"Group Therapy" The Independent [via "alive on all channels"]
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"Our feelings tend to be very unreliable, very unstable, and we cannot think as we want largely because our feelings are in control. For most of the time, we have automatic emotions of like and dislike. We also spend a great deal of our time in states of emotion that are unmistakably negative, such as anger, pity, and fear.
We can realise through this how far we are away from what we ought to be as human beings, for these negative emotions serve no useful purpose and are quite unnecessary. They have been grafted onto us by our environment, arising in the first place as an emotional counterpart to the instinctive reactions we have to pain and bodily discomfort. It can even be to some extent that these are hereditary, and now part and parcel of our lives.
What it all means is that our feelings are in a state of slavery. It is only when we have worked so as not to express negative emotions, and then so as to be able to neutralise them when they arise, that we can begin to understand the potential of our feeling nature and what purpose it should serve.
The true power of the feelings is to be able to perceive directly how things are. This is not done through knowing, sight, or hearing but through participation, by entering into things. The feeling nature of the normal man can penetrate into the depth of the world, beyond the world of bodies, which we can reach with our senses, and beyond what can be grasped by conceptual thinking. The real nature of feeling is not in time and space but in ‘eternity’. Eternity is the zone of experience in which things do not go on as processes but are what they are."
~ JG Bennett, 'Deeper Man'
[Ian Sanders]
