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Thought and feeling in the theater of the body-mind
Sydney Banks saw something and understood something extraordinary about human beings, about the extraordinarily sublime process of how our thinking-imaginative minds generate for each one of us a one-of-a-kind intimate experience of ourselves in the world in each passing second. Once he saw this, he spent the rest of his life trying to convey its significance to everyone he met. Again and again he would point to how thought functions in its most basic capacity.
Writing from my own experience and understanding growing up in the cultural setting of the United States, the way we generally talk about thought and feeling is as if they were two separate things entirely. “Thought” is something we associate with language, intellect, and the mental reasoning we do in our heads, whereas “feeling” is something we associate with emotions, intuition, and the body. For today, however, at least over the duration of the next paragraphs, I want to put this schism aside. Actually, what I would like is for us to entertain the possibility that thought and feeling might have a relationship that we previously have overlooked, one that makes them part of a whole rather than separate experiences.
Coming from an arts background, I can’t help but take some poetic license in describing these things, in a spirit of playing with our perceptions and assumptions, the spirit of play. So allow me to spin a different story. First, let’s go gently with this word “thought” and see if we can put aside our many associations about it. Let us consider it as an activity much far more basic than a language-structured sentence that passes silently through our head. For sure, in the course of evolution, early human beings must have experienced thought long before the development of language. And there are times I vividly see my dog, Mr. Bugsy, thinking to himself. And so, I want to use the term “thought” simply to reference any flicker of intelligence, perception, imagination, or memory that arises inside our body-mind in a given moment.
As for feeling, this is perhaps going to sound strange, but please indulge me if you would…
Feelings are the body's experience of the flickers of thought coming into being. Said from another angle, feeling enables us to experience the movement of thinking and perception, just as it enables us to experience sensations from the world around us. It is also common for most of us to be unconscious of much of our thinking. We easily notice thoughts that strike with conviction, and overly present/recurring thoughts that seem to never leave us alone, and memories that rise up and momentarily fill our attention. But far less are we aware of the quiet flickers of impulse that enter our psychic states without making it to the office level of language or memory’s production studio. What enables us to catch this more subtle activity in our awareness are the feelings that arise in our body. Think of a moment when, after feeling completely at-ease, a sudden pang of insecurity rushes through you, or a wave of sadness comes upon you, and you could swear there was not a single “thought” that crossed your mind. But the feeling is there. It’s there like ripples on the water’s surface as a fish passes just underneath. Like this, thought produces its ripples through our felt body.
Related to the above observation is a figure of speech I really like, and it is when we say that someone or something “made an impression” on us. I love the physicality of it! It’s as if something arrived to us and pressed itself into our body so as to leave a footprint behind. And the physicality is real, because what transpired doesn’t leave merely a memory, a mental picture with words. It leaves in you a feeling, a kind of resonance, for which you may not have words. This manner of exchange is central in many artistic disciplines (outside of the literary arts) whose objective is not to put something into words, much less explain something in a narrative fashion, but to trigger an experience that transcends the conceptual mind. Similarly, it is common for people to say they had, or have, an impression in response to a particular person or experience, as in, “I had the impression that the whole room was buzzing with energy”. We tend to use this turn of phrase in situations where there is uncertainty or an intangible quality, and yet despite the uncertainty we feel the presence of a quality that is more than just a passing thought. It is as if “thought” is at work inside of us, our inner intelligence trying to ascertain something before us, likely in ways we can’t identify at the moment. The manifestation of that activity, the way it makes itself known, is via the “impression” it gives us, a feeling impressed upon us.
