our "missing" foundation

Civilized life disconnects us from the most foundational component of our psyches, rendering it unknown and unknowable. The more we live in disconnection from this part of ourselves, the more unworkable our lives become - without our ever knowing why. When complete (mid-2014?), this blog will be a book-length description of what this component of the psyche is, how it functions, how civilized life disconnects us from it, how this affects us, and how we can restore our connection to it.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

The Causal Level - Chapter 2

1.2 Feeling Fully 

OKness, our first key concept for understanding the causal level, established a new baseline minimum of psychological health – a new way of defining what is essential to feeling right and functioning optimally. The innateness of OKness also established the causal level as a distinct level of being. We emphasized in the previous chapter that there is no way to directly and willfully generate, acquire, increase, or in any other sense “create” OKness; that the innate, primary form of security, belonging, ease, and rightness simply exists without cause or reason; and that the only “reason” we experience it (when we do experience it) is that we are fully connected to the causal level. But what does it mean to be “fully connected to the causal level?” In this chapter, we will express what this means as feeling fully. Conversely, we will express being “disconnected from the causal level” as feeling less than fully – as having blockages or inhibitions in our capacity to feel. Feeling fully is the second main concept for understanding the causal level.

As facets of the causal level, these first two concepts are in no way separate from each other. They are equivalent. To feel fully is to have a full sense of OKness. Still, each concept highlights different aspects of what the causal level is and does and what it means to be causally connected/informed. For this reason, it can be useful to talk about them separately. Focusing on “feeling fully” will bring out additional aspects of the causal level and increase our overall understanding of it.

As with the four qualities of OKness, the concept of “feeling fully” might, at first glance, seem so obvious and self-explanatory that the tendency will be to assume that we already know what it is. But as before, so also here: as an aspect of the causal level, it has an altogether unexpected meaning – one that is surprisingly different from whatever meanings we might currently ascribe to it; one that can only be known by knowing the causal level experientially. In fact, the entire phenomenon of feeling as it will be presented here is altogether different from what it is now conceived to be in the modern, civilized world. How is this possible? Don’t we all already know what something as simple and basic to life as feeling is? We all do it all the time, after all. So how much more could there possibly be to feeling than what we already experience at every waking moment? 

A lot. By its very nature, civilized life puts enormous – but unrecognized – psychic constraints on our normal, natural ability to feel. It does this in two ways, limiting both the intensity or quality of feeling and also the range of feeling we are capable of registering. First, civilized life forces us to abandon our capacity for pure, raw, unadulterated feeling and instead restricts us to an excessively and unnaturally mentally mediated, “watered down” type of feeling. This necessarily leads us to, second, block or shut down large swaths of what would otherwise be the virtually unlimited range of our normal feeling capacity. Feeling as we now conceive and experience it is therefore quite limited and partial – a mere fragment of what true feeling is; and this fragmented form badly misrepresents the real nature of feeling. It is only feeling in its unadulterated fullness that allows us to know what feeling really is. And knowing feeling as it really is is central to the causal perspective. Feeling in its fullness is the thread that unifies and brings to life the many “parts” of the causal level and the entire understanding of human nature based upon it. As OKness, the causal level may be the “missing foundation” for all other aspects of us; but feeling fully is what allows us to reconnect with the causal level and thereby regain that foundation. Without the capacity to feel fully, the idea of the causal level – and everything else that goes along with it (the foundation, OKness, personal-relational reality, and still other concepts we will get to later on) would forever remain just that – a mere idea, rather than a lived experience that actively informs every moment of our lives. Feeling fully is the living, breathing heart of the causal level.

For this reason, it is only feeling in its fullness that can meaningfully and usefully be placed at the foundation of human nature. Only in its fullness can feeling be the basis of a truly workable, beneficial, comprehensive, coherent – and I would add beautiful – conception of who we are and how we are meant to feel inside and how we are meant to function in the world. We can therefore say that the central theme and question we will be exploring throughout this book is, “What does it mean to feel fully – as opposed to any degree less than fully?” Filling in the gap between partial, adulterated feeling as we now experience it and feeling in its fullest, truest form – and showing that these are two fundamentally different things – is one way to describe the purpose of these writings.

A few words on how we will proceed: The concept of “feeling fully” – along with the complete story of how and why we withdraw from it – will unfold slowly over the course of Books I and II. We will only introduce the concept here. In fact, roughly the first half of this chapter will not be about feeling fully per se, but about the nature of feeling itself – as in, “What is feeling?” Through this first part of the discussion, we will arrive at a definition of “true” or “pure” feeling (which relates to the participatory-personal-relational nature of reality) as an intermediate step towards understanding feeling in its fullness – although, as we will see, there is something of a “trick” here. Then, in the second part of the chapter, we will mainly just discuss the general implications of feeling fully as opposed to feeling less than fully. But we will only be able to arrive at a more complete definition of “feeling fully” in Chapter 4 Causal Sensation, where we indicate what, specifically, we feel when we feel fully. And finally, the full import of feeling fully will become clear only when we discuss the how of the healing process in Book II (a topic we will only hint at in this chapter). 

The Endless Flow of Feeling – A Quick Description of Feeling Fully

But first, let us just very roughly describe what we mean by “feeling fully” so it will be less of a vague abstraction. Feeling is an essential component of every experience. Every physical, energetic, mental, emotional, and spiritual process and occurrence that we will ever know feels like something (whether we are conscious of it or not), meaning that there is some sort of sensation associated with it. These sensations can arise from both internal and external sources. As different as they may be from each other, both a gentle breeze blowing by us and the inner promptings of a developmental urge – an urge, perhaps, to hone a newly emerging mental skill – are equally sensate, felt experiences. It is inconceivable that there could be any sort of experience where it does not feel like something to be having that particular experience. And because every experience has its own, unique sensations associated with it, countless sensations are present in our field of awareness in each and every moment; so many, in fact, that we cannot possibly be aware of most of them; and so the vast majority are subconscious. But they are there.

Central to the causal perspective is that we are meant to be fully impacted by each and every one of the countless feelings that arise within us – each according to its inherent “strength” – in each and every moment. Feeling is how we “taste” life. Being able to experience and respond to the entire range of sensations generated by different experiences is what it means to be alive – to be a person, rather than a thing. This complete openness to feeling is the essence of non-mechanical subjectivity, personhood, and relationship. The quality of our feeling – how full or partial it is – plays an essential role in everything we do because all of our decisions, impulses, and drives – whether good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, conscious and willful or subconscious, automatic, instinctive, or intuitive – are grounded in, and ultimately emerge from, feeling. So: everything we experience feels like something; and everything we do is driven by feeling. Feeling is central to life. If we had no feeling (which is impossible), we would utterly cease to function. Without feeling, we could not consider ourselves to be living beings in any meaningful sense.

Each and every feeling is meant to be fully digested, assimilated, responded to, and then released by our total being (although, again, not necessarily consciously). This is what it means to be “fully impacted” by feeling. This is what allows us to stay in perpetual, directly felt contact with the world. What part of us is responsible for this continual processing of all sensations? The causal level. Assuming we are functioning normally, then, somehow, at the causal level, we ceaselessly sift through the endless flood of sensations passing through us and allow each one to make its full contribution. Our processing of and response to the countless sensations associated with each moment’s sensing, perceiving, acting, thinking, and emoting gives us our subjectively felt, “lived experience” of each moment and also informs the subsequent moment’s sensing, perceiving, acting, thinking, and emoting to produce the natural, spontaneous, healthy flow of life. To grossly oversimplify, it is through this sort of (mainly) subconscious processing of uninhibited, unrestricted feeling – an incomprehensibly enormous task that we carry out effortlessly and flawlessly at the causal level – that we decide whether that breeze blowing by us should be heeded as a warning to seek shelter or whether we can safely ignore it and concentrate instead on fulfilling our inner developmental promptings by seeking out the appropriate mental stimuli – or whatever other decision bubbles up to the surface from the totality of our sensations. And it is because of our total openness to all sensations that we maintain our sense of absolute OKness about acting on whatever decisions and impulses bubble up through this process, as well. So in this way, feeling fully, being connected to the causal level, having our full sense of OKness, and acting spontaneously are all one and the same, mutually reinforcing process. But the real key to all of this is that we do not block any portion of the total spectrum of feeling.

Incidentally (for now, anyways), the above description of how we take in all feelings at the causal level and process them in a way that informs and steers us in every moment might sound a lot like the sorts of tasks we now program our supercomputers to perform – whether tracking weather patterns, DNA sequences, economic trends, or other hugely complex phenomena. That is to say, processing the totality of feeling might at first seem to be an utterly mechanical process – pure “data crunching.” And certainly there is a mechanical aspect to it. But as we will see, feeling itself can never be mechanical because there has to be someone – a purely subjective person – to feel the feeling. Otherwise, feeling cannot exist at all. Feeling and subjectivity simply do not fit in to any sort of mechanical picture of the universe. Unlike with anything else in the physical (mechanical) universe, our scientists cannot tell us where our felt, subjective experience is “located,” how it can exist, or how it can interact with physical-mechanical things – although obviously it does, since, whenever I tell the muscles in my arm or any other part of my body (which is ostensibly part of the mechanical universe) to move, it moves. So while we can program computers to do things that are in some respects similar to what we are describing here – taking in vast quantities of data and spitting out some sort of product – no computer will ever feel itself doing this. There is no “what it feels like” to be a computer. And as we will see, this is an all-important difference.

In any case, “processing the totality of feeling” as described above is what we mean by “feeling fully” – which, again, is the same as “being fully informed by the causal level,” having a “full sense of OKness” and “feeling right and functioning optimally.” Why are all of these synonymous? As we said before, we cannot give any further explanation for why feeling fully and being fully connected to the causal level gives rise to OKness and a sense of feeling right. It just does. But as for functioning optimally, we can say a bit more, which is that, when we allow all sensations to impact us fully, the causal level’s way of sorting through this endless flood of sensations somehow reflects the natural balance between all these forces, which somehow keeps us moving through life with the greatest possible balance and harmony, insuring that our participation in life is as natural, healthy, and appropriate as can be and that it always leads to optimal development and functioning. So long as we do not disrupt this process – so long as we allow all sensations to have their full impact upon us – the decisions and impulses that bubble up from the causal level and inform our body and mind will somehow be the “right” ones – and they will accord with our genetically programmed instincts and drives towards full and balanced development and optimal functioning (those instincts and drives themselves contributing to the sensations that we process and respond to in each and every moment).

Somehow, this is how life works. But again, we cannot say why. It just does. That word “somehow” cannot be elaborated upon. We cannot say how the causal level knows what to do or why it is so infallible. This is part of the life’s mystery – part of the mystery of why anything in the world is the way it is and works the way it works. (The unprovable/ undisprovable claims that we keep making about the causal level may seem unjustified; but no more so than the take-it-or-leave-it fundamental assumptions integral to all other perspectives – including the “objective-scientific” perspective of the modern world. We will address the issue of fundamental assumptions more fully in the Worldviews chapter in Part 2.) Still, even though we cannot explain why feeling fully leads to optimal development and functioning, we can describe what this process looks like when allowed to unfold fully and naturally. We will do this in the next chapter, The Foundation.

In essence, then, “feeling fully” means being completely open and responsive (whether consciously or not) to the entire range of sensations arising within us without blocking it at any point or at any level of being. It means allowing each and every sensation to have its full impact on us and make its full contribution. Only when we remain completely free of blockages to feeling can the causal level successfully do its job of recalculating (continuously, every single moment!) the “sum total” of all those sensations in order to form the basis for the next moment’s optimal functioning. Again, this does not require us to take conscious note of each and every sensation. That is not necessary (or even possible). It only means not blocking (consciously or unconsciously) any portion of the full range of sensation. We must not stop a single sensation from making its full, unimpeded contribution, according to its inherent nature. The causal level is fully capable of guiding us more or less flawlessly through life in a way that will allow us to feel right and function optimally – but only when we give it unrestricted access to all sensations. Remaining fully feeling, then, is an all-encompassing mode of moving through life. We will expand greatly upon this core idea further ahead in this chapter and in later chapters; but this is the gist of what it means to feel fully.

In case we have given the impression that being “completely responsive to the entire range of sensations,” “allowing them to have their full impact on us,” and “processing them fully” is in any way difficult or technically complicated, the truth is that, in actual, lived experience, feeling fully is extremely simple. It is the mode of being that comes most easily and naturally to us. What we have just described in somewhat dry, technical terms is nothing other than that mind-melty state of letting-go familiar to all of us through ordinary, everyday experiences like falling asleep, falling in love, laughing, crying, dancing, fighting, listening to or playing music, or intensely engaging in any other activity, like play, games, sport, art, religious devotion, and so on. Really, feeling fully is just an expression of the full, free, healthy, balanced, life-enhancing spontaneity that “goes with” and is OKness. And while, in civilized society, we no longer enter into this mode beyond a limited degree in limited situations – so technically we do not feel fully – still, we all know essentially “how to do it” – and it is not any big, complicated deal.

