What is feeling? by "ReadMe"

Many of you will see this as a rewording of things known to you, but others will not. Besides,it is a submission for official MOTU status, after all :) Here goes ...

What is feeling?

It is considered a fact that there are 5 verifiable senses, and everyone knows what they are. They are considered as senses because there is an internal response to external stimuli. They are accepted empirically because our responses to those stimuli are objectively measurable. Feeling is not commonly counted with the 5, perhaps because it does not meet this test. But, consider.

When you have a feeling, is it not an internally measurable response? Something within us senses, feels, the external emotional energy that comes from others or the situational energy from environmental phenomena. Sometimes (say you see a bar-room fight brewing), you just feel something is going to happen.

It is important to separate feeling and emotion. Feeling is the sensory component of the pair, the input receiver. Emotion (Latin "ex" - out, and "motion") is the outwardly directed reply to a feeling. When people are speaking of their emotions, they are actually referring to their responses to a feeling, the need to express or move the feeling out of the body, although they may be using the word to describe the feeling itself. But that is one step too far for this point in the discussion. Let's get back to feeling.

When we are children, our reception to feeling is wide open; similarly, responses to the other senses are said to be more acute, more vivid, and there is no occurrence of the phenomenon of conditioned visual or auditory (for example) reactions. The world is a very rich and dynamic place. So too with feeling. But this changes, and pretty quickly.

Over time, we develop conditioned reactions to virtually every feeling. We develop a stock of internal reactions. These manifest in outward behaviours, emotions that are somehow generally designed to produce gratification or deflect discomfort. Feeling starts to become a mere alarm system in hair-trigger service to these conditioned responses. Its richness as a sense in its own right becomes dulled, as it becomes more and more a servant to self-protecting emotions. Sometimes the protection involves clamping down hard on certain feelings altogether, to the point where strange physical manifestations are emoted. People will hum little tunes, twitch, clear their throats, etc.

In the true sense of the word, these people have become emotional, that is, they are no longer capable of accepting a particular feeling in its raw, unfiltered form because the feeling has become a source of conflict or discomfort. Because our society is filled with generations of people all exhibiting conditioned emotions to generate needed responses, it becomes very difficult for anyone to remain in that pure, child state of directly experiencing the sense called feeling. This is not to say that all emotion is an expression of aberrant feeling. Unadulterated joy is a beautiful thing to behold. But for the sake of this discussion I refer to those feelings which have become adulterated. Feeling gets a bad rep as the cause of beahviour, and therefore, is viewed as untrustworthy. This is an unjustified indictment. It is the emotional responses to uncomfortable, sometimes intolerable feelings that are providing the basis for that assessment.

Feeling is receptive. It cannot be dismissed on the basis of the conditioned reactions to a feeling. Some of these reactions, however strange they appear, are actually sane protections from insane situations. It is the original source of the adaptive behaviour, however unimportant to the unkowing observer, that is the real culprit. Feeling is only unworthy of trust because we are no longer responding directly to it as a sense. It has become distorted by us, often necessarily so to cope with unreasonable or threatening stimuli. Feeling is not, however, distorted by nature but, sadly, by environment.

The road back to responding rather than reacting to feelings can be a very difficult one to follow. For some, there is no clue that an internal map to that road exists. But finding it is critically important. It is just as tragic a circumstance as if one were walking around with a pair of mud covered glasses, or earplugs, and had no clue as to the reality of unobscured perception. What happens when the obstruction is removed is that a spontaneous response in the form of healthy action takes the place of the conditioned behaviour of repetitive re-action.

The truly ironic aspect of this inability to see the road, or the map that leads to it, is that we have it all the time. It is emotion itself. Every emotion leads to its source in a feeling. Tracing an emotional reaction back to its deep source of feeling, that we all can tap into, is the key to the mystery of the question "What the hell have I been doing?". Contacting this source not only gives answers to why we have made the "choices" we have, but also tells us why some were not conscious choices at all, but defense or gratification reactions. Combined with reason and conscience, our feelings are part of a powerful set of tools for perceiving the ways of people and events around us.

The nature of feeling may remain a mystery, but how to live a life of unfettered feeling and non-programmed reactions need not be as mysterious, and seemingly out of reach, as it can often seem. Feeling is the translator of the subtext of existence. It deserves to be regarded as the wonderful source of knowledge that it is. It may be argued (by those who are qualified) that losing sight, hearing, touch, taste or smell are all survivable, as grave as the loss of any of these must certainly be. But what is a life where nothing at all is felt? It is feeling that lets us know that we exist, and know our location on the map of existence.



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