Thought comes into being and expresses itself in feeling, and feelings are what constitute our embodied experience of being alive. There is no movement of thought, no movement of mind, that does not manifest simultaneously as feeling. Is this true? Consider all the ways we are continually immersed in feeling; pangs of hunger, spikes of fear, the throbbing of love, the urgency of ambition, the drive of passionate curiosity, one’s sense of injustice, the landing of sun, wind, and rain on one’s skin, a belly-laugh of humor, the contraction of insecurity, the muscle-ache from hard labor, the felt disorientation of confusion, the release of tension under a caress… Even detachment and numbness we are able to experience precisely because we can feel an absence of sensation. As such, when we say we had an experience, it refers much less to a matter of facts that came to pass than to the living embodied experience of what we inwardly felt in the process. Then contrast this to a person that has been knocked unconscious, even in your own experience if you have ever been knocked out. When we are unconscious, we simply do not have experiences, not even dreams. Without consciousness, there is no experience for us at all. Consciousness is what brings our experience to life by giving life to our experience.
This is all so very basic, so fundamental, that it can be hard to see. As the saying goes, we are like fish in water. One of the most stunning and underappreciated functions of consciousness that Syd would attempt to describe in so many ways, is that consciousness, in this sense of the term, is indiscriminate. It will bring to life anything that comes into it. For example, consciousness will bring to life a paranoid thought, one without any basis whatsoever in what we call the world of facts, just the same as it will bring to life a thought that delivers the solution to a mathematical problem. Regardless of the content of thinking, our consciousness shines its animating light onto whatever passes in front of it, much like the sun will indiscriminately illuminate all that falls in sight of its rays.
A common metaphor used across the years to express this understanding is that of an old-school reel-to-reel projector: Frame by frame, the inner world of thoughts passes in front of the projectors light like a film reel across the lens, each thought a frame. This light, our consciousness, then projects outwardly whatever frame passes in front of it. As thoughts speed across our consciousness, the frames go unnoticed as our perception of the world appears to us as one seamless film.
This observation is strikingly different from most things I have heard or read about regarding the subject of consciousness. What it points out to me, and what I find confirmed continuously in my own experience, is that as a momentary thought takes shape inside of me, it captures my gaze (the gaze of my consciousness), and for the duration of that moment, no matter how fleeting, this gaze gives life to the thought such that it awakens in the very cells of my body. I feel the thought, and this feeling becomes my experience. More comprehensively, and increasingly over time, we nearly automatically string thoughts together into a narrative - a story about ourselves and the world around us, and this is the story we live.
I often think that attempting to point this out is like trying to point out a small object on a distant hill. I can use words to give clues as a way of directing your gaze, but for your part, what is needed is for you to look quietly with a clear mind until your gaze alights upon it. No amount of thinking will help you do this. It does not require that you even believe me, because no amount of belief will help you either. Neither memories nor theories, not even the most brilliant idea in the world, will help you in this task. To see what you do not yet see requires that you empty your mind of all these things. Do it right now, picture it if you will; you and I standing on a ridge and me saying to you, “do you see that odd red-shaped object way over there?”. Can you sense the quietness of the conversation and the quality of looking it invokes? And the more subtle or hidden the object is, the more quiet and slow must become this manner of looking. You could say it is a way of using intelligence without the interference of concepts and ideas. It is a matter of becoming deeply present in our gaze. But if thought does not help us in this task, what then is looking?
Another refrain that Syd would often repeat is, “Listen for a feeling”. This simple enigmatic instruction has played out across the years like a riddle that continually produces new insights as one attempts to understand it. I find that it invokes in me a similar curiosity and quietness such as that I described in the previous paragraph about searching for an unseen object with our gaze. As I listen for a feeling it is as if this same gaze turns itself inward, but now, instead of seeking an object in my visual field, I am listening for a feeling within the scope of my embodied being. And again, no amount of thinking, believing, conceptualizing, etc., is going to help me in this adventure. Rather, there is an emptying, a letting go, a quieting down, as I find myself feeling for a feeling. This is a funny play on words, but how else are you going to know a feeling except by feeling it!
Now, something on the subject of Love…
In my personal experience, the moments that have brought the most transformation to my life are ones characterized by a tremendous feeling of love - a generous, gentle and abundant fullness of love. Always they arrived as a gift of grace. Much to my dismay, I have never been able to manufacture them on command. Nevertheless, they remain in me as essential points of reference in my understanding, because when Syd says “listen for a feeling”, it is from the experience of an embodied feeling of love that I understand what he means, to whatever extent I presently grasp his meaning. And I find in this feeling of love a vital and responsive intelligence, responsive because it is so highly attuned to what is transpiring in the present moment, which, as far as I can see, is nothing short of a wild mystery. I find that this life intelligence generates more life and more aliveness, inclusive of its capacity to be present and responsive to death and decay.