In its true, unlimited fullness, feeling is an exquisite phenomenon – truly the glory of existence. It is in no way incidental to life, but is the very essence of life, without which life loses its savor and meaning. Life is not ideally “perfect” and utterly problem-free when we feel fully; but it is as good as it can be – which is quite marvelous. In sharp contrast, feeling that is partial, limited, or blocked to any degree – as it almost always is in civilized life – is the underlying basis for an entire category of especially pernicious, destructive, suffering-inducing, and totally unnatural states of being. These states are associated with, or give rise to, the gravest of our personal and social ills and are now so ubiquitous throughout the civilized world that we have mistakenly come to think of them as part of the “human condition” itself. But really, they are totally unnecessary, pathological impositions on human nature. They come into existence – they are induced – solely as a result of blocking or shutting down our natural, normal capacity to allow the entire range of sensations to have their full impact upon us. Thus, these blockage-induced problems are completely separate from (and now almost completely overshadow) those relatively few and far more manageable problems that truly are inherent in human nature. Along with OKness, then, the concept of feeling fully helps us distinguish between those problems that really are unavoidably part of the human condition (even at its healthiest) and those that are only part of our artificially induced, less-than-fully-feeling, civilized condition. Sadly, the partial and blocked form of feeling (and functioning) is the only form most of us now experience or know. What a poor and utterly false, distorted view of human nature – and life as a whole – this give us.

Understanding the nature of feeling in its fullness is incredibly clarifying. In spite of the fact that some people believe – incorrectly – that they suffer because they “feel too much,” the truth is that feeling fully is always and only one hundred percent beneficial and life enhancing. It never causes any harm or suffering. It always and only moves toward the resolution of unnecessary suffering. It always and only moves toward overall balance and harmony. It is our only means of sensing true, overall balance and harmony. And it is what shapes every bit of us in overall balance and harmony. It is only feeling less than fully that causes unnecessary problems and suffering; and it is only these problems and suffering that seem to be “too much.” Therefore, it is of great importance that we move beyond the false conception of feeling that now prevails in the civilized world and come to understand – and experience – feeling in its fullness.

Part A - What Is Feeling? 

True/Pure Feeling

Before we get into any further discussion of feeling fully, we must first clarify what we mean by “feeling” itself. A proper understanding of the entire phenomenon of feeling is, quite naturally, essential to understanding the concept of feeling in its fullness. So then, what exactly are we referring to when we talk about feeling? Simple and self-explanatory as it may seem, the exact nature of feeling is far from clear. In fact, feeling is such a hard-to-pin-down phenomenon that it may not be possible to arrive at a single definition that all will agree upon; but that is not necessary. It will be enough to say what we mean by feeling in these pages, in the context of this discussion. The reader can then decide for hirself if our definition (and therefore our discussion) makes sense and seems true-to-life.

Not that the issue is simply one of “defining our terms.” That is important, of course; but in defining feeling, we will be going well past mere clarification of the “we mean this, not that” sort. How so? Feeling as we will be defining it is neither a “this” nor a “that” within the civilized scheme of things. It lies outside our existing concepts and categories. As we have been saying, feeling as we know it in the civilized world is only partial feeling – which seriously misconstrues the true nature of it. Thus, there are a number of civilized misconceptions and misunderstandings about feeling that must be dispelled as well as entirely new conceptions that must be added. 

At the end of this process, we will arrive at a conception of what we will call “true” or “pure” feeling. This is feeling as it is experienced from the causal perspective: stripped of anything else that may typically be associated with it; and yet altogether more than what we now think it is. And while defining true or pure feeling is, to some extent, only an intermediate step towards defining the larger concept of feeling fully, this process will adds its own essential components to our emerging causal perspective. 

Defining Feeling

First and foremost: feeling, as we will be using the word, does not contain what we might call a “mental” or thought component. (This is in keeping with our discussion of the four qualities of OKness. In general, the idea of “non-mental/non-conceptual” arises from the fact that the causal level is “deeper” than, or “prior” to, the mental level.) This means that feeling as we are defining it is also not emotional in nature (even though people often use “emotion” and “feeling” interchangeably) because emotion always contains a mental component. Feeling refers only to raw, unfiltered, unmediated, purely visceral, sensate experience. Put simply, feeling is all about sensation. True sensations can only be known through feeling; and sensations are nothing other than the content of feeling. Whatever we feel, it can only be a sensation. Although we say things like, “I feel angry,” this is only partially accurate. Anger is an emotion, which is a combination of felt sensations and thought. We do not only feel angry; we also think angry. There is no such thing as “purely felt anger” totally devoid of any mental component. In contrast, true feeling is pure sensation with no mental component. Feeling is the aspect of us that registers or experiences sensations – and only sensations. 

Feeling is thus also not sensation filtered (as it usually is) through any interpretive and conditioned mental filter – as in “I feel hot.” “Hot” may seem to be a pure sensation; but as with “angry,” it is actually something that we think as well as feel. Feeling refers only to sensation in its pure, wordless, directly felt, raw form – as a baby would feel it, without knowing that such-and-such sensation was “hot” or “cold,” “hard” or “soft,” “rough” or “smooth,” etcetera. The part of a felt experience that can be labeled and described is not sensation. That part is mental-conceptual. Only the part of an experience that can only be felt is true sensation. For example, if we generate sensations by, say, running our fingertip down the length of our arm, part of that experience cannot be put into words – it can only be felt. The capacity to register just that portion of the experience is what we are defining as true “feeling” (or our “feeling capacity”). The part that can be described in words – “I just ran my finger down my arm and it felt sharp and scratchy” and so on – is not true or pure feeling, but feeling filtered through, or mediated by, conceptual thought. 

Another way we can think of feeling is that, if you had been born just this very moment and had not yet formed a single concept or thought in your mind, then all you would know of yourself would be your pure, visceral, directly felt, unmediated experience – pure sensation with no labels, meanings, or concepts connected to them. This thought experiment gives a fairly clear idea of what we mean by “true” or “pure” feeling.

The mere associating of a word-label with a sensation does not automatically make it mental-conceptual, however. It is only the mediation of purely felt, sensate experience by these mental associations – which are anchored in our word-labels – that makes those experiences mental-conceptual. What we mean by “mediation” is that, to some extent, we start living in the words themselves, psychically extracting ourselves from – and in some cases, blocking – the actual, lived, felt experiences that those words name. In other words, through mental mediation, we can begin to “live in our heads,” disconnected (to any number of degrees) from pure, felt sensation. Naming is a necessary step in this process, but not the critical step. Even after young children begin to give names to things, they continue experiencing full, unmediated feeling for some time. And in the case of very young children, whatever word-labels they use refer directly to their felt, sensate experiences without mediating or diluting them at all. At that early stage, words are hardly more than an indexing system for the child’s pure, sensate experiences. When a very young child says “hot,” s/he is referring solely to hir direct, sensate experience. An abstract, mental concept of “hotness” has not yet begun to substitute to any degree for hir felt, lived experience.

Furthermore, mentally mediated experience is not inherently bad or undesirable. That is, while it always does, by definition, take us out of our purely felt experience at least temporarily, mental mediation does not necessarily block our capacity to feel purely in a permanent, ongoing way. As part of our normal, healthy development, we are supposed to gain the capacity for symbolic, abstract, word-mediated thought. This is a very useful tool for creative problem solving. But we are not meant, in the process of developing this tool, to lose the capacity to experience pure, unmediated sensation. This is not meant to be a trade-off. Neither capacity should diminish the other. We ought to be able to switch back and forth between these two modes, more or less “at will,” as the situation demands. And not only that, but as we said in the previous chapter about spontaneity, so also here: the capacity to feel truly and purely keeps our abstract, word-mediated thinking balanced and sane. Feeling and thinking are meant to work together, not independently – and certainly not in opposition. In other words, it is not that truly feeling people do not also make full use of their mental capacities. Precisely because they retain their full feeling capacity, truly feeling people think exceptionally well. But they do not think in ways that are specifically intended to permanently block feeling. They think in ways that are open to and informed by unadulterated feeling. As we will see, their thinking can then shape their pure feeling in wonderful and very life-enhancing ways.

In fact, being able to integrate the conceptless, purely sensate level of experience in a life-enhancing way with the symbolic, abstract, word-mediated level of experience – that is, the ability to create a meaningful and beautiful conceptual framework (which we will later refer to as a cultural “Way”) that includes them both – is the crucial difference between mere regression to an immature, child-like state (what we might currently associate with someone who is “overly feeling”) and becoming a fully mature, fully feeling, fully thinking adult – and society. 

We are thus not setting up some kind of good-bad opposition between the feeling and the mental-conceptual realms of life. We are simply clarifying the distinction between them because the two are often conflated and misconstrued. The main point is that, even as adults with fully developed intellects, we should always retain the ability to feel fully – to be fully informed by the entire range of raw, unmediated sensations. We are never meant to “outgrow” this “childlike” ability. But of course it is possible to use our capacity for mental mediation to psychically extract ourselves from our direct experience and start living more or less permanently in our thoughts. This is what it means to “block” feeling. Under normal, healthy (non-civilized) circumstances, we do not ever choose to do this; but given a reason, we can and will. For reasons we will explore, civilized life provides the only inducement to chronically block feeling and get “stuck in our heads.”

One of the biggest misconceptions about feeling is that extremely demonstrative, emotional people – people who are easily stirred up to intense and dramatic excitement, enthusiasm, jealousy anger, sadness, pride, and so on and who may come from families and cultures that engage in a lot of shouting and fighting and crying and boisterous celebrating – are “more feeling” kinds of people. Such people might themselves agree that they have “lots of feelings” or that they have very “strong” or “intense” feelings. And to some degree, this may be true – especially if compared to more emotionally subdued and non-demonstrative individuals, families, or cultures. But in many cases, what we see in these individuals and cultures is not a high degree of feeling as we are defining it here, but of emotionally charged thinking; and emotionally charged thinking is very different from true feeling. Truly feeling people – people with little-to-no blockage of feeling – are usually somewhere in between the two extremes of “hot” volatility and “cold” rigidity. A full capacity for feeling generally smoothes out and reduces the intensity of emotionally charged thinking – without inducing any loss of vitality or expressivity. It keeps our emotional expressions balanced, appropriate, and proportional to reality – that is, it keeps our expression as “hot” or as “cold” as the situation genuinely calls for; not much more, not much less (while allowing for a normal amount of individual and cultural variation in creative-expressive style or personality). The emotional tone of a fully feeling person is in contrast with the much more wildly exaggerated or inappropriate, inauthentic, or stifled, shut-down quality that goes with loss of OKness and the blockage of feeling. A great deal of emotionality is generated precisely by the blocking of true feeling.

True “feeling” in the causal perspective, then, refers to pure, unmediated, conceptless, directly felt sensation – exactly as it is experienced by all very young children (and animals). Sensation is the sole realm in which true feeling takes place; and true feeling is that which registers only pure sensation.

If once again it is starting to sound like true-pure feeling is complicated of difficult – like some sort of rarefied, advanced, hard-to-attain, or even spiritual or meditative state of being – then once again rest assured that it is not. We are talking about the most basic, natural, innate – we could even call it “animal” – mode of being. It is the minimal requirement for health and sanity, not a “higher” form of it. In a sense, it is the opposite of an advanced or higher state of being. It is the capacity we must have to begin with if we hope to attain higher states of being (or, really, anything else of true value or benefit). Sure, it is difficult for modern, civilized people to stay connected to pure, unmediated feeling for any length of time; but not because there is any inherent difficulty in doing so. This is an artificially created, strictly civilized difficulty.

As part of the innate, primary level of being, our capacity to feel is not like the secondary, gene-mediated aspects of us at the physical, mental, or emotional-social levels of being, all of which are immature at birth and which, in countless ways and for countless reason, can fail to develop fully and properly. Our feeling capacity cannot fail to develop because it does not develop at all. Even when the causally disruptive forces in the civilized world cause us to block our feeling capacity, it remains as FULL ON as it was at birth. Like the sun hidden by clouds, it can seem to diminish; but really, it is only the degree to which we are informed by it that ever actually diminishes.

This takes care of the basic question, “What do we mean by “feeling?” As it turns out, however (and here is the little “trick” we mentioned before) feeling truly or purely – registering raw, unmediated, non-conceptual sensation – is exactly the same thing as feeling fully – feeling the entire range of sensations without blocking any portion of it. That is, whenever we feel in a non-mentally mediated way, we also automatically allow ourselves to be fully impacted by the entire range of sensation. But before we can go ahead and focus more specifically on the “fully” part of feeling, we still need to explain a few more things about true-pure feeling and how it differs from the current, civilized understanding of feeling. But at least for now we can plant the seed of the idea that the “true-pure” and “full” aspects of feeling are actually one and the same. To reinforce this, we will, from this point forward, use the terms interchangeably – unless we want to particularly emphasize one or the other aspect of feeling.

The Civilized Definition of Feeling

What we have said so far ought to be the end of the “defining feeling” discussion. And if it were, it would certainly make things easy. Our way of defining feeling probably does not sound particularly radical, new, or hard to accept even to readers who have perhaps never seen a need to separate out feeling from thinking and emoting in quite this way. So, even if this way of describing feelings is somewhat different from the reader’s, it is probably more or less acceptable in the sense that a reader might say something like, “OK – if that’s how you want to define ‘feeling’ – as a capacity to register pure, unmediated sensate experience – that’s fine by me. It may not be exactly how I think of it, but it doesn’t contradict my experience in any big way.” Defining “feeling” as the part of us that experiences only raw sensation probably seems reasonable enough to most.

