feeling: gift and curse

The Gift and Curse of Feeling:

” Is it possible to get rid of suffering? What is the use of feelings? Sometimes I feel that life would be easier if I were a robot.”

We can be free from suffering, which is to say not controlled by it, and we can remove many sufferings that are unnecessary and come about through our habitual conditioning and egoism.

Feeling, as one of our three brains and functions, is an ‘organ’ of ‘perception’ and knowledge. Feelings give us access to the world of feeling, which is another domain of experience.

Certainly, when suffering from negative or unwanted feelings we may wish that we had no feeling at all, but then we would not have access to the potential that feeling brings.

If experienced ‘impartially’ and without ‘identification’, feeling is a source of joy and energy. Evidently feelings are powerful, such that a man may wish to kill himself due to intense feeling, so there is likewise a great positive potential in feeling.

An intentional use of feeling can mobilize the whole of us in some direction and can bring a great source of energy into play. Of course, we tend to feel under the sway of feeling, feel at the mercy of feeling, and it is this that tends to bring up issues with feeling. Here we may perhaps recognise that our very suffering of/from feeling could potentially be turned into a great asset.

Freedom ‘from’ feeling is the ableness to be equal to such feeling, in which case the feeling then becomes something which we can ‘ride’. If we learn how to ‘suffer our feelings’ appropriately then we simultaneously learn how to be free in our feelings. Again, we can look at the suffering of our own feelings as a means to potential transformation.

The suffering of feeling can be akin to a fire, through which our emotional nature may be transformed and ‘crystalised’. A simple analogy is the beauty of a diamond or gem stone, which is formed from intense pressure and heat, and yields something that has a robust presence of its own.

The aim of the development of our feeling nature is not to become ‘unfeeling’ but to develop a certain kind of freedom which provides independence from the physical nature and its limitations. Feelings provide a means of perception into the world of Being and Value, and they are central to ‘living in harmony’ with other fellow creatures.

In the terms of the Fourth Way Work, it is the development of our feeling nature that can provide us with an independent ‘second body’ or ‘kesdjan body’, which has an existence beyond our physical nature.

Certainly, at times, to feel can feel to be a curse, and no doubt feeling certainly has a potential for extreme negativity and destruction when it runs rampant and operates in ignorance, and yet by this very fact it also offers something as equally extreme in the positive direction.

Work with our feelings can take various forms, and it is useful to try to ponder on the nature of feeling and emotion itself, and what it means, or may mean, that we are feeling creatures.