by ZULMA REYO
Inner Alchemy School of Consciousness
As a school of Consciousness, Inner Alchemy is dedicated to the development of Consciousness at every level and to the evolution of humanity. It embraces any approach that helps the individual contact his Nature: the faculties and powers that permit communion and collaboration with all of Life. These necessarily stem from a healthy, flexible, resilient ability to feel – to sense and respond appropriately to a wide variety of stimuli from the mineral, vegetable, animal, human and angelic worlds. Sensing accurately and responding in kind require maximum development of body, mind, and emotion.
All of life is sentient, but the human being is the only one capable of matching complex levels of feeling with intelligent activity. For this reason we are the custodians of life. The job of mankind is to decode and evaluate perception and act upon the rest of creation reconstructing and advancing it. The calibre of life we give depends entirely upon the level and quality of human Consciousness as feeling awareness. When the feeling quotient is deep and consciousness is refined, so much greater are its ethical and practical results.
Unfortunately, we have forgotten how to feel consciously and deeply. Instead, our mental attitudes and emotions are limited to a release from tension or to the obtaining of desires, revolving around self-preservation. In such a myopic state, the resulting disconnection obligates us to face the world fearfully, if not recklessly. Either way is doomed to failure, frustration, suffering and hopelessness.
In every language, the meaning of the word “feeling” is ambiguous. At times it is equated with thinking, at others with physical sensing. A gift of money or the stimulating effect of hormones often translates as “love”. Tears of gratitude mix with tears of sadness, and joyful laughter with sarcastic belittling. In politics, even the most remote acquaintance becomes the object of emotional and intellectual scrutiny, and the implied projections achieve prominence over humane principles. We are left with an inevitably dubious world arena of double standards and little real feeling.
Normally, we say that an emotional person is a feeling person and that a more mental person is unfeeling, but neither truly “feels”. Each illustrates an exaggerated defence, the attempt to sense-feel-evaluate that has turned personal. Feeling is something profound and internal, and can only be sensed by another feeling being. It is connected to sensation but relates to an ongoing non-physical phenomenon as vital as breath is to life. It is perceived as emotion and yet it points to a universal quality that transcends the self. It represents a genuine response to life in the present and can be glimpsed in the eyes or through a barely visible gesture. Its true emanation is invisible, linking the individual to the web of sentient life everywhere, from human to stellar to solar. It does not judge and responds in kind. Which is why a person with a low threshold of feeling cannot perceive subtlety and sees a manifestation of warmth as unnecessary or excessive emotionality. Vice-versa, a person addicted to the excesses of emotion cannot grasp the gentle nuances of a deeply feeling person of serene character.
True feeling is not a partial phenomenon that can be turned on or off. We either feel fully or not at all. We cannot feel “a little”. If we resist any level of involvement, whatever we interact with is tinged by the colour of our avoidance. True in-depth conscious feeling requires that our body and personality first be cleansed and liberated from past programming and refined to perceive the wider range of subtle frequencies that surrounds us.
As children we absorb a barrage of overt and covert signals that condition us. Either we receive too much or too little stimulation. The milieu is rarely safe, spacious and non-judgemental. This leads to many forms of stress and its sequel, secrecy, even or especially from ourselves. In the end we don’t know how to feel or what we feel, and our whole existence is defined by what we see happening around us, what affects us and how it relates to our idea of ourselves. Ideally, feeling development is best learned at home in safety. The process begins with the first cry at birth and continues through all of life’s experiences in varying stages of frustration and achievement.
Feeling cannot be planned or produced. There is only one way to feel and this is through our own body, mind and emotional system as the instruments of perception. We need to revert the original shutting down process but this must be accompanied by a state of deep neutrality, as a precondition. When we learn to sense everything anew, fresh, then we may perceive ourselves and through ourselves the world around us as it is, rather than as we imagine or fear it to be.
So often the incentive to become a better feeling person is our relationship with another person. But it is important we realize that we can only give what we are. This means that we can only feel in another what we allow ourselves to feel. Most people cannot withstand depth without resorting to some device to shut it out as quickly as possible. Adults today are the consequence of a world that did not or could not allow deep sensitivity. Our discomfort in the face of depth is striking. How many parents allow their child to cry to the full extent of their capacity without immediately trying to “make it better”? How many friends stand by, allowing you to feel despair or anger without telling you all will be fine, when it is simply not so for you? How many of our acquaintances offer ready-made solutions when what we really need is the space to discover them for ourselves? We deprive one another of authenticity because we can’t recognize our own. With all the best intentions our loved ones deny us the safe space necessary to trust ourselves. How else can we learn that we will invariably come through any and all experiences whole and strong?