Where things do become new – and quite strange – from a civilized point of view is when we set discussion aside and actually go ahead and enter into the experience of feeling pure sensations without the mediation of analytical-interpretive thinking. Because, as it turns out, the prevailing materialistic-mechanistic-scientific view of the world that has been bestowed upon us by modern civilization is not upheld by the actual experience of true feeling as we have just defined it. “New” phenomena – new to us in the civilized world, at least – that are of a completely different order of reality than what we would expect to arise (or that we would even believe possible) reveal themselves when we, as adults, return to the pure feeling that we abandoned in our childhoods. 

When we actually go ahead and enter into the unmediated, non-conceptual realm of purely sensate experience, “sensation” – and indeed the whole world itself – turns out not to be what we have been told it “ought” to be. According to the scientific-civilized view, unless we are suffering nervous system damage or are having an out-and-out psychotic hallucination, whatever we subjectively feel “in here” should, logically speaking, correspond in a fairly strict way to the so-called “objective world out there” (which includes our physical bodies), and should merely give us sensate and sensory information about that “objective world.” But as it turns out, true feeling does more than that. Somehow, it actually enters into and changes the very nature of what is supposedly “objectively out there” to be felt. Or, put the other way around: Our current way of not feeling fully – of mentally mediating our experiences in a way that extracts us and holds us back from purely sensate experience – gives the so-called “world out there” a falsely “independent and objective reality.” In other words, the type of “objectivity” we now conceive of – the very cornerstone of our entire scientific-technological worldview – is actually an aberrant by-product of the blockage of feeling.

Of course, this makes absolutely no sense in our current way of thinking. In the dominant, civilized, materialistic-mechanistic-scientific view of things, “the world” always remains “the world.” Period. It has a definite form, which has nothing to do with how purely we enter into our sensate experience or how much of the total range of sensate experience we may be blocking inside ourselves. In the standard, civilized view, there is no way for such subjective factors (how truly/fully we feel) to directly affect or change the external world. How truly or fully we feel may change our experience or perception of the world; but the world remains exactly what it is. 

In the scientific view, all objects and phenomena in the world, including sensations, are strictly physical-energetic in nature; and we have a very clearly-defined idea (maybe not anything most of us could express very precisely in words, but that has nonetheless been impressed upon us in countless ways – verbal and non-verbal – while growing up in this society) of what “physical-energetic” means. Essentially, it means, “composed of tiny, lifeless particles of matter.” We consider these particles to be the building blocks of the entire known – and knowable – universe. (Actually, much of physics has moved on from a strictly particle-based, determinate view of reality to a field-based, indeterminate, “quantum” view; but even among physicists, this has only been an intellectual shift, not a truly experiential shift, because it has not entered into anyone’s – including physicists’ – day-to-day, moment-to-moment feelings and perceptions. In Part 2, however, we will see that our fully feeling aboriginal hunter-gatherer kin naturally perceive and live in indeterminate quantum reality – which is simply “normal reality” to them.) 

Thus, according to our current science-based view of things, we live in a physical-energetic universe composed entirely of dead stuff and we ourselves are physical-energetic beings made up of this dead stuff. Logically then, our subjective feeling capacity itself must be made up of this same dead, physical-energetic stuff. What else could it be made of? And what else could our subjective feeling capacity register other than physical-energetic sensations made up of this exact same stuff? In this view, then, feeling is: physical-energetic stuff interacting with physical-energetic stuff producing a (subjective) experience of physical-energetic stuff. To our civilized minds, this is all quite simple, logical, scientific, and obvious – even though we cannot explain the subjective-feeling part of it. 

The fact that we, who are made of dead stuff, are subjectively aware of our sensations is seen by scientists as an as-yet unexplained, but purely secondary, “epi-phenomenon” (whatever that means) of this dead stuff. In other words, scientists claim that when dead particles find themselves arranged in just the right way, for reasons we do not yet understand (but will eventually figure out), those dead particles somehow spring to life – and then become aware of just how dead they – and all other things – are! But most importantly for our discussion, scientists tell us that purely subjective feeling is irrelevant to the “objective” and “true” nature of things because there is no mechanism by which subjective factors could interact with or alter objective reality (even though again, they obviously do because we can all move our bodies whenever a subjectively experienced impulse to do so arises). So while it might be a very nice thing that we are here to feel and cognize the world, as far as science is concerned, the world continues on exactly as it always has, regardless of whether or not anyone is around to experience it. “The world” is totally independent of us in that sense. Subjectivity is interesting but unrelated to how the world works and why it is “the way it is.”

This civilized-scientific view seems so logical and obvious to most of us that we do not bother to test it out and see for ourselves what would actually happen if we allowed ourselves to dive back, like young children, into true, direct, non-conceptual feeling. We assume we already know what would happen because our usual, day-to-day experience of partial feeling, heavily mediated and blocked by thought, always seems to confirm our civilized logic and assumptions. All day long, what we assume to be our strictly physical-energetic feeling mechanism seems to only ever register strictly physical-energetic sensations generated by strictly physical-energetic phenomena. In our less-than-fully-feeling condition, this is the only type of experience that we can register as “real.” Why, then, would we ever suspect that, if we were to take the time to feel purely, we would experience anything else? Our day-to-day experience gives us no reason to conduct such an experiment in pure feeling – and so we never do. We all already “know” that feeling can only ever register the independently existing universe of physical-energetic stuff. Case closed. 

Another way of saying all this is that, as a result of our blind acceptance of the materialistic-mechanistic, less-than-fully-feeling view of reality, we now think of our feeling capacity as being very much like some sort of scientific measuring device – or perhaps like a video game. We view our senses, nervous system, and brain – which we take to be our “feeling apparatus” – as a kind of machine for detecting and registering physical-energetic data “out there” in the “objective world” and translating it into a 3D, surround-sound, virtual reality display somewhere “inside our heads” (as we imagine it). Whenever some physical-energetic thing impinges on our “feeling apparatus,” we register it, and that is what we believe “feeling” is. We may register these sensations with greater or lesser sensitivity and precision; and other parts of our brain may misinterpret what we feel or be fooled by various “illusions”; but regardless of its accuracy, we do indeed think of our feeling capacity as a physical-energetic mechanism for creating physical-energetic representations of the “objective” physical-energetic world “out there” (or “in here” when we happen to be registering sensations inside our bodies – although we also see our bodies as part of the “objective world”) – much the same way a thermometer or light meter or pressure meter would do so. If it is hot outside, we expect our “feeling apparatus” to register the sensations of that heat (and we expect other people to register more or less the same thing). If we have eaten to fullness, we expect to feel the sensations corresponding to that “objective” physical-energetic condition as well. If people are being either friendly or mean to us, we expect to feel the appropriate evolutionarily selected emotion-generated sensations that correspond to this treatment. This is the sense in which we believe that our feeling capacity does nothing more than register and reflect objective physical-energetic realities. 

An important correlate of this civilized version of things is that we view our feeling capacity as “passive” and “neutral.” That is, as simply registering whatever is there, whatever acts upon it, without in any way interacting with it, changing it, or adding anything of its own. In this sense, it is like a mirror: it merely reflects whatever object passes in front of it. It does not act upon the objects it reflects. The distortions in perception that we do recognize as sometimes occurring – again, either due to the imperfect design of our senses or because of mental biases or influences – do not fundamentally change the civilized view that feeling is an entirely passive and neutral mechanism. Even a distorting mirror simply sits there reflecting – even if imperfectly – whatever is put in front of it in a totally passive way. That is, a distorting mirror does not reach out, interact with, act upon, change, or add to whatever is put in front of it. The reflection of the object might be distorted, but the object itself remains totally unchanged. Similarly, we believe that feeling never does anything other than passively reflect what is “out there” or “in here” in the “objective universe,” whether with greater or lesser accuracy.

We can sum up the salient aspects of the civilized view of feeling as follows: our feeling capacity – which is commensurate with our physical-energetic nervous system, brain, and sense organs – is nothing but a neutral-passive, more-or-less accurate, physical-energetic mechanism for registering physical-energetic sensations generated by, or in response to, the physical-energetic world, which always remains unaffected by our registering of it. 

Now, to some extent, our “feeling apparatus” does undeniably work as described above. But this description fails to capture what is by far the most significant aspect of our true-pure feeling capacity. The thing is, when our feeling capacity gets pared down and hemmed in by a worldview that defines it in such narrow terms (in our discussion of worldviews in Part 2 we will see how this paring down occurs) – that is, when our thinking blocks our feeling and so we do not bother to try feeling truly and fully because our worldview gives us no reason to try such a thing – then this limited version of feeling is indeed what feeling seems to be. So long as we do not feel truly-fully, this narrow definition of feeling – and the world – seems totally normal, logical, and consistent with our day-to-day experience.

New Worlds – Feeling Beyond Science 

From the modern point of view, everything we have just said is so obvious it hardly needs pointing out. Again, what else could our feeling capacity be?

As it turns out, it is much, much more – a whole world more. 

The simple – but surprising – experiential fact is that by entering into pure feeling (which is really just normal feeling, free of any excessive or unnatural mediation, obstruction, hindrance, or imposition), our seemingly self-evident, rational, and inviolable sense of a purely “objective world out there” separate from our perception of it dissolves and our entire experience of self-and-world is transformed in ways that are inconceivable so long as we continue to feel in only a heavily mentally mediated way. Let us express this a few different ways so that it can really sink in:

First off, it is not that, if we allow ourselves to feel purely, the “objective world” suddenly lurches and morphs and swallows us up in a solipsistic rainbow-swirl of psychedelic hallucination; or that we become forever lost in some private, amorphous, indefinite, “quantum potentiality.” When we return to feeling fully, things remain much as they were, in the sense that we can continue to carry on our practical, day-to-day life functions. “The world” does, after all, have a fairly stable, dependable, “given nature” – just as we all do. But in true feeling, we experience that the “given nature” of the world includes us and our quality of feeling – and always has. Thus, while the given nature of the world remains much what it always was (which is not to deny that perfectly valid experiences that we in modern civilization would consider to be “strange” or even “crazy” – some of which we will describe in Part 2 – can and do arise when we feel fully), we no longer delude ourselves that this given nature is a clearly defined and purely “objective” one. What changes, then, is mainly our experiential sense that we participate in and interact with a world of infinite potentiality at a fundamental, ontological level. There is still a “world,” but not one that is in any way entirely “out there,” independent of our perception of and participation in it. We begin to grasp that our quality of feeling enters into, is part of, and evokes different facets of, a truly unlimited cosmos; that self-and-world emerge and unfold as a single, endlessly creative unit. The world is then like a bottomless treasure chest in which an infinitude of different experiences are tucked away. But they are “hidden,” not by the “objective” structure of things – like objects hidden behind walls or other coverings – but by our quality of openness to feeling, by our ability to interact with and respond to what is “there.” Different degrees and modes of feeling and perception evoke truly different worlds and realities, all of which are equally “real.”

If we set aside our mental assumption that we are physical-energetic beings who will only ever register physical-energetic data with our physical-energetic feelings; if instead we allow ourselves to just feel – with true, non-mental openness and receptivity – then something else altogether arises in our experience – something that cannot be explained by physical-energetic laws and processes as we now understand them. These are experiences and phenomena that, according to our current scientific viewpoint, cannot exist – especially not as a result of merely feeling. But according to the alternative view being presented here, not only do they exist, they exist only as a result of feeling – feeling truly-fully, that is. In other words, true-full feeling evokes aspects of reality that otherwise do not “objectively” exist. To be clear, it is not merely that pure feeling allows us to notice things that had been there all along but that we had missed (although this can happen as well); it is that our quality of feeling is itself the very thing that brings certain phenomena and aspects of reality into being. Thus feeling, in addition to functioning as the “neutral, passive registering mechanism” we now conceive it to be in the civilized world is also an active, positive, non-mechanistic, creative force.

Not Just Another Feedback Mechanism

As an example of what we mean, let us look at an expression of this form of feeling-based “creativity” that is very closely related to what the scientific view tells us is the “purpose” of subjective, felt experience. As noted before, from the scientific point of view, we are very much like machines or computers in that we have physical hardware (our chemical-molecular body), energy (bio-electricity), and software-programs (thoughts-instincts-drives). Science also recognizes that, unlike a computer or machine, we can directly and consciously feel all of this; that a conscious, subjective feeling capacity interpenetrates the mechanical levels of our being. Without trying to explain how this is possible (because science has no clue how this is possible), scientists do note the undeniable fact that this allows us to self-monitor the functioning of our body-mind mechanism. For this reason, science sees subjectivity as if it were something like the feedback-providing mechanisms (thermostats, oxygen sensors, and so on) built into other mechanisms (heating/cooling systems, car engines, and so on) that tell them to turn on or off or speed up or slow down and so on when they exceed the tolerances (like temperature or oxygen concentration) that these feedback-providing mechanisms are designed to measure. From the scientific point of view, the “purpose” of subjectivity and feeling is to generate and monitor similar kinds of feedback because this gives us “advantages” in the “physical struggle for survival” (which is what “life is about”). According to science, this is why the “epi-phenomenon” of subjectivity “evolved.”

