Friday, October 15, 2021

The Fluctuating Field of Feelings

Another week, another Friday off. I'm looking forward to the long weekend because I'll be working continuously the whole of next week when everyone else goes on leave.

I didn't have breakfast today, opting to go for lunch instead, which I had here in my apartment in Cyberjaya a moment ago. Now I'm just enjoying my coffee while I type these lines and figure out the subject of this week's blog article.

This morning a single phrase keeps repeating in my mind: "existence is energy". I remember that I wrote about this recently, and upon searching my blog, indeed I had an article called Existence is just Energy.  Perhaps I want to elaborate more on what I mean by this.

I'm going to go a step further by saying, existence is a feeling. Now, we know what it is like to feel something. You feel cold. You feel dejected. You feel touched by someone. There's a feeling, that is the sum total of all your bodily electro-chemical process inside which you recognize.  The feeling varies from moment to moment in time. There's a quality and identity to that feeling.

Yes, but what is the point that I'm trying to make?  You know you are alive when you are feeling something. And feeling means receiving and reacting to the world. I almost wanted to write "reacting to the external world" but that would be wrong. The so-called reaction is exactly what we mean by that feeling. It is a fluctuation in the field, of which our individual existence is defined.

So life is a continuous feeling. If I may paraphrase Descartes: I feel, therefore I am. At any point in time, the state of your existence is that feeling that you feel and you should treat it as nothing more than a reading of the energy dial. When you meditate, this is what you are constantly aware of, moment by moment. You are tracing the graph of existence as it is being drawn.

When you see that feeling as it is, it is all there is. You are not a physical being feeling heat or cold, anger or elation, but just being a point in the energetic continuum. You have no idea which way it will go next but all you have to do is observe and maintain your balance as you are being swept along by the waves of this energy.

Again, all this sounds like mystical new age mumbo-jumbo. This is what I have a propensity of doing: spouting paragraph after paragraph of such nonsense. I take that as a compliment. They are all non sense--not to be experienced with the usual senses. It is what underlies your senses. You know it when you feel it.

When you say that you know or you understand, again it's a feeling. And if you see it clearly, one feeling differs from another in terms of quality but they are all neutral. We cannot say one wave causes another, or is superior to another. They are part of that oceanic field of cause and effect.

All of art is nothing but feelings captured in various physical medium. And if you feel something after reading these lines, then I've made my point. The moment it is felt, it becomes a part of your existence. And there's nothing more that needs to be said.



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