Spiritual Feeling

Natural Emotion and Spiritual Feeling, Part I

Photo: Sunrise, Piermont Pier, April 2023

Exactly what is feeling, why do we have it, and what role does it play in Being?

Like all other faculties, feeling exists on a scale. We can roughly analyze it by saying that it is divided into two differing properties: natural emotion and spiritual feeling. These correspond to the right hand and left hand of the Enneagram, accordingly, but we will try here as best we can to avoid analyzing it per that diagram, even though it is eminently possible.

Natural emotion is a set of impulses that begin with crude, automatic and programmed (predictable and mechanical) response to stimuli, evolving into self-willed response (agency, in the form of lust) and then finally agency in terms of the more complex and future-oriented desire. This is about as far as natural emotion can take us.

Yet there is a whole second dimension to natural emotion called spiritual feeling, which contains, roughly feeling, three levels: first, self awareness accompanied by the emotional impression that one is in service to something greater; second, that same awareness evolved into a recognition of the way selfishness penetrates feeling and the need to purify it so that that ends; and third, a highly elevated understanding of sorrow, joy, and the relationship of a human being to God.

This being said, we can remember here that all natural emotional response is, in the material world, mediated within the immediate body by molecular electro-chemical exchanges. All of the first three natural forms of emotion are consequent and derivative of these material conditions and the way they respond to internal and external forces.