Being and Feelings
While I was walking up from the carpark of the Da Men Mall just now, I thought I would write about "being" and "feeling". That I think would be the title of the blog article (I often don't know what the title is until I've written the last line). But today will be different.
We all know what makes us unhappy. We say that we 'feel' sad. Maybe someone you love died. Or you lost your job, had a car accident or having a misunderstanding with your spouse. These things bother us and make us feel miserable. But we also know that, every unhappy state passes. It is a 'feeling' that comes and goes. All feelings fade away naturally unless you purposely rekindle them.
Feelings are by definition ephemeral--like clouds in the sky. They will drift in and drift out. People who are in depression are however in a slightly different state. They are stuck in a rut--like a buggy computer program that ran into an infinite loop. But even then, depressions don't last forever--either because the body that's suffering from it gives way or changes in circumstances alter the body chemistry enabling the person to snap out of the depressive state.
Depression is just a runaway feedback cycle of reinforcing negativity that plunges a person into a perpetually unhappy state. This overpowering storm of negative feelings has to be disrupted, either by a change of environment or a chemical intervention that changes the neurophysiology of the person.
By and large, feelings come and go. It is a content of the body and mind. The problem with sadness is that, we are sometimes addicted to this negative content because it distracts us from other deeper issues. But we are not the contents of our minds. We are that awareness behind it, which is untainted by feelings or contents.
That awareness is Being itself. Being is not the body nor the mind--these are just physical manifestations of our existence. It is the underlying field where the perturbations happen. Whenever they are perturbations, we 'feel' it--as happiness or sadness. The field of Being does not comprehend the drama of feelings--it merely provides the stage for the play to happen.
But Being is who we really are. Even the concept of 'I' or 'We' needs to be understood in its proper perspective. It only has relative and local significance. Each one of us is simply a tiny group of fluctuations in the field of Being, which cumulatively has a kind of shared life-cycle. Just like how a whirlpools seem to have a force of its own, sucking in everything that comes into its vicinity. But a whirlpool is just a part of the larger body of water called the ocean.
Our soul-proud selves are nothing but whirlpools in the field of Being. Sometimes it is convenient to talk about our individual souls and personalities, very much like how we illustrate software architecture with block diagrams. It is a conceptual representation of reality, which has its purpose at the level of abstraction that we are operating.
Feeling is form and Being is emptiness. Form disappears into emptiness and vice versa, as the famous sutra goes. When expressed in that kind of mystical language, people find it difficult to grasp and comes up with all sorts of interpretations that miss the mark.
All spiritual practices attempt to reconnect us to our fundamental Being--that "oneness with God". But again, the moment we express it that way, we are creating subject-object duality--I and God. The best approach is not to talk and argue too much about such things. All arguments, thoughts and expressions only generate feelings. Just be. And that, is the ultimate bliss of Being.