There is little doubt that our feeling capacity is damaged in infinite ways. No amount of external repair or substitution can undo that, only our determination. This involves daring even more than courage, diving into and exploring our depth consciously. We soon discover that at the innermost level feeling itself is a healing force. It is Light. It is Consciousness. It is both a faculty and a network of feeling-triggers constituting a very special instrument of perception. Sustaining this depth feeling-perception allows for the reweaving of nervous filaments and the re-sensitizing of diminished faculties, aided by the visualizing power of mind and the vital flow of breath. Intention and attention carry on the work of retraining automatic reactions, and developing an intelligent attitude as well as a keen vision of all of life.
In today’s world a person must be shown how to hone his feeling capacity, the basic instrument that bestows perception and communion with the universe. In the process the mind, divested from the extraneous ideas programmed into it, is sharpened so that we may attain to the greatest of all divine gifts: discernment.
Higher consciousness is a knowing faculty of the heart, not intellect. The feeling quality necessary for the development of Consciousness embraces the wholeness of life, because it knows that it contains joy and pain, love and anger, as clearly as it partakes of day and night. Such a person is able to orient himself through the obvious layers of body responses and spontaneously polar emotional reactions to evaluate neutrally and correspond accurately. Only then can we distinguish an emotion from sensation, a premonition and insight from a triggered memory or projected feeling from others or from the environment. Experience, all of it, is precious, and we do not shut ourselves away from it. Neither do we short-cut it by analysing it to death, justifying all sort of escape mechanisms. Most importantly, we recognize that the prize of experience comes from feeling the feelings and sensations created by situations and relationships, not by the meaning we project and then attach to it. The treasure lies within us and not in the outside world.
There is a world of difference between vulnerability and weakness. The former requires courage and trust in the inner self. True power, the kind that changes the personal self and reverberates in our world, is gained through the experience of vulnerability. Vulnerability and strength are two sides of the same coin, as weakness and aggression are two aspects of its falsification. What distinguishes the two sets of responses to life is the quality and depth of feeling response.
Feeling experience leads into the core of stillness where meanings arise. This core is a state of unified feeling-being. It is the essence of peace that goes beyond tolerance. This is understandable if we realize that peace comes only when opposites have been assimilated in consciousness. To feel fully is a privilege that we are only now discovering is essential. It is the critical ingredient in perception, discernment and truly spiritual development.
Life consists of multiple levels and qualities of experience. The world unfolds around us but also within us. Everything is related to everything else. Feeling sensitivity colours everything. There is no interpretation or ultimate significance without it being coloured by feeling. When we do not feel fully we are not being true to our Nature, to life, or to one another. The fullness of feeling allows us to feel another even if another’s experience is different from our own. We feel it as our own because we part from a flexible feeling mechanism that is intrinsically connected to all sentient life.
Evolution depends upon a critical mass of humanity sharing a vision of reality and working together. As we evolve our individual capacity to feel, evaluate and share, humanity expands in Consciousness. Inner Alchemy, and in particular our approach to individually focussed primal therapy at interconnected emotional, mental and physical levels, works to reactivate and draw to a focus the lines of force that have been invested in past involvement in life. The prize is genuine power.
The journey to freedom is individual and experiential. By the very nature of the feeling experience it is also intensive. The energy released is taken to a core level, nourishing the highest faculty of the self, and backed by sound spiritual discipline. In practical terms, the evolved person reveals an expanding focus of energy around a self capable of dealing not only with the practical and creative aspects of everyday life, but also with the intangible realities of universal life. The ransom price of Consciousness, as feeling, is a bonus in itself.
SUMMARY:
1. The purpose of human embodiment is experience.
2. The purpose of experience is evolution.
3. Evolution means the development of Consciousness.
4. Experience, evolution and consciousness depend on the quality and depth of feeling as sensation and emotion.
5. Feeling requires energy as vitality, and leads to creation of thought-forms and expressions of positive or negative nature.
6. Non-conscious feeling depletes energy and prevents us from perceiving reality as it is.
7. Conscious feeling circulates, refines energy and leads to greater Consciousness.
