By J. Donald Walters, author of Education for Life and co‑founder of the Living Wisdom Schools
How many people recognize the difference between emotion and feeling? Very few.
And how many children are consequently taught that calm, sensitive feeling is an invaluable tool for the complete understanding of most subjects? Or that turbulent feelings — that is to say, the emotions — and not calm feelings prevent clear, objective understanding? Again, very few.
Few children, again, are taught the extent to which reason is guided by calm feeling but distorted by the emotions. And few are taught that by developing calm feeling they will improve their understanding of objective reality on every level.
Feeling, when it is calm and refined, is essential to truly objective, mature insight.
There are definite ways of clarifying feeling, just as there are clear principles of logic for learning to reason correctly.
For instance, feelings can be clarified by learning to distance our feelings from our personal likes and dislikes, withdrawing our awareness to a calm center in the heart. Feeling can be further clarified by directing the heart’s energies upward to the brain, and thence to a point between the eyebrows that was anciently identified as the seat of concentration in the body.
Clarity of feeling can be assisted by calming the flow of energy in the spine, by means of certain breathing exercises. These exercises are a priceless contribution of the science of yoga to the general knowledge of the human race. It would be a grave error to ignore them.
Only by calm inner feeling can a person know definitely the right course to take in any action. Those who direct their lives from this deeper level of feeling achieve levels of success that are never reached by people who limit their quest for answers to the exercise of reason.
Reason, indeed, when unsupported by feeling, may point in hundreds of plausible directions without offering certainty as to the rightness of any of them.
Children need to learn how to react appropriately. But they will never learn this very important skill if their reactions spring from their subjective emotions. Considerable training is needed to learn to harness feelings and make them a useful ally. What children are taught, instead, is that feelings are always obstacles to correct insight. The scientific method is offered as a model — “If you want to see things objectively, you must view everything in terms of cold logic.”
I remember a college professor who boasted to us, jokingly, that X-rays had shown his heart to be smaller than normal. This, to him, was a sign of intellectual objectivity, which he prized.
We too often ignore the fact that the greater the scientist, generally the more deeply he feels his subject. Or that, as Einstein put it, the essence of true scientific discovery is a sense of mystical awe.
Feeling can never, in any case, be suppressed. Shove it out of sight at one point, and it will only pop up at another. When long-suppressed feelings at last burst upon people’s consciousness, those feelings often assume terrible and unrecognizable shapes.
Right feeling is a defining feature of true maturity. It must be cultivated, and not ignored, suppressed, or treated as something beyond the scope of right education for maturity.