Of course, unlike living beings, machines are not conscious of their feedback loops; which is to say, they do not feel the “data” that they are generating, measuring, and responding to. But as we said, since science cannot locate subjective experience in the physical world, it does not know what to do with this glaring difference between true subjectivity and mere mechanical feedback. Therefore, science simply ignores this difference as unimportant. As far as the scientific point of view is concerned, subjective, felt experience is just a neat trick that evolution stumbled upon (since it could not be designed into us purposefully, the way we design machines) and that happened to turn out to be useful for physical survival. So evolution kept it.

But from the causal perspective, the difference between felt sensation (even if registered only subconsciously) and a truly non-conscious thermostat is all-important. Why all-important? Because when we feel truly-fully – when we are free of mental obstructions to feeling – then we (or what science would call our “body-mind machine”) operate in a completely “new” way that goes beyond simple cause-and-effect feedback loops. More than merely providing feedback about reality that helps promote physical survival, feeling truly-fully itself contributes to and changes reality. That is, pure feeling adds something of its own.

To give just one simple example for starters, pure feeling – beyond the data it supplies and the survival advantages of having that data – adds (or really, is) an overall quality of well-being and optimal functioning (which we have been calling OKness). Feeling less than fully – in an excessively mediated way – on the other hand, while it might still provide more or less the same physical data we can use for physical survival, does not provide this “extra” quality of well-being and optimal functioning that literally “creates” – or constitutes – a different reality. If we do not feel truly, that quality will simply be missing – and we will be in a fundamentally different reality. This applies not just individually, but to civilized life as a whole. The “objective feedback” about “the” world we generate with science is actually only feedback about a world – one that is devoid of OKness – which is a completely different world from one that contains it. The world that we inhabit and study with our scientific methods as civilized people is therefore fundamentally different from the one that fully feeling peoples inhabit.

Pure feeling is thus far more than a mere feedback mechanism. When a feedback mechanism does not work properly, it does not give accurate feedback and/or does not respond properly to it. If the feedback mechanism gets fixed, then it once again gives accurate feedback about the “objective” world and responds accordingly. But in contrast with this, when we go from feeling in a mentally mediated way to feeling truly, it is not that we merely receive and respond to “objective” reality more acurately. We actually generate a fundamentally different reality altogether. To use a mechanical analogy, it would be as if a Mars Lander was having problems reporting back about the rocky terrain on which it had landed; but then, when it got fixed, Mars turned liquid and the Lander turned into a boat.

What science now takes to be a strictly neutral “monitoring” and “responding,” gene-based survival mechanism is also, among other things, a non-mechanical “transforming and optimizing” function. Thus, if, for whatever reason, we are unable to act on our mechanical feedback – for example, if we register that we are cold or hungry, but are unable to do anything about it for the time being – but if we remain fully feeling, then we will optimize what would appear, from a purely mechanical-survival point of view, to be an “objectively” negative, painful, or harmful circumstance. Simply by feeling truly – without doing or changing anything else about our circumstances – we automatically “generate” and maintain a sense of well-being that goes beyond gene-based survival. Science cannot offer any explanation for how this is possible. According to science, our feeling capacity can do nothing other than supply us with the objective information that “I am cold/hungry/in pain/etcetera.” But in fact, our “objective” experience of hunger or cold – or anything else – is automatically transformed – for better or worse – by the quality of our feeling – depending on whether it is full and pure or is blocked and adulterated. Thus, feeling “hunger” or “coldness” fully yields a totally different kind of experience than feeling the same exact “objective data” any degree less than fully; which means that neither “hunger” nor “coldness” – nor anything else we can experience – exist as simple, direct reflections of “objective reality,” separate from our subjective, feeling-based participation in it. Again, science has no explanation for this.

Note that we are not talking here merely about “keeping our spirits up,” “maintaining a positive attitude,” “seeing the best in the situation,” “toughing it out,” “accepting our fate,” or anything else of a strictly mental-emotional nature. We are not simply saying that when we generate positive emotional states internally, we feel better. We all already know that making changes on the physical-mental-emotional levels usually makes us feel better or worse. This is nothing new. This is how the secondary level of things works. These are “objective changes in the world” (changes, in this case, in our physical, mental, and emotional systems). In essence, this is no different from noting that, say, winning the lottery, or eating fatty, sweet foods, or going out for entertainment makes us feel good; or that being pierced by a sharp metal object makes us feel bad. Mental-emotional shifts in attitudinal are essentially no different from these other kinds of mechanical, “objective” changes. They are changes within our reality; they do not open us to new realities. In contrast with such “objective,” mechanical changes, we are talking here about an optimization (or a loss) of well-being that occurs spontaneously and effortlessly at the primary-causal level for no other reason than that we are feeling fully (or less than fully) – which is not any kind of an objectively measurable factor. And we are talking, not merely about making changes in how we experience “the world,” but about generating fundamentally different worlds altogether. (Besides which, the mental-emotional – or even spiritual – capacities we have available to us with which to “change our attitude,” “keep our spirits up,” and everything else listed above – things that really can make us feel better in difficult or painful circumstances – depend on our maintaining our foundation of fully feeling OKness. This is the topic of the following chapter.)

Incidentally, we are not suggesting that, as a result of feeling truly, we will take delight in being hungry or cold. Even in full OKness, we will still experience such situations as physically stressful, painful, and undesirable; and they can still kill us, which is not desirable or pleasant at all. Nonetheless, by feeling truly, we experience them in a totally transformed way that optimizes our sense of well-being – even as we feel hungry or cold. We do not experience them as we do now in “the objective world” we have constructed in our less than purely-fully feeling condition. 

Ultimately, these things have to be experienced to be believed or understood. But the main point to grasp conceptually is that this transformation-optimization occurs strictly as a result of feeling truly and not because of any mechanical, “objective” change. Mechanical changes can occur as a result of pure feeling as well, but they are secondary. 

The Personal-Relational World

Adding its own unique quality of well-being to our experiences – even painful ones – is only one way that feeling fully literally evokes a new world, rather than merely registering it “as it really is.” The active and creative reaching out and transforming of reality that occurs when we enter into unmediated sensation goes well beyond this first, most basic example. To go further, we will now look at how pure feeling evokes personal-relational reality.

For context, we should start off by mentioning that, in the causal perspective, individual psychological health is always seen in a larger, relational context. The sense of well-being of OKness is the minimal core of individual psychological health; but really, the reason it is a genuine form of “health” at all is that it enables us to evoke and participate in personal-relational reality. To be grounded in personal-relational reality is the full expression of OKness and causal connectedness. Furthermore, as we will discuss in Part 2, it is only here, in the larger world of personal relatedness, that we really begin to see the degree to which pure feeling does not merely reflect, but fundamentally alters, the very nature of reality as we now know it.

If we truly allow ourselves to just feel in a non-conceptual way, without putting any kind of culturally conditioned mental limit or constraint on what feeling is (i.e., “feeling is a strictly physical-energetic phenomena” and so on), then not only does our feeling capacity stop appearing to us merely as a passive, neutral, physical-energetic “registering mechanism ” and instead reveal a profoundly participatory, decidedly positive, and far-more-than-mechanical cosmos; but even more than that, the entire, otherwise seemingly dead, impersonal universe gives way to a sense of self-and-world that is unambiguously living and personal. That is, a now “hidden” quality of reality opens up and we naturally and automatically experience the entire world as innately alive, conscious, interactive, and relational in a truly personal way. In pure feeling, we experience ourselves first and foremost (not incidentally) as persons; we feel that our true and rightful occupation in life is to relate to an ever-wider range of persons; and we find that all aspects of reality can, in their own way, be related to personally. The world simply strikes us this way, rather than in an impersonal way. Personhood no longer appears to us as an “epi-phenomenon” of dead matter, but rather as intrinsically woven into the very fabric of existence – which is how all humans have perceived and related to the world right up until modern times. 

This makes sense, philosophically, based on two premises we have established. The first of these is the premise that our personhood consists, first and foremost, of our feeling capacity – of our non-mechanical subjectivity, of the fact that it “feels like something” to be who we are, of the fact that we are the integrative, interactive, responsive center of all that we feel. The second of these premises is, as we just discussed, that the degree to which we are a person – the degree to which we feel – interacts with and is part of the fundamental nature of reality. If we accept these two premises, then it follows from them that, since personhood plays such a fundamental role in the formation of reality, the nature of reality must be fundamentally personal. Of course, this is ultimately an experiential – not merely philosophical – truth. When we experience how feeling fully allows us to create and enter into different worlds, it becomes self-evident that personhood is at the very heart and core of reality.

Currently, we modern people tell ourselves – and not without a fair amount of condescension and smug self-satisfaction – that people who see the world as alive, interactive, and personal are “superstitious,” “primitive,” and “stuck” in “archaic” forms of consciousness. In other words, we believe they lag behind us in not yet having made the “great leap in consciousness” that we have made – to a sober, mature, realistic, scientific view of a dead, random, chaotic, indifferent, impersonal universe. But the causal perspective, grounded in true-full feeling, offers us the alternative point of view that people always experience and relate to the world in a personal way until they develop obstructions to feeling.

In other words, feeling fully is what allows us to experience…a fully feeling cosmos. And feeling less than fully evokes…a non-feeling universe. This is no surprise. How else could a purely subjective aspect of existence be known – or even brought into existence – other than by its being experienced subjectively? Could it exist or be experienced in any other way – that is, in some way that an objective, scientific approach could reveal? Of course not. An “objective” approach is precisely the approach that could not see or evoke it. There is only one way to know the full dimensions of feeling, and that is by feeling fully. It is self-evident that, to whatever degree we can no longer feel, to that degree we can no longer know what can only be known by feeling fully. If any portion of our feeling capacity is stifled, adulterated, or lopped off, then there is no additional way to know what feeling is or what it reveals when it is left whole and complete – or what is lost when it becomes adulterated and blocked. When we do not feel fully, then the dimensions of reality evoked only by feeling fully simply do not exist. Instead, we experience the reality evoked by not feeling fully – which, by definition, will give greater emphasis – greater reality – to the mechanical side of things. This is how mediated, partial feeling re-casts existence in objective-mechanical terms and makes material-mechanical reality seem to be the “one and only reality” or “reality as it really is.” 

This may be the most important aspect of the causal perspective. If we could once again experience ourselves living in a primarily personal cosmos, as opposed to the primarily mechanical universe we have evoked more recently, just this one simple shift – which requires no more of us than what once came effortlessly and spontaneously to us as children – would do more to resolve our current civilized crises than anything else we could possibly do in a less than fully feeing state. In other words, we do not all have to attain a “higher-purer state of consciousness” in order to “save the world” as so many personal growth and spiritual teachers insist; nor do we have to be inordinately clever and come up with high-tech solutions to our problems. Simply returning to that which is most natural and easy for us – that which we were never meant to lose – offers unimaginably better solutions than anything we could come up with while remaining in the same mechanical mindset that created our crises. But precisely because personal-relational reality is so important, we will explore it in-depth in Part 2. For now, we will maintain our more narrow focus on identifying the main building blocks of the causal level, merely noting that the personal-relational cosmos arises inseparably from feeling truly. 

Actually, now that we have raised the topic, it is worth noting two additional points about personal-relational reality. First, talk of personal-relational reality could quickly give rise to all sorts of far out, extreme notions. Yes, personal-relational reality can be quite “far out,” relative to narrow civilized beliefs; but simply opening to pure feeling does not, in and of itself, suddenly propel us into a reality crawling with all manner of spirits and beings from different dimensions or anything of that nature. While shamanic, spiritual, and religious systems seem to be full of such beings, it is only because of the way pure, sensate experience is mediated in a healthy way by these highly developed cultural belief systems that “non-ordinary persons” can be beneficially evoked in their culturally mediated forms. Thus, a San Bushman always sees Bushman spirit-beings while a Tibetan Lama always sees Tibetan-Buddhist spirit-beings. This begins to suggest how it is that a solid connection to personal-relational reality must be channeled through a specific, mentally mediated cultural Way in order to serve a life-enhancing purpose (and is thus an example of pure feeling and mental mediation working in harmony). It is not recommended that anyone attempt to evoke non-ordinary states, realms, or beings in an imaginative way for egoic reasons or as some sort of game. Unless you really feel that you have the knack and the nerve for such a potentially dangerous, mentally destabilizing undertaking, this is almost certainly something that should only be attempted under the tutelage of someone well-established in a tried and tested cultural Way. Those of us who are highly conditioned by the modern, civilized worldview are almost certain to project false ideas and unresolved negative emotions onto whatever personal-relational reality we may still be able to evoke – and to thereby make a big mess of it. (Just look at what most of the civilized world has done with the concept of “God” as an example.)

Rather than evoking any particular form of personal-relational reality, opening to pure feeling in the way we are discussing here simply makes it clear that subjectivity and personhood is fundamental to the nature of reality; that it has not merely been added to an already existing, “objective reality” as a result of random evolutionary mutations. Regaining this basic, “unformed” and general connection to pure sensation will undoubtedly make various cultures’ specific personal-relational systems or Ways more accessible to us; but it does not constitute such a system or Way in and of itself.

