Jeff Foster: Why Your Feelings doesn’t Belong to You

According to Jeff Foster, it is so normal for us to identify ourselves with our feelings and to think about them as something belonging to us (“my” anger, “my” pain, etc.), that we cannot understand what is really happening.

Feelings are not something we “produce”, but phenomena appearing in the space of our consciousness in a way that is completely independent from our will. You can’t decide that in a while you will be afraid or feel pain using your mind.

The problem is that you are used to identify yourself with your feelings, sensations and thoughts and to label them, in order to separate the good from the bad ones.

Pain isn’t good, so I must not feel it!

This brings you suffering, because you receive as negative phenomena what often are simply neutral. But also because you compare things that are too different: one real (the feeling of pain), the other unreal (the idea that you couldn’t feel pain).

We must learn to see consciousness as an open space, where phenomena (feelings, sensations, perceptions, thoughts, …) come in, stay for a lapse of time and then go out. But in order to do so, we have to give up the idea of a separate self, a self which has so many neends to satisfy!

These are some reasons that make the teachings of people like Jeff Foster so preciuous. Foster is a leading figure in nonduality, the philosophical, spiritual, and scientific understanding of non-separation and fundamental intrinsic oneness.

Nonduality will have its momentum soon, during SAND14, the Science and Nonduality Conference 2014, on the next 22-27 October at San Jose, in California.

Readings

Jeff Foster, The Peace That Cannot Be Destroyed