Saturday, September 06, 2008

Life Lesson: Honor Your Feelings

The world outside is infinite, if we were to take account of its permutations and combinations. Then there are events related to us that are never taking place in front of our eyes. Then, there are truths, half-truths, and lies.

How does one see the reality?

Perhaps, with vision and hearing, reality will sometimes never be perceived in totality.

But there is another way, a much close-at-hand and honest way, in which we know everything in the world. It is through inspecting one's own heart. It is knowing one's own feeling.

I can now imagine the world very clearly as a beam of light projecting out of the heart. Like heart, like the image projected. But while mastering the projected image is worth an entire journey, when we need to know what's going on, we don't need to examine the entire projected image at the screen outside.... we can only examine that narrow source. It's simply our feeling. From the heart.

What's happening out there in the big, vast world can easily be known at this source because feeling is the metric of what we have projected out. WE KNOW. Whatever.

I think most people don't let their feelings flow. At its core, it's NOT bad to feel even things like anger, jealousy, fear, greed, anxiety. Let them be, what are they doing? The trouble is what are we doing. Of course, there are feelings that we feel; and thoughts that we create. The first is inwards, the other is outwards. Thoughts are another subject in themselves, but feelings never lie.

Are you feeling down? Suspicious? Happy for no reason? Mischievous? Hungry? Full? That's fine. There is no "reason" - actually there is, but can you actually sit down and take a blood test each time you feel hunger and decide exactly what food the chemical balancing would require? Reason is too much calculation, and the world is too vast for us to hold all information together in our mind. At any rate, the information is dynamic; so what you're calculating is changing as you calculate it anyway, perhaps because you're calculating! (Enough to make a soup of one's head already, isn't all this? No wonder we are automatically positioned to be trumped when we think too much.)

Honoring one's feeling, though, is understandably a matter of (re-)training one's self to honor our feelings. The keyword is OUR. OWN.

If I and you feel, "But I can't feel truly what I ought to feel!" or "I am not in touch with my feelings!" then that's the Honest Feeling of the Moment! The feeling is not something we order (to begin with). We can't ask our feeling, "How long shall I run on the track today?" when the feeling says, "I'm feverish." The truth of the moment is NO RUNNING - forget 3 or 5 miles, and that is it! Honoring this feeling, at this moment, leads us to possibility ahead. Rest today, run longer tomorrow. Crack today, give up tomorrow.

I believe, eventually, by honoring one's feelings consistently, the invisible truth also becomes clear. Sometimes the projection outside is out-of-focus. And cleaning our feeling, and focusing it eventually brings the whole picture into focus.

The truth may not reveal if we keep up a tradition of over-ruling our feelings with our "ought, should, must, what if?" thinking - if we derive our sense of self from not who we truly are (and we always ARE)... but who we desire or fear to become.

Shed these, and the feeling that is always there becomes clear.

No it's not a disease, it's not going to go away when we grow up. It is a constant friend and a mentor, and not a sign of weakness.

Peace!

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