Thinking with Feelings - Future Dynamics

Life is a deep and profound feeling experience. What are we meant to experience as we live our lives? What is there, awaiting to be felt and registered beyond the known, the familiar, the expected?

Modern education trains people into intellectual prowess, to the point of seeking to intellectually comprehend the great mysteries of life and existence. Life, however, is not an evolutionary algorithm that surrenders its secrets to intellectually driven processes. It is a profoundly energetic, connected process, that lives inside of the flow of a greater process, that lives inside of the flow of a greater process… all magically inter-connected, joined to the cradle of life that lives at the heart of the greater causes.

The Domains of Feelings

Consider for a moment what happens when you feel pain, the alarm signal alerting us to something happening to our system that is violating the threshold of safety. When we experience pain, its emotional and physiological impact awaken a thinking process that seeks to locate, react, respond, and re balance. It wants to pin-point what is happening and why and what must be done to alleviate this condition. The nature of pain instructs what must be done.

Pain-associated feelings are highlighted here because they readily make the point that feelings are quite instructive, providing at the point intelligence in many contexts.

These experiential inner holograms that keep forming, dissipating, and reforming as we travel through our lives, feelings exist across a wondrous breadth of domains, from the tangible to the intangible: From “It’s a warm day” to “I don’t know why, but this does not feel right”.

Try to write down the astounding range of feelings experienced during a day in your life. What would life be like without feelings?

When a human becomes departed from one’s feeling lives, the human in the human vanishes, making way for something else. Would weapons of mass destruction come to be if those who play part in driving their invention would be deeply connected to their natural human feelings?

Thinking with Feelings

Exercise: Pick up a point of focus, such as a loved one, your favourite ice cream; today’s inner struggle; Monday morning; a wild dance; love; the Orion constellation; Indigo; peanuts; your favourite pastime; a mystical contemplation; a current inspiration…

What does it feel like? Not what do I think about it but what am I feeling when I think about it? Try to attach language to the feeling experience. Some may be hard to feel at first, some acutely feel-able. Try to unlock the language and intelligence that lives in the feeling experience, to, in time, as you progress with this exercise, discover new dimensions of how the thinking processes are made to work and reveal in their evolutionary context.

To ease your way into this exercise – in reality, it is not just an exercise, it is a foundational practice for those seriously interested in self-development – add a comparative dimension to it in the following way: Think about one thing, such as the colour blue, to feel what turns up. Then think about the colour red and feel what turns up. Do not intellectualize – just feel and try to attach language to the feeling. Do this in may ways: Peanuts and honey; Monday and Friday; The sun and planet Earth… to in time discover the thrill of what the human system is made to be able to do, and this is just scraping the surface of its natural capabilities.

Natural Discovery

A feeling is a coded impression with a message. The human is made to live and experience life, the natural worlds, the human possibility. While Intellectual prowess absolutely has its place and usefulness, it is a wise person that does not substitute it with experiencing life and its many wonders and opportunities in a feeling, deepening way. Because true understanding is in living and experiencing, not intellectualizing upon, that which one seeks to be with and understand.

With very best wishes,

David