In our feelings lies the big picture. Something I often find hard to describe. To put it simply, in our feelings lies life as it is, and the perception of it this way. To perceive things as they are, we must fine tune our judgement. We must ascertain the validity of the content of our minds so as to purify our means of perceiving:
Though hypocrate, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye;
and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
King James 7:5
As Jesus says, we are to remove the beam from our eye so that we can see what truly needs to be done to help others. The beam in this case is the light of our perception, or the light of our consciousness. This light is polluted by ungrounded assumptions and thereby rendered an ineffective tool for the purpose of assessing the needs of others. Their needs being the shaping up of their own perceptions which are clouded by motes, or ungrounded assumptions. To help others, or even ourselves, we need to see clearly, and this is done by casting out the body of our polluted consciousness which is the sum total of our ungrounded beliefs. Our feelings are our guides to discerning which is true and which is false. They are the cleansing force that leads us from the darkness of our ignorance into the Light which is truth.
For nearly everyone it seems apparent that we don’t come pre-packaged with a stellar truth sense. We have to develop our feelings as to better and better perceive truth. This takes time, it takes faith. It nearly always takes hard work and sacrifice. Your feelings are your conscience. They lead you to all kinds of experiences. It’s their job. It’s your job to figure out what they mean. Some of you may not be very in tune with how you feel. Some of you are probably out of tune a lot more than others. No need to worry. However you are, you have the capacity to become more familiar with your own feelings. As you do, they will naturally deepen. This widens your perspectives and your perspective-taking ability. The more familiar you are with your feelings, the easier it is to understand them. If you understand them well, then you can avoid unpleasant situations. You will deceive yourself less and you will have a greater likelihood of succeeding in your ambitions because of it. For you will have a good understanding of what you want and what you’re capable of. You’ll waste less time doubting yourself, getting distracted and you’ll have the motivation to follow through. These are some of the pretty sweet consequences of self-knowledge.
This works out because your feelings indicate your preferences. They also tell you if you can trust a situation or environment. But, they are often misleading because they are underdeveloped and you can’t or don’t want to depend on them as much as you may like. This is because of what I have already mentioned. Our perceptions are distorted by our false assumptions. If we are full of assumptions, we don’t know how the world really is, we don’t know who we really are and we probably think that both are something that they are not. So when we take these perceptions and use them to perceive our feelings, what we feel is also unavoidably distorted and untrustworthy. But at this point, we probably won’t be able to tell and will regularly run into trouble. This is ok though. This is just apart of being human. We are ignorant and because of this we suffer, we have problems. We don’t need to be saints, most of us are unable to be saints in the here and now. In other words, we don’t need to worry about being perfect, but we will probably be happy to figure out how to make our own lives a little brighter.
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