Second, the interactive, personal experience of self-and-world that arises from pure feeling – even when channeled through a cultural Way – does not necessarily constitute the most fully developed and “highest” stages of relatedness. That is, it does not necessarily fulfill our full potential for selfless love, compassion, and willingness to sacrifice for others. But openness to personal-relational reality is the necessary foundation for realizing this potential – and all the stages leading up to it. It is thus a kind of proto-love. Which means that it is not really possible to love at all, even in a “lower,” more egoic sense, so long as we experience ourselves as inhabiting a mechanical, dead world. That is, we cannot truly love ourselves or others in any sense – higher or lower – without access to pure feeling as our indispensable foundation. Another way we can say this is that the earliest form of “proto-love” – the most basic ability to relate personally – is yet another innate quality of the causal level. This follows quite logically from the fact that love is so closely related to those other innate qualities we discussed in the previous chapter: security, belonging, and acceptance. Therefore we must feel truly in order to have even just this basic “seed” of love. Either way, then – higher or lower – true feeling gives rise to (among other things that have no “objective” existence in the mechanical, dead world of partial feeling) genuine, person-to-person, non-objectifying relatedness.

Conclusion of Part A

All of the “objective reality-busting” ideas we have just explored have been discussed extensively in countless other books on quantum-versus-Newtonian physics, shamanism, aboriginal lifeways, and the numerous mystical and spiritual paths of the ancient civilized world (and their various New Age reformulations, mutations, and mutilations). Recently, books and movies like The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know?! have popularized similar ideas. What we are adding here is the understanding that relational, participatory, “quantum” reality – the sense of self-and-world as a positive, living, person-to-person interaction where reality is inseparable from our state of being – is our normal, natural mode of being – the mode we were all born into – and that it is fully available to us simply as a result of feeling fully. As we will see, this uniquely causal perspective on these ancient (and now New Age) ideas takes them out of the realm of mere ideas and “higher ideals” and shows us how it is that they have always been the utterly down-to-earth, normal experiences of our fully feeling ancestors and kin – as they can be for us, too, if we return to our natural, normal, fully feeling condition once again. 

Everything we have said about feeling thus far has been aimed at distinguishing between feeling as we now know it, in its partial and mediated form, and feeling in its purity and fullness. At this point, we are only trying to show that the realities experienced by fully feeling versus less than fully feeling people are truly fundamentally different – and for no other reason than because of this one difference in feeling capacity. We are not yet trying to provide a thorough description of reality as it is experienced by fully feeling people. We will save that for Part 2, where we will examine hunter-gatherer modes of living and being in order to get a much greater sense of just how far perception of, and participation in, personal-relational reality can go. There, we will get a truly astounding glimpse of how pure feeling really is an active, positive force that radically alters reality and our ability to interact with it. But while such things are fascinating – and highly instructive – it is more important for now simply to grasp the fundamental difference between true-full feeling versus adulterated-partial feeling. Only when this difference is clear will we be able to profit from a study of aboriginal peoples’ reality.

Part B - Feeling Fully Compared to Feeling Less Than Fully

Why Feeling Truly = Feeling Fully

While true and full feeling are one and the same thing, in different contexts, it makes sense to emphasize one or the other aspect. In the context of participatory, personal-relational reality, it makes sense to speak mainly in terms of true-pure feeling – the registering of raw sensation; but when it comes to discussing first, how causal connectedness and OKness serve as our foundation, and second, how civilization’s uniquely suffering-inducing states of being are created – and how to heal them – it makes more sense to talk about feeling fully – feeling the entire spectrum of sensation. In this second part of the chapter, we will shift to the second of these two contexts. (We will discuss the first of them – how fully feeling OKness serves as our foundation – in the next chapter.)

But first, let us look a bit more closely at the equivalence between true and full feeling. There is an interesting connection between them. In short, so long as we remain able to access pure feeling, we remain able to access the entire range of feeling as well. Does this then mean that the mediation of sensation always causes us to block portions of the full range of feeling? Not necessarily. Earlier, we said that there are two kinds of mental mediation. First, there is the healthy kind, where we use our fully developed intellectual capacities to give a life-enhancing and aesthetically satisfying shape to our pure, raw experience. This healthy mediating does not block our ability to feel across the entire range of sensation, but rather channels it, allowing us to translate the full spectrum of raw impulse into balanced, workable, practical, meaningful, satisfying, concrete behaviors, expressions, and life patterns. This is the type of mediation that has allowed virtually every pre-modern culture to create its particular Way – its unique, integrated, aesthetic, ritual, philosophical, and “microcosmic” mode of relating to the wider personal-relational macrocosm. By channeling the full span of our feeling-responding capacity through a specific form, or Way, this first type of mediation enhances our ability to connect to others and to the larger cosmos. (Just think of how much we are able to express to a beloved simply by presenting an engagement ring. The ability to channel such a large amount of intention and emotion through one simple act is only possible because of the way our culture has built up a system of meaning related to engagement rings. Similarly, a cultural Way allows us to relate to the wider cosmos through relatively simple but highly culturally charged gestures that correspond to the full range of our felt impulses.) Healthy mediation explains why, as we noted before, San Bushman only ever encounter their particular spirit beings while Tibetan Buddhists only ever encounter their particular spirit beings, and so on with each culture around the world. (The fact that every culture has its own spirit beings/deities/gods and codified ways of relating to them is often taken as “proof” that such beings are not “real.” But this can also be seen as evidence that reality contains infinite potentiality and that our capacity for feeling and our way of mediating feeling plays a significant role in determining the type of reality we evoke.) 

In contrast with this healthy form of mediation is the unhealthy form, which serves no truly life-enhancing purpose and in fact does nothing other than get in between us and our raw, felt experience, shut down our natural inclination and ability to relate, and cause us to “live in our heads.” It is only this type of mental mediation – which we will also refer to as “adulteration” – that blocks our capacity to register and respond to the entire spectrum of sensation.

How does unhealthy mediation of sensation cause us to block specific areas of sensation (whereas the healthy kind does not)? Actually, asking this is a bit like asking why pounding on a wall with a hammer sometimes causes the wall to fall down while other times it helps us to build up a wall. It all depends on our motivation. If we want to tear a wall down, then we will keep pounding on it with our hammer with the force required to make it fall – and that is why it falls down. If, on the other hand, our aim is to build up a wall, we will use our hammer very differently. Similarly, the tool of mediation can be used either to channel the full spectrum of pure feeling into a life-enhancing Way, or it can be used to block areas of feeling. It just depends on what we our aim is. 

The real question then, is, “Why do we want to block certain areas of feeling to begin with? Why do we not simply stick with the healthy, less forceful form of mental mediation and thereby retain our freedom to experience pure sensation across the entire spectrum?” These questions go to the very core of the causal perspective and so we will have to build up more of our overall framework to answer to them adequately. For now, we can simply say that it is extremely painful to be born as a fully feeling infant into a society where people are disconnected from full feeling and therefore frequently relate to us in highly impersonal, mechanical ways. The desire to lessen the pain of being treated impersonally – to defend ourselves from depersonalization, in other words – is one way of describing our motivation for using the tool of mental mediation to block specific areas of feeling. As it turns out, mentally adulterating sensation is our sole means of doing so.

Thus, we come to use mediation, no longer “lightly” as a creative tool for shaping pure sensation, but very forcefully as a shield against sensation, as a defense against the pain of depersonalization, as a mechanism to shut down the personal-relational world as a whole. As young children in civilized society, we really have no other choice. From our fully feeling perspective, feeling fully – living in personal-relational reality – is too painful. But the only other place we can live is in our heads, and adulteration is the only way to get there. This is why we convert the normal mediation of sensation into the abnormal blockage of sensation.

Once this motivation to block specific areas of pain/sensation arises, the rest follows automatically. We simply go ahead and use the tool of mediation to accomplish our aim: we direct our mediating capacity very vigorously at the areas of feeling we most want to block. Thus, as individuals, we do not mediate all sensations uniformly. Each one of us, according to our unique individual histories, has some situations in which we retain much more of our natural ability to “let go” into pure, raw, unmediated experience and others in which we adulterate our experience much more forcefully. The particular pattern by which we do this creates our own, unique “spectrogram” of feeling. That is, across the entire bandwidth of feeling, each one of us has areas where we feel relatively more and relatively less purely. But the specific pattern of blockage is not as important as the fact that we do indeed have areas of intense blockage, wherever they happen to be.

We should emphasize that, when we mediate specifically to block pain, we do so much more forcefully than when we mediate simply as a creative tool; and we must maintain this forceful mediation on a virtually perpetual basis. Defensiveness against sensation is an all-out, never ending proposition (even though we are never fully conscious of doing it). When we feel the need to block the pain of depersonalization, we must stop ourselves from flowing easily and freely, as we normally would, between pure sensation and healthy mediation. Instead, we are blindly driven to cling to a much more highly adulterated experience. From then on, we only allow ourselves to “let go” under a few, highly controlled circumstances (often involving drugs, alcohol, or other addictive substances or behaviors). Making this transition from our natural, flowing mode of being to a much more rigid defensive posture of ongoing (subconscious) mediation requires a tremendous output of energy. In short, we are talking here about a massive, all-encompassing transformation in how we live. (We will go into the details of all this in the discussion of the psychodynamics of causal disruption in Book II.)

We see, then, that it is not that we have any objection to participatory, personal-relational reality itself. Far from it, that is where we feel most at home and where we most want to be. But when we are treated in impersonal-mechanical ways, we are driven to block the pain of this; and the only means at our disposal for doing this is to withdraw from pure and healthily mediated feeling into a harshly adulterated world – a world where the specific feelings that we want to avoid are kept permanently shut down and safely at bay. 

Choosing the degree to which we mentally mediate sensation is thus how we control our feeling capacity – and our entire reality. As we will discuss briefly in this chapter and at great length in Book II, it is here, in our choice of how to engage our capacity for mental mediation, that we can intervene in and heal the injurious psychodynamics of causal disruption – by opening ourselves back up to the full bandwidth of feeling.

This, then, is the connection between pure and full feeling: in a society that treats us in depersonalizing ways, the mental mediating of raw, pure feeling and the blocking of portions of the full range of feeling become one and the same process. So long as we retain access to true feeling, we retain access to the entire range of sensation. But if we ever find it necessary to block any portion of full range of sensation, then we will invariably enter into heavy mental mediation of sensation because that is the only means to do block feeling. We adulterate in order to block. Blocking is the ultimate goal; adulterating is the tool to achieve it. Apart from the defensive drive to block painful areas of feeling, we have absolutely no motivation to engage in unhealthy mediation.

And the upshot of all this? If being fully connected to the causal level is feeling fully and is our sense of OKness, then the defensive adulteration of sensation, which causes us to block portions of feeling, also causes us to lose our sense of OKness. Simply put, adulteration of sensation amounts to loss of OKness (adulteration  blockage  loss of OKness). This is why the specific pattern of blockage of feeling is not as important as the fact that any amount of blockage has occurred; because regardless of where they happen to be, any blockages make the difference between having or not having a sense of OKness. Thus, the upcoming discussion of “full” feeling will primarily be about the loss of OKness and how uniquely negative states of being are created in the wake of this loss.

Unfortunately, the loss of OKness becomes powerfully self-reinforcing. The impersonal, mechanical reality we construct as a result of that loss makes impersonal, mechanical values loom ever larger in our lives; and so we become less and less able to perceive/ function in a personal-relational way, even if we want to. The reason we block feeling in the first place is to avoid the pain of depersonalization at the hands of parents and society. It is a sad fact that our way of dealing with this pain ends up taking us deeper and deeper into impersonal-mechanical reality, making that pain worse and worse (and, as we will see, generating a cascading series of secondary, self-reinforcing effects along the way). Fortunately, we always retain the ability to return to full, pure feeling.

The Dimmer-Switch of Feeling

The equivalence between feeling fully and OKness – for truly, they are two aspects of one and the same state and mode of being – reveals yet another aspect of feeling that remains unknown so long as we remain disconnected from the causal level, yet another aspect of feeling that has escaped the notice of the scientists, academicians, and medical practitioners who study feeling and the psyche only from the cold remove of an imagined objectivity or by entering into it in only a partial and overly mentally mediated way rather than purely and fully. 

What we will be focusing on in this portion of the chapter is that, if feeling fully is equivalent to having our full sense of OKness, then it follows that having any amount less than total OKness must be the result of feeling less than fully. There is no other factor that could cause us to experience a diminished sense of OKness other than feeling less than fully. The direct practical implication of this is that we can regain our full, innate sense of OKness at any time simply by entering back into feeling fully; and in fact, there is no other way to regain it. (The practicalities – and difficulties – of doing this will be discussed in Book II.) 

In this sense, we can think of feeling fully as the “mechanism of non-mechanicalness” – the “how” of all aspects of the causal level, including having a full sense of OKness, functioning optimally, perceiving/participating in the personal-relational cosmos – and still others to be discussed further ahead. We are speaking metaphorically, of course. Feeling is not a mechanism; nor is it something we “do” in the same sense as, say, running, thinking, or emoting. But to the extent that feeling is something we can, in a sense, willfully increase or decrease, we can talk of it as if it were a mechanism. Really, all that we can “do” is choose whether or not to mentally adulterate pure, raw feeling. Thus, we can choose to intervene in the natural flow of things and decrease our level of feeling – or we can simply leave feeling as it is, at its normally full level. For obvious reasons, we cannot choose to increase feeling beyond the maximum with which we are already innately endowed. Keeping this in mind, however, we can, for simplicity’s sake, speak of feeling as something we can “do” or “not do,” “increase” or “decrease.” By desisting from our adulteration of feeling, we are in effect “increasing” our capacity to feel, raising it from its unnaturally diminished level back up to normal. For the remainder of this chapter, then, we will focus primarily on how increasing feeling “gives” us (but really, is) our full sense of OKness, how decreasing feeling causes us to lose it, and the implications of this.

