Feeling is Knowing

Sunday Times of India, New Delhi, May 14, 2006

If you want to know who you are, listen to your soul, says Neale Donald Walsch.

In life, the biggest choice you will ever make is the choice between your truth and the truth of another. And, how can you know which truth is truly yours? By listening to what you are feeling. Feelings reside in the soul, and the soul is God in- you. In this place is your truth, and it is in no other.

Feeling is the language of the soul. Most of our adult lives are spent learning to trust our feelings. This is not surprising, since most of our growing up years were spent learning to ignore them. Many people were told as children that feelings were not good. It was not good to be angry and to show it. It was not good to feel jealous and to show it. It was not good to feel scared and to show it. It was not good to feel too excited and to show it.

If we ran into a room filled from head to toe with youthful exuberance, we were told to hold it down, to not interrupt, to keep still. If we laughed too loud or cried too long, spoke too soon or asked too much, we were made to know that we had somehow done something wrong. We had not been good.

In all of this, we could not have missed the point; we could not have escaped the message. Life was not about learning how to be, it was about learning how not to be, what we were.

For many adults, the biggest challenge is to remember who they really are. Such a big portion of them has been dropped by the wayside, left behind, abandoned, stifled, ignored. Do you want to know who you are? Do you want to get back in touch with your truth about things — whatever those things may be? Then check out your feelings. Listen to your soul.

However, try not to confuse feelings with emotions. Your feelings are what you know about a thing. Your emotions are what you do with what you know. A feeling is energy. An emotion is energy in motion.

Your feeling is your truth. It is exactly how you feel about a thing, based on what you factually and intuitively know. Because feelings are what you know about a thing, they will always be your truth, but they may not be the truth. They may not be what you would have formerly called objective truth, especially if you look only at what you factually know, and set aside or ignore what you intuitively know.

There is no such thing as objective or factual truth in this reality. All truth in our world is created by the context within which it is experienced or observed.

Within the context of your life, for instance, the sun is up, the earth is down, the air and the sky are between. To Neil Armstrong, on his way to the moon, there were, no doubt, many moments when the sun wasn’t up at all, but down.

He may have found himself looking up at the earth instead. Up and down are relative terms. We can all understand this. What we don’t understand is that all of reality is relative — which is to say that nothing is truly true at all!

Still, to make some sense out of our lives, to put some order into them, we decide upon what we choose to call objective truth. If, therefore, what you know about a thing is false or incomplete you will have a false or misleading feeling.

This will make it no less your truth. You will still truly feel that way. Your feelings will simply not be what is objectively true within the larger context of your life.

Emotion is the power which creates, but it has nothing to do with what is really so. Emotion is neither true nor false. It is simply energy in motion. An emotion is an experience. A feeling is knowing. How you feel is what you know about a thing. How you express those feelings is how you emote — or experience emotion. That is, how you place energy into motion.

You do not have to place energy into motion around any feeling. To do or not to do is your choice. You can know (feel) that you love a person, but you don’t have to do anything about it. You can know (feel) that you dislike a person, but you don’t have to do anything about it.

It is when you translate what you know into action (e+motion=energy in motion) that you have an emotional response. This is not to say that an emotional response is bad. For there is nothing that is good or bad. There is only that which serves your purpose — or does not.

Your purpose is the key to everything. In order to know whether anything serves your purpose, you have to know what your purpose is. If you are not clear as to your purpose in any given moment or situation, to say nothing of all of life, it will be very difficult for you to decide or to choose how you want to act or react; which is to say, how you want to be. Beingness is everything. And so this decision, this choice, is no small matter.(The above article is an excerpt from Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch).

(websource: Indiatimes spirituality)