Dear Burt,
Thank you for the Satsang today. Would you please clarify feelings versus emotions (energy in motion like frustration, anger, sadness, depression, fear?) again?
With love, M.
Dear sweet M.,
I noticed your energy last night and your listening was quite good. When someone listens well there is an aura of beautiful energy around the person.
You asked me to clarify feelings versus emotions. First of all please remember that words like ‘feelings’ and ‘emotions’ are often intertwined and mixed up by most people. However, when you start going deep into spiritual understanding, you will start to feel subtler feelings — feelings that most people are not aware of. So, in order to explain them one must use special explanations like saying ‘there is a vast difference between true feelings and emotions.’
A true feeling is joy, it is a feeling as if you have disappeared and have merged with everything around you. For example, observe a baby when they are happy, there is a brightness in their eyes with so much joy. Their smile is captivating and their innocence is heart-warming yet as they reach out to you, they are oblivious of themselves. In other words, they are not self-conscious. Now, this feeling is known as Pure Feeling. It is not an emotion because the body is not caught in any sensation other than total ‘melting’ with whatever is at the moment.
Now, an emotion is the opposite of that feeling. An emotion is a motion of sensation in the body. Again, suppose you are with a group of people that make you feel uncomfortable. You can feel the sensation of emotion in your face, in your red hot ears, in your contraction, self-consciousness or a feeling of smallness. Along with this emotional feeling in the body you also feel a ‘story’ going along with it such as, “I could kill them,” or maybe not as drastic such as, “They are obnoxious,” or “Gee, I don’t like them...” and so on. Just as pure feeling is joyous and all -encompassing with the environment with no story or physical discomfort, so is emotion filled with a story (mental activity regarding that emotion) plus self-conscious contraction.
Every emotion such as anger, depression, frustration and even sadness is a carry-over from a thought. For example, if you have been often ignored by others as a child or not shown love by your parents and so on, then there is the inevitable thinking that you are separate and different from others. This can’t be helped. Any thought regarding feeling ignored or unloved brings the need for having love, having meaning, having importance or becoming something. The human being can’t help seeking that which they feel they are missing. The reason for this automatic seeking is because that is how the heart reaches for itself through us. However, when these needs for love are not understood they start making us feel lonely, separate from others and create a feeling of smallness, which again makes us want to be special even more. This vicious circle creates many emotional feelings of quiet sadness, depression, anger, frustration, irritability, judging others, and general unhappiness. Every human being goes through this and it can’t be helped.
What happens with most people is that they can’t feel happy and so bury these emotional feelings by ‘trying’ to have fun, have wild sex, look for parties, maybe drink alcohol, become workaholics, take drugs, do crazy things and a million other escapes in order NOT to feel this nagging emptiness. However, this nagging emptiness cannot be avoided because it is not something bad, it is a warning (karma) that we are not being honest with ourselves, we are lying and deceiving our truth of being. Did you know that very very few people actually know that true feelings are joy (inner peace, contentment or inner fulfillment)?
So, growth is dealing with emotional suffering through awareness until only pure feeling remains. Pure feeling is the voice of God within. It ‘talks’ to us through silence and shows us (through its light) how everything IS!! This is the Inner Silence that all masters talk about.
To understand what I have written to you, is to begin to ‘FEEL’ inside you what is beyond words. The extent that you ‘FEEL’ (not emotional) what is being said here is called heart-understanding. It is spiritual understanding.
With love,
Burt
http://members.shaw.ca/burtharding/feelings.html
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