To an extent, it is as if our feeling capacity functioned (to use an extremely mechanical metaphor) as a special kind of dimmer switch. When we leave it at its normal, default setting – turned up all the way – we get full OKness. But as soon as we turn the switch down – as soon as we start obstructing our capacity to feel – we diminish our sense of OKness. We can thus turn down our sense of OKness (something we do not seem to have any direct control over) by constricting our capacity to feel (something we do have control over); and we can return to normally full OKness by releasing our willful constriction of feeling (and thereby “increasing” feeling). This is a direct inverse relationship: constrict feeling more = have less OKness; constrict feeling less = have more OKness. Not feeling full OKness? No problem – simply stop blocking feeling. Of course, it is not as easy to give up the tendency to adulterate/block feeling as it is to turn up a dimmer switch. Giving up our adulteration of feeling requires us to uncover and resolve painful childhood experiences of depersonalization, which is a tricky process. But still, understanding the direct relationship between feeling and OKness orients us in a useful way. If we are suffering from having less than a full sense of OKness, then it is good to at least know where to turn our attention. Feeling is something we can learn to “control” (again, not quite the right word, but it will do for now) – so it is useful to recognize that our all-important sense of OKness is directly tied to it.

The direct equivalence between feeling fully and OKness also tells us that feeling fully (like having our full sense of OKness) must constitute our normal, natural, baseline – our true and proper starting point in life. In other words, being free of all unhealthy, unnatural limitations, blockages, or obstructions to feeling is our true and proper reference point for what is “normally optimal.” This is the condition into which we are born and in which we should normally spend our entire lives. It is not something we should ever need to strive for or “attain.” Again, even though most of us in the civilized world drop below this baseline norm – which misleadingly makes dropping below this norm appear to be the “norm” – it is helpful to know that true normalcy means remaining fully feeling, maintaining the optimal state of functioning that goes with it, and then building on top of it as we grow and develop (and perhaps even using this foundation of naturalness to transcend the natural realm altogether, if we choose that path). The mode of feeling and functioning that is ubiquitous throughout the civilized world is therefore not at all normal, despite its ubiquity. It is abnormal, sub-optimal, and below baseline. And since there are countless ways in which – and degrees to which – we can feel less than fully, there are infinite ways in which we can sink below baseline into literally “negative” dysfunctional states of being. Thus, at birth, we all feel fully and have full OKness. We then either maintain this status – which is normal; or we fall below baseline – which (in the civilized world) is what usually happens and which puts us into abnormal, dysfunctional, pathological territory (to whatever degree).

Putting these two ideas together, we can say that we are all born with the dimmer switch of feeling turned up all the way; and that this constitutes our baseline for normally optimal feeling and functioning – i.e., OKness – throughout life. Turning the dimmer switch down any amount – introducing any amount of obstruction to feeling fully – always put us below the baseline for normally optimal well-being and OKness and into literally “negative” territory.

A New Perspective on Literally “Negative Feelings”…

In relation to the fully feeling state of OKness, all other states of being that fall below this baseline (all states of being that we experience when we are not fully informed by OKness) – even ones we might seem to enjoy – must, in a very literal sense, be “negative” states of being. That is, they are the result of “taking something away” from – or dropping below – the baseline normalcy of total OKness. Once again, having OKness as a reference point for true normalcy is helpful because many negative states feel deceptively pleasant to us, at least initially. They masquerade as genuine sources of positive feeling and lure us in to pursuing them – only to be revealed later as suffering-inducing traps. Generally, these pseudo-positive states turn out to be compensations for our loss of OKness. So, for example, things like aggressively “looking out for #1,” “getting ahead in the world,” and successfully manipulating others or putting on an unnaturally “tough” persona and bullying, dominating, and humiliating others, or even fulfilling obsessive-compulsions (“doing it just so; doing it just the right way”) can make us feel “good” in the short run – safe, secure, “correct,” energized, powerful, and so on; but these artificially induced states of being – false toughness, self-centered aggressiveness and competitiveness, obsessive-compulsiveness – are almost certainly attempted compensations for not having our normal sense of OKness; and engaging in them only ever takes us further from fully feeling OKness. Thus, trying to feel “good” in a false way – a way that is not informed by OKness – ultimately ends up making us feel worse and worse – and induces more and more blockages to feeling; which in turn makes us more and more dependent on compensations; and on and on it goes. But once we learn to accurately assess our level of feeling, we can always trust that, if we are not feeling fully – if we are not readily able to access pure, unmediated sensation and remain in that mode for as long as we please – then whatever state of being we are in, even if it happens to feel pleasant, exciting, or otherwise rewarding for the moment, is not an expression of true OKness and will not help us to maintain (or regain) OKness. Learning to make this sort of determination helps us to get our true bearings, resist the urge to seek false compensations, and refocus our attention much more profitably on returning to feeling fully and genuine OKness. (Incidentally, because it allows us to feel a sense of OKness even in uncomfortable or painful situations, feeling fully gives us a real – natural, balanced, and authentic – kind of “toughness” and assertiveness – far beyond what any compensatory Tough-Guy act or self-serving scheme ever could – a toughness and assertiveness we will use to help others, rather than step on them.)

Viewing literally negative states of being – every state not infused with or informed by full OKness – as representing a diminishment of full feeling is a very new way of looking at these states. True, we already call them “negative,” but only because we do not like them. Normally, we think of each specific negative state as a real thing in its own right – as a “something” that has full and independent (and in that sense, “positive”) existence. In our new, causally informed way of looking at feeling, however, only states of being that we experience in full OKness can be said to have full and independent, positive existence. All other states of being, and their associated ways of feeling, are actually only subtractions from, or diminishments of, OKness, resulting from limiting or blocking our full capacity to feel. As such, they literally are “negative” states. They do not actually add anything of their own. Their seeming “existence” is only a byproduct of the negation or diminishment of that which does truly exist: the truly “positive” states informed by OKness. Literally negative states are what the absence of full feeling feels like. (As we said earlier in the chapter, everything feels like something. Even the various ways of negating feeling have their characteristic feeling states associated with them.)

Truly negative states are like varying degrees of darkness relative to the positive presence of light. Light is a real thing – a “substance” with actual, positive existence. Darkness, on the other hand, is not any sort of existent thing or substance. When we turn off a light, no substance called “darkness” rushes in to fill the room. What we call darkness is simply the absence of light. It is in this sense that darkness is something with purely “negative existence” (even though darkness does still “look like something”). Similarly, only states of being that are informed by OKness truly exist. States of being that are devoid of OKness, even if we think of them as independent, real states in their own right, can actually only be experienced as a negation of, or subtraction from, our baseline of OKness. Again, these states are what we experience in the absence or diminishment of full OKness. They “feel like something” (just as darkness “looks like something”) even thought they are, in fact, not a something.

As in the previous chapter, we need to distinguish here between, on the one hand, those natural physical-mental-emotional sensate states – such as momentary anger, fear, revulsion, jealousy, sadness, and so on – that we tend to call “negative” because they feel bad but that can actually play positive, life-enhancing roles in our lives and that can and do arise even in full OKness (recall the examples of persons either feeling sad at the death of a loved one or scared of elevators while still maintaining a full sense of OKness), and, on the other hand, those truly negative states and feelings that serve no life-enhancing purpose, that are totally disproportionate or even unrelated to actual, present-moment, circumstances, and that arise only because we have been causally disconnected and therefore no longer have our normal foundation for feeling and functioning optimally. We are talking here about pathological states such as chronic, free-floating anxiety; deep-seated, festering dejection, resentment, and bitterness; crippling shame and self-rejection; an insatiable need to control and dominate; compulsions, obsessions, and psychological addictions; ongoing depression; unfocused violent rages; permanent, lurking alienation, disconnection, emptiness, unrealness, shut-downness, not-thereness; and so on. The so-called “negative” emotions we may experience even in the midst of optimal well-being and functioning – those normal, passing emotions we first mentioned, like anger and fear, that arise in response to actual situations – are not truly negative in the sense of only coming into existence as the diminishment of OKness. It is only the latter, sub-optimal, pathological states that are genuinely and literally negative. 

This distinction goes hand-in-hand with the one we made in the previous chapter – the distinction between the optimal functioning characterized by natural, healthy spontaneity, authenticity, presence, balance, appropriateness, trust in life, and so on versus the sub-optimal and/or pathological functioning characterized by unnatural rigidity, fakeness, imbalance, inappropriateness, stuckness, and so on. Here, we are just adding the idea that pathological states are the result of feeling less than fully.

(Note also that normal, healthy living does not consist of passing back and forth between truly positive states informed by OKness and the negative states of less than full feeling. Passing between these two fundamentally different types of states is not in any way like the normal alternation between happiness and sadness, excitement and somberness, and so on that is part of the normal and inevitable – and even desirable – “ups and downs” of a full, rich, well-lived life. Rather, we are saying that a truly normal, healthy, balanced life is lived entirely on the “positive” – the real, existent – side of this distinction; that all of the normal variations, challenges, ups and downs, and “dramas” that make for a colorful and authentic life take place entirely within the realm of fully feeling OKness.) 

…And A New Way of Resolving “Negative Feelings”

Very briefly, we will look at the main implication that this conception of literally negative states – subtractions from our baseline starting point of OKness – has for the healing process. (We will go into this only enough to suggest the bare outlines of a practical healing method based upon these ideas, reserving the in-depth discussion for Book II.) The fully feeling, causal approach to working with and resolving chronic, truly negative states is fundamentally different from what we find in modern, “science-based” psychology, which has no conception of innate OKness, feeling in its fullness, or how they form a baseline of normalcy from which all negative states are a subtraction. 

Picking at random, we will use alienation as an example. True alienation – not just a passing moment of feeling distant or at odds with others due to actual circumstances, but a chronic sense of having no real place in the world and no meaningful connection to others – could never arise in our fully feeling state of OKness, with its absolute, innate sense that “I belong here and always will” and with its inherently participatory, relational, personal perception of self-and-world. It is only in the civilized world, where virtually none of us feels fully, that alienation can and very frequently does arise – to the point of becoming ubiquitous. (Alienation in this sense almost certainly includes such modern “medical” diagnoses as social anxiety, agoraphobia, probably some forms of what we now call autism, and so on.) 

Not knowing that there is a fully feeling baseline below which virtually all of us have dropped, our psychologists often assume that people who report feeling alienated might very well be otherwise perfectly “healthy” and “normal” (by civilized standards) and simply have this one, particular, independently existing, real “condition” imposed upon them – just as a tumor or pathogen might grow in a body that is otherwise presumed to be healthy. In this frame of mind, they might do things like measure their alienated patients’ various psycho-biological markers, like hormones and neurotransmitters, areas of brain activity and neuronal patterns, blood pressure, muscle tone, skin conductivity, facial expressions, thought and speech patterns, behavioral patterns, and so on. This creates a psycho-biological “profile” of alienation – as if that is what alienation is. Of course, all of our negative conditions do have corresponding, characteristic psycho-biological markers; and it can be helpful to familiarize ourselves with them. But without knowing that there is such a thing as feeling fully – and without knowing that this is our true norm – negative states of being like alienation, with their ever-present psycho-biological markers, are given a fully independent existence that they do not actually have. In our less than fully feeling conception of reality, we have no basis for conceptualizing a negative state like alienation as being just that: a literal subtraction from a prior baseline of normalcy and health, a diminishment of what ought to be our full feeling capacity. So instead we see it as an addition, as something imposed upon us. This whole approach and viewpoint is analogous to measuring the levels of darkness of various rooms assuming that we are measuring an actual substance that is “present” to different degrees rather than measuring different degrees of the absence of light. 

Of course, even in the medical approach, we already think of illness (all illness in general) as a “diminishment” of health; but again, we almost always conceive of this diminishment as occurring because of the presence or addition of some illness-producing agent – like a virus or bacteria; of certain symptoms – like having too many or the wrong kinds of brain chemicals, thoughts, emotions, and so on, that must be modified or removed; or of an injury or genetic defect, both of which are also conceived of as “positive presences” in the sense that they, too, are things that can be directly worked with, attacked, repaired, eradicated, and so on. Medical psychology does not think of mental-emotional illness and suffering as a diminishment in the much more literal way we are discussing here – as literally being caused by feeling less than fully. Therefore, given our modern-scientific-mechanical conception of feeling in general, we do indeed conceive of chronic, pathological feeling states as existing in their own right; and so we attempt to resolve them by, in one way or another, attacking and eliminating them – so that we can “stop feeling so much of them.” Thus, with a negative state like alienation, we really do believe we must “get rid of” the “infectious agent” – the undesirable, disease-inducing thing that is present – in order to feel well again. Hence, the main treatments for the various “diseases” of alienation – the various social phobias, anxieties, depressions, and behavioral patterns that go along with it – is either medication or behavioral therapies aimed at overcoming symptoms and changing behaviors, thoughts, and emotions. To put all of this another way, the medical approach asks, “What is causing our alienation?” rather than “What is diminishing our sense of total security and belonging?” The main point, however, is that in this approach, absolutely nothing is done to help the sufferer return to hir normal, natural baseline of full feeling. No such baseline is assumed to exist. The assumption is that psychological suffering is always the result of “feeling too much” of something.

