Religion provides an opportunity to examine the difference between feeling and emotion. The distinction between the two is critically important to the understanding of Self-realization. Experiencing “emotion” is an afflicted state whether or not the person would describe the emotion as good or bad. This is because emotion takes place within a paradigm which is an illusion. Emotion effectively blocks a person from experiencing present-moment reality. The “feeling” associated with Self-realization takes place in the present moment. Feeling, therefore, is present when a direct and unmediated experience of Reality (God in religious terms) is being experienced. It is during the “feeling” experience that the perfection of life and Creation is realized and indeed “all is right with the world.” This experience is beyond verbal articulation, models, theories, reasoning, or thinking of any sort. That is why the numinous can be approached through art more effectively than through science. It is an experience of the heart, so to speak, rather than the head.
Looking at the sculpture of St. Theresa by Gianlorenzo Bernini found in the Cornaro Chapel in S. Maria della Vitoria in Rome, we see an angel piercing her heart with a spear causing her to suffer spiritual pain and a “spiritual orgasmis” or emotional ecstasy. Much of 17th century religious art was propaganda in the service of the counter-reformation struggle going on between the Catholic Church and the competing Protestant denominations. The founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius of Loyola, encouraged all believers to seek such an emotional experience by entering into the process of illusion. “Many of these exercises required their practitioners to imagine, as precisely and as physically, even as painfully as they could, the sufferings and experience of Christ and the saints.” This pseudo-mystical ecstasy was a creation of the emotion-driven imagination to fulfill the needs of the false self not the genuine experience that the church leaders would have the faithful believe. Buddha advised those having such emotional sensations during meditation to ignore them and return to the tranquil reality of the present moment.
It is natural to seek these delusional emotional experiences believing them to be an experience of the Divine. Ironically, this afflictive energy generated in a church, temple, synagogue or mosque by well-intentioned evangelicals, charismatics, Pentecostals, mystics and the like is an obstacle to a genuine experience, a true insight into the nature of Simple Reality. An authentic experience of the Now is a pre-requisite to Self-realization and a true experience of the ineffable. Despite the excitement among members of these religious communities, they are growing in neither wisdom nor numbers. “Of 1,004 respondents to the NEWSWEEK/Beliefnet Poll, 45 percent said they attend worship services weekly, virtually identical to the figure (44 percent) in a Gallup poll cited by Time in 1966. Then as now, however, there is probably a fair amount of wishful thinking in those figures; researchers who have done actual head counts in churches think the figure is probably more like 20 percent.”
Joseph Campbell made a perceptive observation when he remarked that people were not looking for the meaning of life, they were looking for an experience of life. Surya Das, a U.S. born Tibetan lama made a similar observation when he said “People are looking for transformative experience, not just a new creed or dogma.”
People can look all they want and aspire until they perspire but they will find neither an experience of life nor a transformative experience until they are looking within a context, a worldview that can support and contain such experiences. This will require a shift from current religious narratives to stories that enable people to transcend the unconscious emotional experiences that are no more than delusional states driven by unconscious complexes (a connected group of repressed ideas that compel characteristic or habitual patterns of thought, feeling and action).
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in books by Roy Charles Henry:
Who Am I? The Second Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Where Am I? The First Great Question Concerning the Nature of Reality
Simple Reality: The Key to Serenity and Survival
