Seek That

"There is a life-force within your soul.
Seek that life.
There is a gem in the mountain of your body.
Seek that mine.
O traveler, if you are in search of that,
don't look outside...
Look inside yourself and seek that."
Rumi

Awareness and Consciousness

Let's continue with covering a 'biggie' here: The difference between awareness and consciousness.

Once again, totally no intention to come in any way, shape, or form to a sort of final judgment on the subject. Only openly sharing my subjective experience, with as number one preferred impact, that it stimulates as many as possible others to also share their subjective experience.

And, what has really helped me in coming to at least something of a rational understanding of how awareness and consciousness might not be the same yet very closely connected, is by comparing awareness to 'looking' and consciousness to 'seeing'.

Awareness then could be understood as a bit more 'raw' as a sensation than consciousness and without necessarily needing an object to be directed at yet, like how you can be looking out for something without already be looking at something. Consciousness then perhaps is a bit more 'polished' as a sensation and necessarily directed at an object, even a specific object, namely the subject. With consciousness in these terms comes a knowing of looking going on, like seeing that there must be an entity doing the looking. In this sense consciousness could be described as awareness of a subject being aware. 

However, when texts or talks are abóut either awareness or consciousness, they are almost automatically about awareness óf awareness, or about awareness óf consciousness. This is where the use of language to me becomes VERY challenging. It easily ends up in fruitlessly discussing what comes first, awareness or consciousness, which to me is very similar to discussing whether the chicken or the egg comes first.

The only clarity I can imagine around this, is to see awareness as closer to the direct experience of the act of paying attention, and to see consciousness as closer to the knowing that there is a subject that is aware and paying attention. At least like this I can come to a little bit of grips with how the term consciousness is also often used as being the fabric of the universe, more or less like the space in which experience takes place, which supposedly is you as well as me, whether we are aware of it or not...

Feelings and Sensations

Okay. Now how about feelings versus sensations? As I used both terms in describing my view on the difference between feelings and emotions. Well, again only giving this just a try, by attempting to capture my own personal understanding into the confines of written language. Mostly for practical reasons. I genuinely hope that people understand what I aim to communicate, whether they agree with it or not.

What comes to my mind first when thinking of feelings versus sensations, is that feelings are a specific type of sensations. In that sense, sensations form a broader collection of phenomena than 'just' feelings. Experiencing visual sensations, sound sensations, smelling sensations or tasting sensations, would by probably nobody be described as having feelings. These sensations nevertheless might be strongly associated with feelings though, or trigger strong emotions.

Does this make any sense to you?

Feelings and Emotions

Speaking about language... I was asked whether or not I see a difference between feelings and emotions, and if so, precisely how. Well, I do see a difference, but let me say right here and now that I do not expect that many debates around this will be solved through any one piece of writing, including my own writing of today. I do however believe that it is very helpful and valuable for communication purposes to understand how different people see these things differently. So let me try and share my personal perspective through use of the written word, in spite of its apparent limitations.

One way of looking at my understanding of the difference between feelings and emotions, is that feelings can be seen as our individual experience of emotions. From this angle, emotions basically come before feelings. Before even the emotion though, there must be a cognition that consciously or unconsciously triggers it. Where an emotion then is a cluster of subjective sensations that are triggered by a cognition, feelings are the noticeable experience of one or more of these sensations. Feelings however can also be remembered and recalled, which in that case does not require a preceding emotion at that particular time any more.

Where emotions clearly have both cognitive and physiological elements, after all the whole goal of an emotion seems to be activating the body to allow a response to a perceived event in the organism's environment, this is less obvious for feelings. Furthermore, next to these feelings related to emotions, we of course often also talk about feelings in the strict sense of physical sensations, or when we mean intuitions. Therefore the feelings like we can have them for someone, the feelings we can have in or on our body because of for example high temperatures, and the feelings we can have about what the weather or so is going to do, usually mean three very different things, although none of these are generally considered to be emotions.

How does reading this make you feel? Did it trigger any emotions?

Perfect Imperfection

Should I actually be able to immediately sense every moment as being as fully perfect as it is? I believe not. I even believe that not all moments would be perfect for us when we would sense all of them as perfect. Not only because perfection wouldn't mean much to us when there was no contrast with perfection anywhere, but also because we wouldn't have any opportunities to perfectly notice ourselves noticing imperfection. Or would perfectly noticing ourselves noticing imperfection make it all perfect again? In retrospect? Or is there no way to ever get to the bottom of this when trying to describe it with language?

I was thinking about the limits of sharing experience with each-other by using words earlier today, when I read a piece of writing on the subject by author and teacher Jeff Foster, in which he introduced a Hafiz quote that resonated remarkably with me:

"If you think that the sun and the ocean
Can pass through that tiny opening
Called the mouth,
O, someone should start laughing!
Someone should start wildly laughing -
Now!"
Hafiz

Extraordinary Problems

Experiencing being able to visit a grandmother, experiencing being able to run an errand and experiencing being able to celebrate an aunt's birthday, for sure all felt good to me. Pretty extraordinary then to still have found a way to not immediately sense all of those moments as being as fully perfect as they were. My dear friend and enigmatically striking listener Krishna Prem, every now and then helps to remind me of this amazing skill of mine, when he responds to some of my occasionally vented worries by saying: "I like your problems!"

Experiencing Living

Happy to be in the company of a phenomenal writer and lecturer such as Joseph Campbell with also my personal observation that people indeed appear to be more strongly motivated in the direction of directly sensing their aliveness, than that people are motivated to come to a rational understanding of what life is all about. And perhaps directly sensing aliveness actually even is what life is all about?

It looks to me like generally speaking everybody wants to move in the direction of more life, and therefore more experience of living. Actions that we think will lead to more experience of living, usually feel good to us. Fulfilling our needs feels good to us. Being frustrated in meeting our needs, or being frustrated in achieving what we think we need, usually feels miserable to us. 

Our needs and desires can sometimes seem at odds with each-other though. Yesterday when visiting my grandmother, I really wanted to spend as much time as possible with my grandmother, yet I also wanted to still run an errand without ending up in a crazy hurry before attending an aunt's birthday party later. When I became aware of slowly building up some tension over this, because I wanted to avoid tension in my day, I couldn't help but laugh at myself.