Excerpt from The Cosmic Kaleidoscope
How did we come to have such a variety of feelings? Envisage a couple of the Bone Age. The Bone Age was the period ahead of the Stone Age, when tools and weapons were made of bone. This was long before matriarchy and patriarchy, when the word “parent” was not yet invented and when the male in most cases would be long gone before the female would discover she was pregnant. Here, in this age of intellectual darkness, we witness historical front-page news. We do not know how long this lovely twosome have been together, but what we do know is that they recently decided to move down from a tree.
Now she stands near the mouth of their new cave, the youngest one on her hip, watching her man setting out to go hunting. “He is walking farther and farther away, soon he will disappear into the forest, but I know he will be with us again soon—I feel inside of me that he is near however far away he may be.” When he later on returns with the catch, his feelings reciprocate hers: “From here I can only just see our place, it is still at a fair distance, but I feel close to them, inside me it is as if I am already in the cave with them, and I will soon be there.”
This is how physical feelings such as “near” and “far” turn into psychic ones with the same names. From here onwards, “hard”, “soft”, “cold”, “warm”, will no longer only define inanimate physical things but also relations and states of the human environment. Existence becomes more colourful and nuanced, and humans evolve mentally and physically as their mind and bio-psychological structure needs to accommodate their new inner and outer realities. Cells, nerves, glands, the brain, physiognomy—everything keeps changing.
The mind-stuff, which earlier registered only physical, objective feelings, grows into a huge storehouse of psychic feelings such as “mine”, “yours” “ours”, “theirs”, “respected”, “neglected”, “ennobled”, “humbled”, etc. with their numerous social, political and further ramifications. At this stage, groups of human beings, perhaps in the Iron Age, no longer existed only as an instinctive survival group. A psycho-physical structure evolved with collective sentiments, perhaps with a hierarchy emanating from the leader at the top nurturing occupational and other social systems. From such structure strategy, political philosophy, etc. evolve to shape individual and collective intellectual thought further—all taking original physico-psychic feelings as their starting point.
In the book’s chapter on spiritual practice you may read about the vital energy organ, called pranendriya in Sanskrit, the physico-psychic organ that evolves during the phase of human development when the faculty of perceiving psychic feelings is growing in particular.
Subtle Feelings
With time, humans develop even feelings without root in physical nature. For instance, a poet may allude to the splendour of solitude while describing a single tree standing in an open field under the vast sky. The term “solitude” was coined from the experience of the existential grandeur of being by oneself, a psycho-spiritual feeling and not the organic outcome of physico-psychic evolution. When applied on a physical entity such as a lone tree it becomes something psycho-physical-spiritual like high grade poetry. In this way, subtle intellect and intuition develop their own vocabulary, with terms that have no direct physical relevance initially, but later may be applied to physical things, such as a tree, a river, etc.
Yogic philosophy has words and expressions for even the most subtle psycho-spiritual realities, such as the various feelings of closeness to the Supreme resulting from a practitioner’s advances through the psycho-spiritual. Actually, spirituality is the greatest feeling. As it is in contact with and comprises everything and everyone. Spirituality not only knows and does everything; it feels it as its own. That profound feeling is a constant, whereas knowledge and actions are variables. To be is the fundamental feeling of existence. Oriental philosophic theory arose out of physico-psycho-spiritual practice. Occidental philosophy is mainly the result of intellectual analysis and speculation. Thus, there are semantic differences between their terminologies.
Feelings Have the Upper Hand
Feelings are hard currency, the real thing, the result of physical, psychic, or spiritual touch—contact. They are the basic components of our mental repertoire and inform us about our immediate circumstances, where we are, how we really are, and everything in between. All elements of the mind-stuff need to accept the sovereignty of feelings. Thoughts are notions of feelings; philosophical reflections on the scope of the mind’s contact points with its physical, psychic and spiritual realities. Sentiments—feelings attached to various entities—emerge from basic feelings and may or may not be supported by rational thought. Feelings, therefore, figure as major navigation points in our physical, psychic, and psycho-spiritual life.
Even if a feeling for any reason is misleading, and a conflicting thought is rational and therefore correct, the rogue feeling may still prevail because of its greater persuasive power. This rule of feelings is part of our evolutionary legacy. Their dominating power comes from their contact with actual, concrete facts. Whereas thoughts are intellectual constructs, our emotional wealth is grounded in experiences of the concrete sensory world. That is anyhow what feeling tells us, and thought faces an uphill battle arguing with it.
Emotion
The words feeling and emotion are sometimes mixed up, which only goes to show just how much feelings move us. Emotions are a type of accumulated forceful driving forces (samskaras) whose eventual constructiveness depends on the amount of feeling that motivate them. The term emotion, from the Latin e-movere, “move out”, is usually reserved for particularly strong feelings with plenty of felt momentum which will fire actions.
Sentiment
Some mistake sentiment for feeling. The term sentiment is used for mental feelings invested with particular objects, such as one’s family, place of origin, social group, particular values, ideals, etc. Shrii Sarkar argued:
How is a nation formed? In reality, a kind of sentiment created either directly or indirectly on the basis of one or more factors such as country, language, religion, etc., plays a vital role in forming a nation. The factors themselves are quite insignificant. It is the sentiment and nothing else that creates a nation.
Human beings nourish sentiments for various objects, hence certain sentiments may group people together in various ways. For example, some become sentimental when watching a game of football. Others become most sentimental on anniversaries or during a marriage ceremony, when singing in a choir, etc. When guided by rationality, i.e., if someone can direct the sentiment of an individual or a group towards a rational goal, that sentiment may drive momentous benevolence. Sentiment-based constructive leadership may be provided by insightful teachers and other social educators.
Running blindly without discrimination between proper and improper behaviour is called “sentiment”. The path of discrimination between proper and improper behaviour is called “rationality”. When human beings discriminate between proper and improper behaviour and select the proper path, it is called “conscience”.
Feeling, emotion, and sentiment are natural developments in the evolution of individual and collective minds. They should not be suppressed but be directed constructively and sublimated.
Mundane and Spiritual Sentiments
The cosmic doer-I evolves the universe in the crudest portion of the cosmic mind-stuff. In other words, the physical universe that we live in is an imagination, or psychic projection, of cosmic mind. Nothing is external to the cosmos; everything is internal to it. Its feeling towards the objects of Its creation is therefore not of any degree of intimacy but of absolute unity. As you and I are physically and psychically heterogeneous creatures we experience everything as different from ourselves: you are different from me and I am different from all. This, in a nutshell, is the difference between mundane and spiritual sentiments. As we keep approaching the cosmic reality our feeling of existential intimacy grows proportional to our proximity with It and eventually reaches the final stage of universality, of oneness with all.