The universe is
All, where we don’t understand what “all” means. It is the greatest mystery. If
you accept the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, you might be intrigued by what
seems to be our fundamental ignorance, or believe it may be conquered someday.
The cosmos may be infinite: One could travel forever, never knowing what’s beyond
the distant blackness.
But what if you
stumbled upon this observation: “Knowledge is simply our word for how we react
to our perceptions. That is, how we react to ourselves. We cannot get beyond our
eyes: We are everything.”
Or what if these
sentences occurred to you: “We are trapped in the universe. There is nowhere to
go. We can never escape it.”
One feeling,
let’s call it a happy feeling, would conjure a positive outlook: a mysterious,
stunning universe. A different feeling – depressed, regret or loss-filled – might
find these other dismal if not dreadful thoughts: We can never get out of
ourselves; we are trapped in this unknown cocoon.
To me, this
problem of feelings leading to certain thoughts is a killer. It may be the
greatest crime of human nature. There is a feeling, but then it leads to a
thought that makes the feeling into an existent, solid and real. From that point
on, the thought will inwardly and outwardly radiate the feeling, or will simply
seem like a truth that can’t be questioned. That is, by the way, the definition
of a delusion, but it won’t seem that.
A child’s bad
feeling becomes the adult’s thought, his truth, that immigrants or blacks or
Muslims are to be hated. Another child’s submerged or prohibited feeling becomes
his loss of empathy and then a belief in the conscience-less, self-gainful life:
that of so many present politicians of the Conservative persuasion. Countless
and more countless arguments, wars, destructive beliefs, contradicting
philosophies, adversarial religions are born of early and ripened and rancid
emotions that could not flow through us.
They became stuck, they became us. That is what happens when we are too alone in childhood,
with no one to help us feel better and grow.
I can’t exactly
get on a high podium and urge the people that the answer to the world’s
problems is to separate their feelings from their thoughts that become beliefs,
that become identity. But that is the answer. If we were just to feel, without leaping
onto the minefield terrain of Idea, we could sink into the deep truths of our self,
where we never go. Imagine people living in that dimension: a way not to be
trapped.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.