This scientific-medical approach seems logical enough. Negative states/emotions really do feel terrible and cause us to behave in highly dysfunctional and destructive ways; so why should we not want to “get rid of” them or “get them out of our system” so that we can stop feeling them? If drugs or cognitive-behavioral training can accomplish this, why not use them? The reason these mechanical approaches cannot work when we are suffering from literally negative states becomes clear when we understand these states and emotions as “existing” only because we are feeling less than fully. We then see that, by doing anything that causes us to feel less of them – by, in essence, attempting to turn down our feeling capacity even more – we are only perpetuating these negative states by perpetuating – and even exacerbating – the less-than-fully-feeling condition that gave rise to them in the first place. By turning down the volume on our feeling mechanism (whether intentionally or not), we are counter-intuitively turning up the volume of negative, less-than-fully-feeling states of being – the very thing from which we are trying to free ourselves. As we will see, this approach fits into the general civilized pattern that, for virtually all problems, only mechanical, scientific-technological solutions – physical, behavioral, mental, emotional – are ever proposed. Mechanical solutions are fine for mechanical problems. But for problems that are the result of loss of OKness/feeling less than fully, our strictly mechanical orientation – the original cause of these problems – only makes them worse. For these problems, the only solution is to return to full feeling.

The modern medical approach is analogous to imagining scary faces peering out from the shadows in a room where the lights have been dimmed – and then getting so scared that we turn the lights down even lower, hoping to make the scary faces disappear. But since it was the darkness that allowed us to conjure up the scary faces in the first place, we only end up conjuring up more of them in the greater darkness. We would do much better by turning the light up to full brightness. This would not, as we might fear, illuminate the scary faces even more fully – and reveal even more of them. Rather, the positive presence of full, bright light would reveal that there never were any scary faces to begin with.

What we should be attempting to do in response to truly negative states, then, is precisely the opposite of what we most often do now. Instead of trying to clamp down on or get rid of our negative feelings, we should be attempting to slide the “dimmer switch” of feeling all the way back up to its normal setting: “FULL ON.” We should be attempting to move deeper into feeling – fully into feeling – not further away from feeling. With every increase in feeling (or, more accurately, with every decrease in our mentally mediated obstruction of feeling), we will come closer to our normal baseline of OKness where negative states simply cease to exist. This is not magical or wishful thinking. This is exactly analogous to how darkness simply ceases to exist when we turn on a light – and therefore does not need to be “gotten rid of” because darkness is merely the absence of light, not a “thing” that exists and that can be gotten rid of. There is no magic in this. And there is also no need to fight against the darkness of negative feeling in any way. That darkness and pain is created by non-feeling, so we only ever need to focus our attention on turning up the dimmer switch of feeling to the “FULL ON” position and keeping it there. That will automatically resolve all genuine negativity without any struggle or fight. 

We can never do anything with darkness. We cannot directly make it go or stay, increase or decrease. We cannot “work with it” at all because it is not there to be worked with. This is why truly negative states are not like any kind of injury, infection, tumor, or defect in the medical sense. We can only ever work with what is actually there – with light. And while turning that light – the light of feeling – all the way to “FULL ON” may not be as easy as it sounds, it is still, in essence, all that is required to return us to our baseline of OKness. Again, this is not magic. Nor is there is any magic (or logic, for that matter) that the medical world can conjure up to bypass the need to return to full feeling.

Feeling more – feeling fully – as a way to resolve painful, negative states of being is counter-intuitive from the point of view of modern, civilized, “scientific” psychology. Many people who suffer from a variety of chronic, pathological states and feelings believe that, “I already feel too much! My problem is that I am always feeling. I’m overwhelmed with feeling! I’m going crazy with so much feeling!” The idea of feeling even more – never mind feeling fully – would therefore seem ludicrous. How could this do anything but promise even more suffering? But as the causal perspective on feeling shows us, while this is an understandable fear, it is deeply mistaken. Being overwhelmed by negative states is always the result of feeling less than fully – never of feeling “too much.” The negative states that we want to feel less of are the “feelings” of not feeling fully. The less we feel, the more of these “non-feelings” we feel, and so the worse we feel; but the more we feel, the more these non-feelings dissipate, and the better we feel. (This is not unlike how we tend to think that “too much spontaneity” causes problems in our lives when, really, our worst problems are due to the fact that we are almost never fully spontaneous. The principle is the same: the more informed by and connected to the causal level we are, the better we feel and function. Full causal connectedness includes both full feeling and full spontaneity. There is no such thing as “too much” of either one – just as there is no such thing as “too much health.” We are either fully healthy – or less than fully healthy; and we are either fully feeling – or less than fully feeling.)

The pain of literally negative states is therefore never the pain of “too much feeling” but just the opposite: the pain of feeling less than fully; the pain of adulterated, constricted, blocked feeling. Again, as we said at the beginning of the chapter, everything “feels like something.” Even blocking feeling feels like something; and as it turns out, it is the worst feeling of all. It is understandable, then, that we believe that this is a pain of “feeling too much” and that we want to clamp down on our feelings even more in order to protect ourselves from it. But that is exactly the opposite of what works.

In contrast with established civilized ways of thinking, then – that even our most chronic and suffering-inducing “bad feelings” are as equally real as our “good feelings”; and that trying to “get rid of” our bad feelings as much as possible and feel them as little as possible is the only approach that makes sense – the causal perspective is that it is necessary to recognize the distinction between “full feeling” and “less than full feeling”; and that, in all cases, regardless of what we are experiencing, increasing our feeling capacity all the way back to FULL is what gives us the primary (if not also the secondary) well-being we normally hope to attain by having only “good feelings” and avoiding all “bad feelings.” In short, the idea is: “stop blocking feeling” or “return feeling to FULL” rather than merely the usual “increase good feeling and decrease bad feeling.”

The Mistake of Primal or “Deep Feeling” Therapies

Even most so-called “deep feeling” or “primal” psychotherapies fail to grasp the concept of full feeling, and therefore of literally negative feeling states. They, too, fall into the trap of ascribing real, independent existence to negative states. On the surface, their approach of, “Let’s get down in there and really feel that alienation (or other negative states)” sounds very similar to the causal approach of feeling fully. But there is one crucial problem: it is impossible to “fully feel” a negative state created by non-feeling. If negative states are what the absence of full feeling feels like, then we cannot fully feel these states because the moment we attempt to direct our full feeling capacity towards them, they evaporate – just as darkness disappears when we try to shine a light on it (like if we mistakenly hope to “get a better look at it”). It is no more possible to feel non-feeling than to illuminate darkness. Going back to our analogy just above, this would be like trying to aim a particularly bright light directly on those scary faces we imagined seeing in the darkness in a noble-sounding attempt to “get a really good look at them and finally confront our deepest fears once and for all.” This might sound like a good plan; but again, it is impossible to implement. Non-feelings cannot be “illuminated” by feeling.

If we were to go to a so-called “deep feeling” therapist complaining of a chronic sense of alienation, the scenario would have to play out in some version of this farce:

The therapist says, “I want you to go deep inside and feel the alienation fully. Don’t try to change it or do anything about it. Just let yourself feel it as it is. Make friends with it. Embrace it fully. Sit with it and be with it without pushing it away. Accept it totally.”

“Alright,” we say, focusing on the pure sensations associated with our feelings of alienation. “Here I go. Oops, it’s gone. What happened?”

“You must have lost your focus. Try again,” we are instructed.

“Okay. But it really is gone now, so what do I do?”

“Well, if it’s gone, then you have to put yourself back into the feeling of being alienated. Imagine yourself doing the things or being treated in the ways that make you feel alienated.”

“Sure – no problem. I’m an expert at generating those kinds of thoughts. Alright,” we say, dialing our feeling capacity back down and re-entering our habitual, emotionally charged thought-patterns, “I got it again – the feeling of alienation is back.”

“Good. Now focus on what that feels like in your body. Really let yourself feel it 100%.”

“You bet. Oops, it’s gone again.”

The fact is, we can only “feel a sense of alienation” when we are not feeling fully, when we are, instead, mainly thinking – mentally reliving and playing out emotionally charged scenarios, thoughts, and dialogs that block our full feeling capacity in just the way that generates what we then call a “feeling of alienation.” But of course, this is not a true feeling; it is a non-feeling – a particular version of literally negative feeling. This is why, if we ever attempt to feel it fully, it disappears; and the only way to get it back is to stop feeling fully and return to the kind of thinking (mental mediation) that shuts our feeling capacity down in that particular way. In other words, if we “succeed” at doing what our therapist is asking – “feeling our alienation” – then this means we are not truly feeling at all, but only perpetuating the kind of thinking that sustains our non-feeling. Remaining in this emotionally charged thinking is the only way to keep the primal therapy game going. Plunging deeply into these emotionally charged thoughts can be helpful if we are out of touch with our actual emotions. But this does not heal us.

So then, what do we feel when we attempt to feel fully – especially if we do so at a moment when we happen to be in a negative state? Oddly, since negative states are nothing but diminishments of OKness, they are, in a sense, “constructed out of OKness.” That is to say, since truly negative states are not constructed out of their own, independently existing substance, then that which does exist when we feel fully – OKness itself – must be the “substance” that negative states are actually “made out of.” So when we turn our full feeling capacity to those negative states, they can only reveal themselves as, and can only resolve themselves back into…OKness. This is quite surprising – if not unbelievable. It certainly needs to be experienced in order to be truly grasped. But it is actually quite simple. Whenever we feel fully – even if we are initially aiming to feel an area of non-feeling – we can only end up experiencing OKness because feeling fully is OKness. This is similar to how, no matter what patch of darkness we shine a light into, we only ever end up seeing an area informed by lightness – never darkness.

(As it turns out, entering into and then resting in full feeling is also what allows our organism to digest and resolve the unprocessed, causally disruptive childhood experiences – those painful experiences of depersonalization – that caused us to generate the defensive, emotionally charged thoughts that now block our full feeling capacity and thus give rise to non-feelings like alienation. Therefore, even though we cannot “feel our alienation” when we feel fully, we nonetheless resolve the underlying cause of our sense of alienation. The problem is that, precisely because we do not understand how full feeling works, we do not trust that this is happening. And in our distrust, we want an impossible kind of certainty: we want to know precisely what area of negativity we are resolving when we are resolving it. That is, if we know that we suffer from a sense of alienation, we want to know that that is what we are resolving whenever we do our “feeling therapy.” We want to be certain that we are getting rid of our alienation – and so, instead of letting ourselves simply enter fully into feeling and allowing our undigested experiences to be digested in their own way, we attempt to mentally hang on to and “feel” our alienation so we can be “sure” that we really are “healing” it. But this mental interference only blocks us from feeling fully and genuinely resolving our alienation – or any of our other non-feelings. Thus, attempting to “fully feel” a non-feeling only ends up perpetuating it indefinitely. Like Orpheus unable to resist looking back to make sure Eurydice is following him out of Hades, we lose the thing we most want in our attempt to insure we are getting it. The fact is, while we can choose to feel fully, we cannot choose what, specifically, will be digested and healed when we feel fully. That part is beyond our control. The only part we can control is how fully we feel. Still, every time we feel fully, some part of our old, undigested material does, without doubt, get digested and resolved; only we will not know specifically which part. Only later, when we find ourselves acting or feeling differently than how we have habitually acted or felt in the past will we realize, “Oh, I guess that must be what got resolved during my healing sessions. What a nice surprise!” Another way to say this is that non-feelings are the non-digestion of what otherwise would have been normally digested feelings; and as soon as we start feeling fully again, our backlog of undigested feelings starts to get digested and released from our system – but not in any order we can control. All of this gives some inkling of the thorny issues we will tangle with in Book II.) 

The Mistake of Spiritual and Personal Growth Approaches

Civilized life can be understood as the attempt to stand outside of our fully felt, fully sensate experience with the misguided hope of gaining some safety or protection from the hurts and insults of…civilized life. Those “hurts and insults” being precisely the depersonalization inflicted by other people standing outside of their fully felt sensate experience seeking protection from the depersonalization inflicted on them by others doing the exact same thing. Depersonalization is thus a pain that re-circulates (and escalates) endlessly down the ages because no one knows how to digest it. Apart from direct mental mediation of raw sensation, we further reinforce this defensive non-feeling through many other means. We have already mentioned medical-technological means, psychotherapies, compensations, and drugs, alcohol, and other addictions. Perhaps more surprisingly, we even interpret spiritual and personal growth concepts and philosophies – about being less “identified” with, less “attached” to, and less “selfishly” or “immaturely” focused on our personal desires – in ways that further disconnect us from feeling (with the side-benefit of looking holier-than-thou in the process) – as if we will not feel as hurt or let down when things do not go the way we want if we restrain and shut down our full feeling capacity. But this “spiritualized defense” is also based on the non-recognition of full feeling. It is precisely our ability to be totally, un-self-consciously immersed in our unmediated, felt experience that is our true safety and freedom in life. Pseudo-spiritual attempts at being “above it all” – by blocking true feeling – only increase our suffering and add to our sense of depersonalization. (We will not even bother addressing those “personal growth” approaches aimed at going after everything we desire. The compensatory nature of these approaches ought to be obvious enough by now.)

