Feeling Is Just a Feeling, It Does Not Construct a Person

Actually the ‘feel like a person’ is never true because there is no feeling like a person. A feeling is just a feeling, it does not construct a person. What we usually say (colloquially like that) is that, there is a feeling there which can seem a bit constricted and I have an interpretaHon or thought about it. Now the combinaHon of that thought and feeling someHmes we call that mixture, that soup, a person. But there is no feeling like a person. There is no feeling like anything but suppose that we say ‘Okay, there is anger, there is lust, there is hunger, all of these feelings are there.’ But there is no feeling like ‘person.’ It’s just a term we use like ‘I just feel so much like a person’ where we are saying that there is a sort of constricted feeling usually and something which is saying ‘this should not be here’ or ‘I should not have said that’ or ‘this one should not have said this to me’ or some sort of interpretaHon mixed with that feeling; that is what we call the person. That’s why it’s very nice to just to see someHmes. Because of our mental interpretaHon of ‘what is happening to us’ hardly ever matches even the phenomenal play. That’s why many Hmes I say, you don’t explain, describe. By the Hme I hear your explanaHon, you are already far away from what, what even the phenomenal descripHon of something is. Isn’t it? You can say ‘I have… all my life all this has happened to me, I wonder when this will stop… when do I… when will these feelings will go away?’ Already so mixed up in the explanaHon in the story. Then we say ‘Okay, but what is actually happening?’ You are like ‘Ahh, I feel this constricted feeling in my chest.’ How big is it? Ahh, it’s very strong, it’s very strong! Okay, how strong? No, but all my life I have had this and when my this used to happen and that used to happen, it’s just doesn’t go… I have dealt with this. No, no but how strong? Stay with me. Then ‘Ahh, yeah, it’s here no, it’s here since this morning. No, no, not this morning.’ Now! What’s happening now? It’s here. How big is this space in which it’s happening? I find no boundary. It’s immense. Then how can this feeling… as strong as the mind may be saying it is, how is it actually hurHng that Being? It isn’t actually. So at the level of descripHon, it’s very simple to pluck but if I have to deal with it at the story level it’s so much more complicated because then we are dealing with a full, full history, with full set of condiHons and all of that. [Smile] That’s why I say ‘You don’t explain, you just describe.’ Because in our explanaHon we have inserted our false ‘I’ into it. We have inserted the full baggage of the full story into it. And then… in India, that story could be mulH-life Hme, not just this life Hme. [Smiles]