Aliveness is something we feel (There it is again, feeling). We know it through the kaleidoscopic spectrum of feelings that move through us. In a very general manner of speaking, I think it's safe to say that we all move through a varied continuum of feelings of aliveness during our days, weeks, and years. We feel enlivened when we feel connection, be it a deeper connection to others, the environment and the more-than-human-world (formally known as “the natural world”), or our own inward personal feeling of being. It’s like being plugged into the electrical grid of the cosmos. Conversely, when we feel disconnected, our sense of aliveness wanes. Like this, it fluctuates continuously. When it comes to feelings of disconnection, the simplicity of Syd’s insight has been able to direct me to a very basic manner of seeing how this disconnection transpires. I am able to see that as I take certain kinds of thinking seriously, my feeling of disconnect is heightened. Going back to the projector metaphor, as I take my thinking overly seriously, I can become so fully absorbed in the running of my own film and script that it leads to the exclusion of all else. We easily observe this phenomenon in the course of an ordinary argument (assuming you have had an argument at least once in your life). Two people in an argument are each immersed in their own particular movie-script. In each of them, their plot-lines and characters come alive, with varying degrees of deceit and betrayal, dashed hopes and lost love, expectations of a higher order and disappointments that invariably come crashing down. This, until somehow, if you’re either lucky or skilled, the storm passes. The clouds disperse and a different and perhaps softer story-line appears.
The best films of all time are those that hold us in “a suspension of disbelief”, that experience when we become so engrossed in the film's story and production that we lose all sense of the actual space and life we inhabit. The room or theater disappears such that we see and experience only that which is unfolding on the screen before us. This can take us through experiences of joy, rage, deep sadness, profound longing, suspense, exhilaration, resolution or its opposite. Like this we live out our inner dramas, adventures, and discoveries, as the mind unfurls within us a world of thought that is often mostly outside of our conscious choosing. As the story unfolds, it all comes alive inside of us in a visceral and continuous metamorphosing experience of feeling.
Considering the multifold stories that we conjure and live out, it would seem natural to want to make a better story. Enough of the tear-soaked dramas, raging conflicts, and endless longing! Can’t I craft something a little, I don’t know, nicer? The impulse isn’t a bad one, and it is indeed empowering to think that we actually possess the creative power to invent new stories and experiences for ourselves. However, the deeper understanding of this life-making process is not centered on trying to implement actions and efforts to make new and better movie-scripts for our lives. Rather, it is centered first and foremost on simply becoming awake to this process, that is happening, and happening all the time. This is to say, that what I have written here is not prescriptive, not a directive to behave or act differently. It is an invitation to behold in our attentive gaze this moving-making process as it takes place within us. I say this because, at least in terms of everyone I have met, it seems clear that we are not masters of our mind-body being. If a person has 60,000 thoughts a day (if google is telling the truth), how many of them are of our choosing? And what if I decide, today, I’m just going to keep it to 40-45 thoughts, what are my chances of success? It’s about as much as trying to limit the beats of my heart or the breaths of my lungs. And so, it is with a great sense of humility and reverence (and sometimes terror, if I’m really honest) that I gaze upon this inward wilderness of thought and feeling that unravels within me. But when I am able to listen deeply, listening for a feeling, as Syd always said, I can come across a feeling that seems not of my private movie-making studio. It is a feeling of being in and of the world in an open and porous exchange. It is a feeling of connection that enlivens me just as taking in oxygen from the green world enlivens my bloodstream. It is a feeling of life-affirming reciprocity of an ever-creative existence.
Thank you dear readers for your attentive and momentary suspension of previous beliefs.
Until we meet on the other side of the screen…
Todd t
