The Two Layers of Feeling
Las dos capas del sentir
A reflection on the difference between raw sensation and mental emotion, and how seeing through the constructed self can open a doorway to something vast and uncontainable.
The Two Layers of Feeling
A reflection on the difference between raw sensation and mental emotion, and how seeing through the constructed self can open a doorway to something vast and uncontainable.
By "feeling," I always summarize it as fear and pain. Shame is a form of pain. Worry is a form of fear. I put it this way to help us avoid overcomplicating feeling. The more complicated a feeling seems, the more likely it is superficial: story-based, rooted in emotion rather than in something deeper.
Sensation as the ground of feeling
By learning to be with our sensations, we are able to place our attention less in our thoughts. At their depth, feelings are sensations. They are simply of a different nature than touch, for example. But a feeling is an energy. It has a texture, a tone, a way in which it moves. It is just a sensation. It can be more intense or more subtle, more unformed, generalized and vast, or localized and focused. It is all sensation.
Mental emotion versus raw feeling
The mind can fabricate a mental sensation in order to push away a deeper, more physical feeling. For example, if I am looking at the space behind the screen and I am lost in thought, I will stop really seeing what is there. Instead, I will be living inside the images of the narrative in my thoughts. The same is true with feelings. When I get immersed in my thinking, that thinking produces an emotional landscape, which is a kind of mental image of a sensation. In that way, it pushes away or distracts from the deeper feeling sensation.
Just as you can see images through raw perception but also create them as reflections in the mind, choosing to focus on the mental image rather than on what is actually coming through perception, the same applies to sound: I can create an inner dialogue, which is imagined sound rather than perceived sound. And with emotions, I can invoke and create the texture of feeling, but it will be removed from the deeper feeling sensation. It will be a mental, emotional sensation.
Two aspects of reality
So I am describing two aspects of reality. One is raw perception: sensation, sound, feeling. The other is mental fabrication: imagery, dialogue, time, space, emotion, mental sensation. When we believe our mental fabrication to be what is actually happening, that is what we call identification. We are in a story, in a narrative, and that narrative prevents us from relating to what is actually real. It is a superimposed reality, the reality of thought, of mind, and it helps us cope with what lies behind it. Because what lies behind it is mystery. It is vast, it is infinite, it is deep, and the feelings can be very intense.
Stepping out of the movie
The work, then, is this: the more we shift into taking some distance from thought, seeing it as thought, the more we begin to have a different relationship to reality. Once I am no longer immersed in the movie, once I see it as a movie, I start to have a relationship to the body on the couch and to the screen in front of me. There is the reality of sensation, and there is the world of inner mind, which becomes nearly all of our reality. As long as we are not stepping in front of a car or otherwise forced into direct contact with what is here, we are not paying much attention to actual reality. Our reality is the world we are mentally constructing.
But as we begin to see that construction as thought, as we see what it is in service to, and as we lose interest in what it is in service to, we become interested in reality itself. Then thought becomes just thought. It is a tool, useful and practical.
The question of "Who am I?"
This is why the question "Who am I?" is so powerful. What the mind is really doing, through all of its constructing, is creating a sense of self that is knowable, known, limited, experienced: something I can experience as "me." And what the inquiry points to is that this constructed self is not what I actually am. What is normally experienced as "I" is thought. The work is to disentangle that. "Oh, that is thought. That is not I. Oh, that is thought." And what remains, once that disentangling begins, is what I point to with a different word, just to contrast it from this sense of "me": beingness. It is still a word, but it serves to distinguish something that cannot be captured by the usual framework.
Glimpses
This recognition can happen in glimpses, in a flash, where that which was always seen and known and experienced as what I am is suddenly seen through. It falls away for a second, and something else is perceived, something difficult to describe. It is known. And then the old sense of self can come back. But once that happens, there is a glimpse: "I am not that." You have seen it. And that is the beginning of a shift, one that can eventually become permanent.
Facing what I was afraid of
The first time that happened for me, it came through facing something I was terrified of. Before then, I had no experience of that fear. I could not even recognize it. Then I started to recognize it and move directly into it. I would wake up in the morning, sit down to meditate, invoke it, and look at that fear. My body would start shaking just from contemplating what I had been, until that point in my life, unable to even contemplate.
After a while of facing it, something happened. It was very brief, perhaps ten seconds. It reminded me of the stories people tell about near-death experiences, where they are about to crash in an airplane but survive, and in that moment before impact, their entire life flashes by. It was exactly like that. I saw my whole life in just a couple of seconds, all of it moving very fast, and I could see how through the whole thing there had been this constructing of an "I" through obsessive thought. And then it was gone.
There was a massive expansion. Absolute terror. Absolute wonder. Absolute beauty. And then back. It was simply too much. But after that, there was no way to fully believe the old construction again.
I share this because it happened specifically when I began to move into the fear and relate to it directly, to enter into a direct relationship with what I was afraid of. That fear came up because I was moving toward what I truly wanted. And so there was this tension: what I want brings up fear; I could move away into what is comfortable and feel depressed. And I found myself caught in that back and forth, until the willingness to face the fear directly opened something I could never have anticipated.