Finding the divide between feeling and emotion

Language can be so tricky because words are in many ways pointers, and often we use the same word to point to very different realities. The word dream is a case in point.  It can refer to the experience you had last night sleeping or to the ideal scenario you would like to see unfold in your life.  Neither usage is wrong, and with a little probing, the usage of dream seldom leads to confusion.

The word feeling is not so simple.  What are you feeling?

As of late I’ve been posting on the psychological functions of the ego, those tools that help us navigate our conscious lives.  One of these four tools is “feeling.” To get a grasp of what this might mean it is essential to discriminate the function called feeling from the emotions.

For emotions it helps me to think of a definition I seldom see these days, but which highlights the relationship of the emotions to the instincts: namely, the passions.  Our emotional life tends to happen to us.  We certainly feel our anger, our joy, our resentment, our sorrow.

The feeling function is not the experience of our emotions (again, this is Jung’s psychological topography I’m charting).  Instead, this tool of the ego is that manner of engagement with the world that makes value judgments.  I feel she is trustworthy, I feel that painting is a masterpiece while that one is not.  In it’s highest forms of development it’s quite sublime: empathy.

The challenge now appears.  Once we arrive at empathy, we have found compassion, and of course love.  And it as if the serpent is biting it own tail.   We all recognize the emotional quality of falling in love.  Perhaps the best I can offer is that the emotions operate autonomously of the ego, which must contend with them.  The feeling function is one way the ego engages the world.

All this  reminds me a lesson a teacher once shared: The problem with sharing knowledge about spiritual realities is simple.  When your out walking your dog and you see something across the field, you quickly point it out to him.  One’s ineptitude becomes clear as your dog intently stares at your finger.