Feeling as a Vivifying Force

and the ground of becoming

Dear Friends,

I am brief on letter today to turn you toward an essay I’ve been promising on feeling as we continue to explore cardiagenesis—the birthing of heart. Here, we contemplate feeling as a vivifying force. As with all these meditative essays, I have no idea where this will go. It is forming on the page through the flow of wonder—wonder as intimacy with that which breaches the membrane of ordinary awareness. And what more to breach the membrane of ordinary awareness than feeling stirred? And so, I invite you to join me through your own direct experience of feeling, in shared wonder.

With love,

Renée

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Feeling as a Vivifying Force

I have a feeling about feeling, its significance. It is deep inside, this wordless inscape of feeling, located everywhere. Wonder wanders this inscape, as if to be a child running to and dancing the eternal liminality of land with sea. The wonder is an awakened presence to the interiority. The interiority is luminous darkness. It is endless, a well without bottom. There is in me a felt comfort inside this inner within.

Biophilosopher Andreas Weber says that feeling is foundational to life.¹ Feeling is the language of cells, of bodies, of all beings.² Weber takes his cue from twentieth-century philosopher Hans Jonas who, as I understand, influenced him. But Weber finds deep veins on feeling not found in Jonas, who was himself influenced by Aristotelian thought on soul. Aristotle brought feeling into the reflective fold when he said that what differentiates the animal mode of being from the plant mode is a threefold cord of perception, motility, and emotion.³

But for Jonas, it is feeling itself that augers the distinction of animality from vegetality. Emotion sets the animal in motion. This is the etymological foundation of emote/emotion — L. e- (out from) + -movere (movement or motion). We can see in ourselves a tendency to move when we are excited or agitated, ecstatic or anxious. In moments of ignited emotion, we struggle to sit still inside our own being. If the body isn’t moving, the mind surely is. The excitation/agitation is the originary something felt that impresses upon us and stirs movement.

I watch a fat, flat nasturtium leaf on a wavy stalk that I pluck in the morning turn hour-by-hour toward the autumn sun. By dusk, it has turned nearly ninety degrees, and the stem has convoluted a new shape. Aristotle would say this is the appetitive attribute of soul, absent feeling (and with it perception and motility). Is appetite not a feeling stirred by the fundamental desire to be? I keep coming back to Sri Aurobindo, who says that feeling is a “perception of something felt, a perception in the vital or psychic or in the essential substance of consciousness.”⁴ A single-celled organism in a watery milieu now infused with a syrup of sugar moves toward the infusion. If the infusion is vinegar, it moves away. From this, it seems that emotion precedes animality. Life is feeling, offers Weber.⁵

But we have conflated emotion and feeling. And while they may not be two distinct modes, rather a continuum, it may serve our wonder to distinguish them across the evolutionary birthing of the human soul.⁶ What is soul? Let us say that soul is the innermost inner within of a life given expression by and tethered to the innermost inner within of Origin. It is the inscape of being ever meeting the world. It is, according to Weber, life’s most pervasive expression.⁷ Its language is feeling.

Feeling seems palpably distinct from that which moves out from an excitation or agitation. And the word palpably is where we near the etymological basis for feeling. We inherit the word feeling from the Old English felan, meaning to touch or have a sensory experience of (something), which bears little resemblance to move out from. If we keep following this etymological word trail, we come to the Old Norse falma, which means “to grope,” i.e., to search through the dark unknown with hands reaching, touching, feeling. Further still, we come to the PIE root pal, the basis of palpate—to touch. In the earlier modes of being, the human—not yet so visually oriented, not yet drawn to naming so much as uttering—would have understood intrinsically that to touch is to be touched.

Might we say that emotion is an archaic reaction to a primal feeling stirred?—that primordial threshold of excitation/agitation is bound on either side by to be or not to be. It is the fine line between living and dying that keeps emotion alive as essential for the continuation of being.

Feeling, on the other hand, is stirred by “groping” through the dark not-knowing of what is unfolding in the immediacy of aliveness itself. Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry frequently remind us that the evolutionary process is one of “groping” toward. Life is feeling its way through the dark interiority of what is not yet. Feeling, then, is a river running two ways through which interiority touches and is being touched by the dark abyss of quivering potentia. Feeling is the ground of becoming.

It seems the human is uniquely endowed with a certain depth and breadth of feeling—from the sublime to the utterly agonizing. And here, we are riddled. For we are at once not unlike our single-celled ancestors with the instinctual impulse to move toward and away: toward that which has the value pleasure (excitation); away from that which has the value pain (agitation). And we are just as prone to feeling becoming beleaguered by the intellect, so quick to tell a story about the what and why of this feeling, to identify with it, before it can be felt in its purity. In this way, feeling is stifled for what it may reveal of the deepest longings of being—our hearts touching and being touched by the unfolding of not only our life, but so, too, the ache and awe of this unfolding world.

I have a feeling that feeling is an invocation, a whisper of significance in the communion process that is life.⁸ Something in me feels the feeling, the sensate quality of it, a river of aliveness coursing through the body. It fills the chest, pulses the heart, makes a dimple in every cell. It is at once something sensate and the awareness of that sensate something that courses with such significance as to wake awareness. That is, the feeling means something. It vivifies the significance of the experience of being alive, enlivening the inner within of life. And if it is true what Thomas Berry says and Teilhard, too, and I believe it is, that the unique role of the human is the universe reflecting upon itself, we must suppose there is value to the great unfolding when we stay present with the purity of feeling, while at the same time letting it flow without attaching to narrative content. This, dear Friends, is no easy task, but perhaps our greatest task as willing participants in cardiagenesis.

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Gatherings in Silence

NEXT GATHERING: Sunday, November 16, 12–12:30 pm ET

1/2 hour meditation in Silence

These gatherings are an online sanctuary from the noise of the world and a homecoming to presence.

All are welcome.

If you would like to join and have questions, please email me: reneeeliphd[AT]gmail[DOT]com.

To keep the sanctuary an intimate experience, ‘seats’ are limited. Please email me for the Zoom link.

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Inner-Life Work in the Spirit of Anam Cara

Notes & References

1. Andreas Weber, The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling, and the Metamorphosis of Science (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2016), p. 1.

2. Ibid., p. 123.

3. Aristotle, de Anima, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge University Press, 1907); Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), p. 99.

4. Sri Aurobindo, The Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo’s Teaching and Method of Practice (Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Light Publications, 1993), p. 173.

5. Weber, Biology of Wonder, p. 68.

6. We are really intimating here the awakening of awareness of our deepest interiority as reflector and reflection (Jean Gebser) of the infinite interiority, the interiority of originary Presence. Jean Gebser, The Ever Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad and Algis McKunas (Ohio University Press, 1953).

7. Weber, Biology of Wonder, p. 69.

8. Thomas Berry, “The Universe Story, with Thomas Berry,” an interview, also featuring Mary Evelyn Tucker and Christopher Chapple, Ojai, California, 1992.