the extra layer

There are many layers to the thinking and feeling process. We all know it to some extent. We all know that underneath the surface of a thought or feeling there is something else there too, but we don't always know what.

I'd like to turn things over for a moment and look at the process the other way around. I'd like to say that not underneath the feeling or thought, but superimposed over it there is something else there too, and we benefit from reckoning with it.

I'll also suggest that most of us don't reckon with it, but rather succumb to it. I'll set up a little duality for the length of this inquiry that reckoning and succumbing are opposite poles in how you might relate to the subject at hand: yourself.

Yourself is the extra layer. When a thought or feeling occurs, it comes with an additional piece over and above the raw experience of feeling or thinking. The additional piece happens very quickly, so quickly we seldom see it as additional. Try to now.

You can have a sensation, an emotion, or a thought without adding a senser, emoter, or thinker to any of them. They don't need an owner. All they require is complete acceptance of them as they occur. The owner is a form of resistance to them.

As I said, it all happens quickly, the thought occurs and before you know what's going on, the thought has successfully manufactured a sense of ownership and full belief in a self who is the agent, the one thinking. The thought produces that illusion.

It's a great revelation the first time you permit yourself to see this process for what it is: the extra layer. You become a witness of it for a while. You see that thoughts and feelings are going on and you don't need to become anyone on account of them.

You see they come and go whether you believe in yourself in relation to them or not. You see that believing in yourself in relation to them is succumbing, while suspending belief in yourself in relation to them is reckoning, and reckoning works better.

Why does reckoning work better? Because reckoning is acceptance. The thought or feeling comes and it wants you to believe in a self in relation to it. You don't do that, but rather you watch the thought, or feel the feeling, and they pass with that treatment.

If, on the other hand, you become the self they want, the thought or feeling persists until that self weakens and lets go. Until then, the thought or feeling rules your world view and your behavior, especially if you pretend or insist it doesn't.

Imagine what that means if the thought or feeling is negative or unpleasant. Imagine it's anger or judgment. If you become the self that is dormant in those passing experiences, they don't pass quickly at all, but malinger. You hate and judge.

If you don't become the self that is dormant in those passing experiences, they do pass quickly. The unpleasant vibration of anger is going on and you permit it to, but you don't lapse into the self it tries to create. You just feel it and let it be.

A lot of this information is counter-intuitive. You'd think becoming someone over a feeling or thought is the best way to relate to it most deeply, but the opposite is true. It's the means of avoiding it, not feeling it. It's adding an extra layer.

Your thoughts and feelings don't need an owner. They certainly want one and they push every button to manufacture one. It seems to be part of their life function to materialize an owner and hold onto it tightly. In fact, that's how they survive.

But you don't have to sustain them against your better interests. Your job isn't to martyr yourself to your feelings, thoughts, and sensations. Your job is to find your way back to the source of what you are and learn to abide there.

If you want that job, if that spiritual calling resonates for you, you'll hear what I'm saying in this inquiry and hopefully use it to see for yourself. You'll stop becoming someone just because a hard thought or feeling is occurring. Or a cherished one.

You'll reckon with that notion of self, the one that arises in relation to all the passing blips on the radar screen of your inner world. You'll see the blips as blips, not as you. You won't succumb to them in that way anymore. You won't add the extra layer.

The rest will take care of itself. You have to believe me on that one. If you stop adding the extra layer, you create a special kind of empty space in which the truth of who you are arises and blossoms without any further effort on your part.

Your job is not to make effort at that point, but rather to nurture the empty space. That's your job starting now. Nurture the empty space. Let thoughts and feelings come and go inside it and don't slow their passage by becoming their owner.

Feel the feelings, feel the sensations, but don't become their owner, the one who is feeling them. Think the thoughts, but don't become their champion, the one who is having them. They don't need a champion or owner. They just want one for survival.

Now what do you want? If you want to abide in the deepest truth of who you are, which isn't a who, you have to start questioning all the who's. If you'd rather be a who, you'll do that until your attitude changes. Whose attitude? Exactly!