In childhood, our healthy immersion in feeling means knowing that we can uninhibitedly run to mommy and hug her or cry if something makes us feel badly. This freedom does not come from distancing ourselves from what we want, but from wanting uninhibitedly – and from being just as uninhibited in our disappointed when things do not go as we like. The civilized fear is that we will be running crying to mommy or feeling disappointed and “acting out” for our whole lives if we remain fully feeling. But feeling fully (as we will see in the next chapter) is what allows us to develop ever more mature and effective forms of action and expression throughout the course of life and to recover faster from life’s inevitable upsets, hurts, and disappointments (the real ones – not the ones created by disconnection from feeling). It is people who artificially attempt to be “mature” and “invulnerable” by shutting off their true feelings who end up perpetually immature, excessively vulnerable, and over-reactive. But this is precisely how we (or at least many of us) are trained to be as “civilized” people. This is what inclines us to interpret spiritual teachings in feeling-blocking terms.

Feeling fully does not mean letting our emotions “run rampant” or “going wild” in some negative, harmful, destructive sense, as the civilized mind tends to imagine – for exactly the same reason it imagines total spontaneity to be dangerous. As we said in relation to spontaneity, truly full feeling – feeling that has been freed up from all blockages – provides for its own natural, healthy, balanced, harmonious channeling. It naturally limits excessive, unbalanced self-centeredness because it keeps us connected to the full spectrum of feelings and impulses – not just a narrowly egoic bandwidth. In this sense, full feeling is truly “disciplined,” but from within – not by the imposition of external rules. (The only rules that serve a useful purpose are those that emerge in exactly this same manner, naturally and spontaneously, through the healthy mediation of full feeling, as part of a cultural Way.) Full, spontaneous feeling is the basis of all true discipline, which is shown perhaps most clearly in how it builds the prefrontal cortex, which give us our “executive function” (which will be discussed in the next chapter).

Yes, it can be painful when we do not get what we want; but this pain is very small compared to the chronic suffering of blocking full feeling. And our full, uninhibited responses to painful situations are fully part (along with all other fully felt, uninhibited responses – whatever they may happen to be at our stage of growth) of the healthy foundation that allows us to remain connected to full feeling – and thereby maintain our optimal sense of well-being in all circumstances (even if we are angry, sad, or scared, and so on). In contrast, when we psychically distance and disconnect ourselves from our felt experience, thinking that we are “protecting” ourselves from pain thereby, we lose that foundation of our easy connection to OKness. This is what causes us to feel unduly threatened, exposed, and vulnerable to life in the truly negative sense. This is what leads us to look for all forms of false compensation, from addictions to false forms of spiritual “transcendence.” Properly understood, spirituality is the continuation of our feeling-guided development, only at a higher level. Building on the foundation of naturally full feeling, it takes us beyond the natural realm.

This brief discussion of the causal approach to working with negative states gives some sense of the practical implications this approach has for the healing process. Mainly, it shows us that healing the most chronically painful, negative feeling states – which we can group together under the name “causal disruption” – can only be accomplished by learning to feel fully as we have described it here. It also begins to give some insight into why existing medical, psychotherapeutic, and spiritual approaches very often give only limited, superficial, or even negative results. And finally, it gives us some further hints about how radically different our view of ourselves and the world might become as a result of adding the causal level back into our overall picture of things. Current approaches treat all negative states as “real” and therefore (if they do not simply ignore feeling altogether) attempt either to stop us from feeling fully or, just as harmfully, to focus on negative states. Neither approach works because neither one recognizes nor attempts to return us to our baseline of fully feeling OKness – and so both approaches end up perpetuating our most painful states of being.

The “Complete Protein” of Full Feeling

It is important to understand the absolute difference between literally negative states of being and our baseline of normal, fully feeling OKness. Even what we might consider to be the very “best” states of being in our less than fully feeling condition – states where we feel “good/right,” “up,” “in control,” powerful, invulnerable, and so on – are fundamentally different from, and pale in comparison to, the OKness of full feeling. Only true OKness gives us everything essential to feeling and functioning optimally. There are critically important ways in which, when we are less than fully feeling, we become fundamentally different people inhabiting fundamentally different worlds.

There are no degrees of feeling (or doing anything else) fully – just as there are no degrees of OKness (even though, for simplicity’s sake, we have been talking about it as if there were). By definition, there is only ever one degree of “fully.” It is all-or-nothing. If we feel less than fully, then it is not that we have a lesser degree of OKness; it is that we do not have true OKness at all. True OKness is something that arises only when our feeling capacity is as naturally and normally open and free as at birth, when we have no blockages whatsoever to feeling and to being informed by the entire range of sensations. If any blockage to feeling arises (no matter how small), the psychodynamics required to create and maintain that blockage (which we will be discussing in depth in Book II) preclude us from experiencing true OKness. As we alluded to earlier in this chapter, there is no way to block feeling to any degree without a massive, full-time change in our overall psychological functioning, and without a consequent loss of true OKness. 

In this sense, the “dimmer switch” analogy we used earlier gives a false impression. We can better understand the all-or-nothing nature of full feeling though the following nutritional analogy: When we say that only feeling fully gives rise to OKness, the word “fully” in this case is much like the word “complete” in the expression, “complete protein.” A complete protein is one that contains adequate amounts of all nine essential amino acids – the amino acids that we must consume through our diet because we cannot synthesize them within our own bodies, as we can the non-essential amino acids. If an adequate amount of even just one of these nutrients is missing in our diet, then, while we still have proteins, we do not have complete protein; and it does not matter how much of the other eight we have; without that one missing element, our bodies will not be able to build the structures that we need to live – and eventually we will lose normal functionality, get sick, and/or die. When we have all nine essential amino acids, however, we have something fundamentally different from what we have with any combination of less than all nine – something that makes the difference between normal good health and enfeebled sickness, between life and death. Note that there is nothing unusual or “idealistic” about getting all nine amino acids. Our ancestors obviously managed to do it on a fairly regular basis for millions of years or else we would not be here now. Most normal diets contain all nine. Absolute as the difference is between complete and incomplete proteins, it is perfectly normal to have a diet that contains complete protein. Diets that consistently do not include all essential amino acids are the aberrant exception. Having complete protein is therefore “normally optimal” (i.e. not “ideally optimal”). 

Note also that, while there is only one degree of “complete” protein, there are many degrees of less-than-complete protein – and therefore a variety of “negative” states of malnutrition. Adding extra protein to a complete protein does not make it “more complete” than it already is. A person getting large amounts of all the essential amino acids will not necessarily be any healthier than someone getting just the right amount. And while a person who is getting plenty of good quality food but who is consistently deficient in one or a few amino acids will remain relatively healthy far longer than a person on an extremely deficient starvation diet – s/he is still missing out entirely on the benefits of complete protein. Thus, there is only one degree of complete protein, even though we can also talk about many shades of malnutrition.

Two more points will round out this analogy: First, having had a regular diet of complete protein early in life, and having developed more or less properly as a result, confers many benefits that will get us through lean periods of less than complete protein later in life; but eventually, over a long enough period of time, a lack of complete protein will take its toll on even the healthiest among us. And second, having complete protein does not prevent all injury, sickness, or death. Complete protein is a necessary precondition for good health, but not a guarantee of it. Still, there is a vast and fundamental difference between a person with chronic ailments due to incomplete protein and a normally healthy person with complete protein who occasionally suffers from any number of the many ailments or accidents that are inescapably part of normal human existence.

Similarly, with full feeling, we have a state of being – OKness – that is totally different from the states of being that go with any degree of blocked, partial feeling. Feeling fully is thus the psychological equivalent of consuming complete protein and OKness is the state of normal, overall well-being and health that results. It is not an ideal state of being – no more than a diet that includes complete protein is an unattainable, pie-in-the-sky ideal. It is simply our natural and normally attainable, but still optimal, state of being. 

This analogy demonstrates how it can be that, if we feel any amount less than fully, we do not have OKness at all – and why it is fairly safe to say that, in civilized society, where full feeling is invariably blocked and disrupted, and where we are all “full feeling deprived,” none of us experiences true OKness (at least not beyond early childhood – although some people might spontaneously experience fleeting flashes of momentary reconnection to full feeling on rare occasions).

Nonetheless, as a result of having been born fully feeling and retaining our fully feeling condition for however long we were able in childhood, we do retain into adulthood varying degrees of some of the benefits of full feeling. First, we retain “feeling-memories” of OKness that have some sustaining, fortifying power; and second, we retain whatever degree of healthy development we underwent. Also, some of us are booted out of OKness much more rudely and violently than others – and therefore shut down our feelings much more forcefully and over a much wider range of the total spectrum. There is a tremendous amount of variation in this from person to person. For this reason, we see tremendous variation in the civilized world in how much partial “OKness” people retain – and therefore different degrees of confidence, poise, gracefulness, balance, sociability, sensitivity, openness, and other qualities that, at least to some degree, are expressions of OKness (and not only of genes, conditioning, or intentional cultivation). But none of these partial expressions of OKness are the same as true OKness; they are only residual. The vestiges of OKness we retain may shore us up against out-and-out psychological breakdown or at least slow it down; but we cannot properly grow and build on these vestiges the way we can build on a truly solid, full foundation. We can grow and develop some positive qualities and abilities, but only in an ever-diminishing way because residual qualities of OKness (unlike true OKness) decrease over time and eventually, our “nutritional deficit” of “incomplete” feeling catches up to us. This helps explain first, why, even though virtually none of us in the modern, civilized world are getting the complete protein of OKness, some of us display much more psychological health than others; and second, why even the healthiest among us are fundamentally different from – are altogether less psychologically healthy than – people who are fully causally connected. (Again, we will occasionally talk about people having a “partial,” “limited,” “residual,” or in other ways limited sense of OKness. Technically, this is an incorrect way of speaking; but it is simpler than creating additional terminology. This will not be a problem so long as the reader understands that any partial form of OKness is fundamentally different from the full and true form of it.)

This analogy should not be taken to suggest that all fully feeling people are exactly alike, however. This is no more the case than it is the case that all people who eat complete proteins are exactly alike. Healthy people are alike only in being free of disease (at least systemic, chronic disease); and this freedom from (chronic) disease is an essential factor in allowing people to fully realize their unique individual qualities and potentials. In the same way, being fully feeling and having the normal, baseline level of OKness is precisely the psychological (as opposed to physical-nutritional) foundation for our becoming the fully developed, differentiated, and wonderfully unique individuals we all are. Feeling less than fully is never anything but a hindrance to full development and individuation. Less than fully feeling people – who invariably get caught up and bogged down in the much duller mechanical aspects of their being – are always far more alike than people who feel fully. In other words, OKness – like health – is a broad and general state of well-being with certain defining characteristics, but one that leaves room for infinite and glorious expression of variety. There is nothing limiting about OKness. Quite the opposite, it is exuberantly liberating and opens us to the infinite possibilities of life. 

Summary and Conclusion

Feeling is not what we think it is. It is not merely a passive, physical-energetic mechanism for registering physical-energetic sensations that gives us feedback about an “objective” physical-energetic universe. Feeling in its fullness actively reveals the far greater – even infinite – dimensions of a participatory, personal-relational cosmos.

Feeling freely and fully across the entire spectrum of sensation is our connection to the causal level, is OKness, is full, balanced development and functioning, and is direct awareness of the personal-relational dimensions of reality. And it is the aspect of all this over which we can exercise willful control. It is the “mechanism” or non-mechanicalness.

Civilized life, precisely because it does not fully recognize the personal dimensions of reality, induces each one of us to shut down our normal feeling capacity in two ways: adulterating our access to pure sensation and blocking portions of the full range of sensation. This then turns us into people who also no longer recognize the personal dimensions of reality – and who then induce others to shut down their normal feeling capacity. This shutting down of our full feeling capacity gives rise to the literally negative, uniquely suffering-inducing states of being – like alienation – known almost exclusively in the civilized world.

While it may not be the sole solution to all our problems and suffering, returning to full feeling – which does not require any specialized knowledge, skill, or “awakening of higher consciousness” – is the single most significant step we can take to resolve the civilized crises created by feeling less than fully.

In the briefest and most general terms: in full feeling, an entire realm of human experience, currently submerged, resurfaces and restores our lost sense of OKness, naturalness, normalcy, connectedness, and balance. Therefore, when we have full, unhindered (even if totally unconscious) felt contact with the causal level, we have an enormous resource from which to draw that optimizes virtually all aspects of our experience and functioning.

Surprise #2 (a and b)

a) Feeling, when it is pure-full feeling, is a non-mechanical force that actively and positively interacts with, alters, and expands our experience of reality, giving rise to a profoundly relational, personal world

b) Feeling fully is OKness; and every chronically negative state of being is a diminishment of fully feeling OKness (rather than an independently existing, real “thing”); therefore, simply feeling fully resolves all literally negative states and returns us to our normal-optimal baseline of OKness 

# posted by GregJS @ 6:16 PM 0 comments

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