the spiritual and the ordinary, coexist and are both necessary for real understanding. 

When he refers to a condition where “man enjoys mental satisfaction only when creaturely joys and sorrows are powerless to drag down the topmost summit of the soul,” the mental satisfaction he speaks of is that stillness which empties itself of what is created. 

This ”mental“ satisfaction ( by mental, he means of the higher or spiritual intellect) is the beginning of a condition whereby we are prepared to receive what comes; and it is this stillness, which begins in the vibration of molecules (paradoxically, the more active the vibration, the more stillness arrives) and spreads itself into a certain indescribable silence within the part of the mind that is not touched to the world. This prepares us for the receiving of real feeling, which will be — should it take place — the first real contact we have with any truth in the context of divine Being.

 Perhaps there seems to be another paradox here: understanding does not necessarily involve intelligence as we understand it on the ordinary level. In fact, real understanding, which prepares us for feeling, cannot be reduced to intellectual formulas and it cannot be stuffed into forms, since the beginning of its nature is formless. 

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.