thinking feeling being

Thinking

Feeling

Being

Each of us has these three aspects, and in any one moment we tend to be inhabiting one aspect with our awareness. It's where our consciousness is in that moment. And for many of us, we tend to spend almost all our waking time thinking: with our awareness, our energy, our consciousness, focused on our thoughts, centred in the head.

We have made our thoughts into our supreme truth. We have given them a status that they don't really deserve. And it's a bit of a pity, really. My feeling is we've done this out of a sort of cowardice. Staying in the mind, the thinking mind, we can create our own little world of concepts, beliefs, ideas. And as long as we don't worry too much about whether the external world aligns with our ideas, we can live reasonably comfortably in this rather dry world of thoughts.

Deeper in our being, and centred more in the heart area, the chest, is our emotional realm, our feelings. And our emotions are more primitive, more fundamental. You might think that thoughts can be exciting or scary, but these emotional responses to the thoughts are felt quite differently to the thoughts themselves. One needs to pay close attention to oneself to see this. The symbolic thoughts in words are not in themselves carrying emotional energy. But our emotional being arises in response to thoughts, or can do. And if you look closely, you'll see that it's really the emotional response that matters to one. It's our emotions that give life quality. Without the emotional response, life would be very dull, a sort of grey mechanical thing. Really we would just be like a machine, a computer, if it were not for our feelings.

And if you look closely at your feelings, you might see that they arise even without thoughts on occasion. They are not merely a response to thoughts. They are a response to the moment. All of our senses feed in to our emotional response: the tastes, the smells, the sounds, the touch sensations, what we are seeing, and the sensations in our own body. Our emotions are really a response to this rich world of sensation.

And if we put aside both thoughts and sensation, we can still have an emotional response, a sort of intuitive gut feeling about the moment. There's no logic to it. It's not rational. It can arise mysteriously. Our emotions have a great innate intelligence within them. And this is why it's rather sad that many of us tend to focus on the thoughts, on thinking. Our life is richer, more colourful, with a greater quality, when we shift our energy, our emphasis, to our emotional being.

There is a third centre within us. If we look deeper into ourselves than our emotional centre, we can come to our being. In the body its centred even more deeply, in the belly. And this being is really our ground. It's the core of who we are, the foundation. It's the most fundamental aspect of who we are. And so few of us remember this – and when I say remember, I don't mean intellectually – I mean with our energy, with our consciousness. In deep meditation we can visit this place, no thoughts, no emotions even, simply a deep, still, silent spaciousness. This is our being. And our being is the most important part of us. It's our being that gives us presence. This is the source of who we are. This is the base of our consciousness. Without our being there would be no emotions, nor thoughts. Without our being there would be no life.

And many of us have forgotten our being, and it's a great tragedy. Without contact with our being, we identify ourselves with our thoughts and our feelings. They become truth, when in reality they are a relative thing, very transient in nature. They don't hold truth. To touch truth we have to reside in our being. From this place we can meet the world in a wholesome way.

So it's rather sad that most people have turned everything upside down, making thinking the most important part of their life, with emotions in second place, and having lost touch with their being, so much so that it barely makes third place. So I urge you: look into yourself, and turn these three the right way up. Make your being the most important part of your life – its rightful position. And with that as your base, then your emotions can flow freely and be heartfelt. And the thoughts that come and go, they can play their role too, but it's the least significant of the three: being, feeling, thinking.