My hippie moment #3: Deeper in the ocean

Does anyone today – anyone over, say, age ten – ever just pause deeply, quietly, and say to him- or herself: How do I feel about this? I mean at the body bowel-gut-chest level, where our deep ocean currents of emotional sensations are. Here’s how to test whether you do this: Image a tree along your evening walk, a cup of coffee in hand, a politician intoning about this or that, the night sky, an African-American man walking down the street with his head bowed, a picture on the wall of your living room, your life as a whole. If you are able to simply sense or feel, in many of these scenes you would find that your feeling is very different from what your common thought would be. That is, the body’s knowledge would say a “felt idea” or more likely a blurred rainbow of feeling-truths that would be different from the attitudes and ideas you had come to accept and identify as yourself. If we will agree that our organismic Self is our authenticity and our history and meaning, more so than the variety of propagandas that sit in our heads, we will fear that we have become lost to our personal truth, our real core.

Three examples. Attitudinal thought: “These gun lovers are closet cowards who don’t have the dignity or strength to be a man simple, naked before the world with his hands open, his mind capable.” Deeper feeling: He – I – would want people to keep out of my life. I like my rifle. Don’t break into my mind anymore than you would break into my house.

Attitudinal thought: “Starbucks coffee concoction. Assembly line made. Eighteen-year-old employee with no interest in the esthetics, the quality, ensuring the recipe is just right, the history, the science of it.” Deeper feeling: Why am I relying on a cup of coffee to give me some peace and contemplative feeling? It’s too powerless to do that. I am a derelict little boat in a big sea.

Consensus thought: “We must sacrifice for our children: They are our future.” Deeper feeling: Children are not more important to me than I am. My future is my future.

I’m troubled by all the ideas, the brand-name thoughts that have pretty much replaced the atmosphere of our modern days. Ideas that must be erroneous because they are eternally in conflict, big box attitudes insane to reality: all Democrats are – ; immigration good or bad; conservative ideology is right; abortion is wrong. We've become garbage heads, our thoughts the pond scum on a deep pool. At the very least, if we were to fall back into our gut, our body known, we’d be falling away from our rage-inducing enmeshment in all these fights. We’d stop being disembodied heads. And we’d be finding ourselves.