You offer a provocative perspective Joe, and it’s one that I think is worthy of deep reflection and personal exploration!
My own sense of being is that my physical body is distinct yet completely interwoven within what I call my (subtle) emotional body…and the same is true of my mental body. It’s my sense that the physical is like the “final link” in the chain. Perceiving the “Feelingmind” as you call it offers an opportunity to deeply be with, listen to, and relate with myriad subtle energetics in our vast living system before they take up residence in the most dense aspect of that system—the physical body. It also allows us to relate with these energies at their points of origin, so to speak, after they have manifested in the physical body. Does what I’m describing here map to your own understanding/experience?
You're spot on, Helen! There are some different ways to talk about it, though, that I'm still sorting through. For example, using the word energy can conjure woo for some people and turn them away. I think the most important feature to highlight is simply that when we actually pay attention with discipline and rigor, we find that our experience of being occupies space, and in that space our experience carries distinct qualities. Opening our awareness to these qualities in these spaces, we discover so much more about the fullness of our experience and its parallel relationship with the body. I like the word "para-somatic" to describe that relationship.
When we enter this space, we enter a realm of not-knowing, and not knowing is super challenging to the western mind, unfortunately. So this level of subjective experience hasn't ever been brought under a scientific lens, at least not in the academy, because there's no easy way to explain its existence. We're left with our cumbersome materialist reductionism as the dominant way to attempt to understand this human experience. Ugh!
One other important distinction you make is that between what you refer to as your emotional body and your mental body. This is an important distinction. We have what I call affect fields, which constitute what you are calling the emotional body. And we have what I call imagery fields which constitute the mental body. I still have some building to do, though, before I'll be able to effectively introduce those, I think. We'll see.
You offer a provocative perspective Joe, and it’s one that I think is worthy of deep reflection and personal exploration!
My own sense of being is that my physical body is distinct yet completely interwoven within what I call my (subtle) emotional body…and the same is true of my mental body. It’s my sense that the physical is like the “final link” in the chain. Perceiving the “Feelingmind” as you call it offers an opportunity to deeply be with, listen to, and relate with myriad subtle energetics in our vast living system before they take up residence in the most dense aspect of that system—the physical body. It also allows us to relate with these energies at their points of origin, so to speak, after they have manifested in the physical body. Does what I’m describing here map to your own understanding/experience?
You're spot on, Helen! There are some different ways to talk about it, though, that I'm still sorting through. For example, using the word energy can conjure woo for some people and turn them away. I think the most important feature to highlight is simply that when we actually pay attention with discipline and rigor, we find that our experience of being occupies space, and in that space our experience carries distinct qualities. Opening our awareness to these qualities in these spaces, we discover so much more about the fullness of our experience and its parallel relationship with the body. I like the word "para-somatic" to describe that relationship.
When we enter this space, we enter a realm of not-knowing, and not knowing is super challenging to the western mind, unfortunately. So this level of subjective experience hasn't ever been brought under a scientific lens, at least not in the academy, because there's no easy way to explain its existence. We're left with our cumbersome materialist reductionism as the dominant way to attempt to understand this human experience. Ugh!
One other important distinction you make is that between what you refer to as your emotional body and your mental body. This is an important distinction. We have what I call affect fields, which constitute what you are calling the emotional body. And we have what I call imagery fields which constitute the mental body. I still have some building to do, though, before I'll be able to effectively introduce those, I think. We'll see.
I look forward to those additions!