Actual Freedom ~ Frequently Flogged Misconceptions

You use the word ‘feelings’ but isn’t it more accurate to say ‘thinking’ as anger, sadness, etc., i.e. ‘feelings’ are actually thoughts i.e. ‘no one likes me’ ‘I am alone’ etc. There are sensations behind thought i.e. tightness, heaviness, sinking feeling, I give you that but the problem to be examined is the thought which creates the tightness (unhappy) feeling. Anyway you say that feelings come before thought and we should examine feelings – easy said than done – what is a feeling then? To me a feeling is a physical vibration or ripple inside the body. Some say emotion is a feeling e.g. hot sensation in head combined with a thought e.g. – ‘I look stupid’ but there are two things that make up emotion – thought and sensation in body. Now if we break this down it shows the thought ‘I look stupid’ comes first or at least the same time as hot sensation, it goes hand in hand, it cant be one without the other.

You said in your email that the feelings are creating the feeler. So it seems logical to me that the feelings, must exist prior of the feeler, because the creator must exist prior to its creation, right? So the feelings are innative to the human being, that means they are actual. Instead the feeler is a real entity, but not actual. So we have reality and actuality. Reality comes from the Latin word ‘res’, which means thing. A thing is manmade.

Yes, it seems that egoistic feelings stem from what he calls an abused mind. The more mind is identified, not aware, not free to observe, the greater the suffering. The mind that is boundless, not entangled with transient thoughts, feelings and sensations is ecstatic.

Many feelings are felt only when the thinker is thinking on it, but when the thinker stops and there’s silence those feelings also stop, seeming that the thinker and the feeler are only the two sides of the same coin. Yes, the surface ‘conscious’ thinker stops and then the surface emotions also stop, but whereas the thinker and his worries are still boiling in the deepest of conscious the deepest emotions and wishes would not stop. In this way, the thinker and the feeler can be the same yet. When mind is in this situation observing a sunrise, without the thinker operating, there’s only the sense of beauty without the sense of a feeler feeling it. It seems that the sense of observer and feeler does not exist then, only exists apperceptive awareness as what is observed (the sunrise) and the feeling (‘beauty’) without a sense of a feeler feeling it. The feeler seems to be a thinking-dependent process in the first case and independent of conscious thinking in the second.

Are you saying here that thought triggers off the prior existing feelings that are being generated by the instinctual passions? In other words the feeling is already there before the thought?