Who decides what feels good and bad?

[4201]

If I understand properly, whenever I have an idea, I can use the ultimate tester of ideas, feeling, to tell me if I reasonate with that idea or not. This means no over conceptualization is required anymore, I can just feel my way through life.

But now, what will this feeling lead me to? If I am a hundred percent of the time following feeling and I end up spending all my time cutting wood, does that mean cutting wood is the meaning of life? 

It begs the question, who decides what feels good and what feels bad? Either the thing that controls feeling is thoughts or there exist a thing that is not a thought.

If it's my belief of "what is good" that defines "what feels good", then isn't this utterly circular? And if so why do following thinking doesn't feel good if it's thinking that defines what feel good?

[tsuki]

4 hours ago, 4201 said:

If I understand properly, whenever I have an idea, I can use the ultimate tester of ideas, feeling, to tell me if I reasonate with that idea or not. This means no over conceptualization is required anymore, I can just feel my way through life.

Yes.

4 hours ago, 4201 said:

But now, what will this feeling lead me to? If I am a hundred percent of the time following feeling and I end up spending all my time cutting wood, does that mean cutting wood is the meaning of life? 

The meaning of life is Love, which is what you feel when you are aligned with Truth.

4 hours ago, 4201 said:

It begs the question, who decides what feels good and what feels bad? Either the thing that controls feeling is thoughts or there exist a thing that is not a thought.

There is no decision present. Feelings, by themselves, are either aligned or misaligned with You, the truth. That is resistance, or lack thereof. Resistance is created when you reject, or split, yourself from the Truth. That is when conceptual "I" is created. You are looking at this whole thing as an "I" asking questions from your limited POV and having expectations about the snake that really is a rope.

@Nahm may be the right person to answer your questions.

Edited November 18, 2020 by tsuki

[Gesundheit]

"You" is not the body. A thing can feel good to "you", but bad to your body. It all depends on how in touch you are with your body. If you ever become the body completely, you will never feel bad ever again. The only reason for bad feelings is the friction that may exist between mind and body. (same thing for good feelings).

[4201]

11 hours ago, tsuki said:

The meaning of life is Love, which is what you feel when you are aligned with Truth.

Love is the absence of so this is the same as saying life has no meaning. Which honestly "feels right".

 

11 hours ago, tsuki said:

There is no decision present. Feelings, by themselves, are either aligned or misaligned with You, the truth. That is resistance, or lack thereof. Resistance is created when you reject, or split, yourself from the Truth. That is when conceptual "I" is created. You are looking at this whole thing as an "I" asking questions from your limited POV and having expectations about the snake that really is a rope.

If Truth is awareness why do "doing stuff" is aligned with truth?

[4201]

9 hours ago, Gesundheit said:

"You" is not the body. A thing can feel good to "you", but bad to your body. It all depends on how in touch you are with your body. If you ever become the body completely, you will never feel bad ever again. The only reason for bad feelings is the friction that may exist between mind and body. (same thing for good feelings).

Ok but then what is the meaning of the body? What does the body makes "feel good"? (Survival and reproduction probably.) If any divergence from "what the body makes feel good" results in feeling bad, isn't the meaning of the body the same as the meaning of life? 

[Gesundheit]

21 hours ago, 4201 said:

Ok but then what is the meaning of the body? What does the body makes "feel good"? (Survival and reproduction probably.) If any divergence from "what the body makes feel good" results in feeling bad, isn't the meaning of the body the same as the meaning of life? 

I'm not sure I understand your question, but I have a theory for the human psyche.

The theory assumes separation in the human psyche in two categories; conscious and unconscious. The conscious is unconditional, slow, present, of little capacity for storage, and aware. The unconscious is conditioned, extremely quick, and of extremely large capacity for storage.

In essence, no external or internal events should have any emotional effects. Emotions emerge due to the qualitative differences between the conscious and the unconscious. When an event occurs, it affects both sections. But the reactions in each section differ, again due to the qualitative differences.

Let's take physical pain for example. What is it actually? One way to define pain is that it's an extremely condensed form of psychological fear. Certain undesired events keep reoccurring. The mind is in resistance. Fear emerges. It keeps accumulating and accumulating until it turns into physical pain. This pain is a fear strong enough to make the mind figure out ways to move away from it, because the initial fear wasn't enough. So what once was superficial fear/conscious emotional pain, now after decades or maybe even lifetimes of conditioning has become deep fear, which is unconscious physical pain. The body and the psyche store that information in the unconsciousness because it's much faster and has much more capacity than consciousness. Now, if you want to unpack that conditioning, you can, at least theoretically. But you'd have to shift everything to the conscious and away from the unconscious. I don't know if that's possible, but I don't see why not. After all, it's all one thing, not two. Duality is imaginary.

[Mu_]

On 11/17/2020 at 10:18 PM, 4201 said:

If I understand properly, whenever I have an idea, I can use the ultimate tester of ideas, feeling, to tell me if I reasonate with that idea or not. This means no over conceptualization is required anymore, I can just feel my way through life.

But now, what will this feeling lead me to? If I am a hundred percent of the time following feeling and I end up spending all my time cutting wood, does that mean cutting wood is the meaning of life? 

It begs the question, who decides what feels good and what feels bad? Either the thing that controls feeling is thoughts or there exist a thing that is not a thought.

If it's my belief of "what is good" that defines "what feels good", then isn't this utterly circular? And if so why do following thinking doesn't feel good if it's thinking that defines what feel good?

If it feels good, it feels good.  If it feels bad, it feels bad.  The meaning of life is a whole other topic.  If your trying to figure out why things feel good or bad, well look into this for yourself in your own experience, there isn't a answer that fits All.

Sometimes things feel bad because its the way in which you look at life or a circumstance.  Sometimes things feel bad because your flesh was cut, sometimes because somethings missing in your diet or sleeping patterns, other times its because of matters beyond understanding,  

[4201]

1 hour ago, Mu_ said:

Sometimes things feel bad because its the way in which you look at life or a circumstance.  Sometimes things feel bad because your flesh was cut, sometimes because somethings missing in your diet or sleeping patterns, other times its because of matters beyond understanding,  

Why do things feel bad when you have a limiting perspective? Because this limitation is a nuisance to survival. All the other examples you give are also divergence form survival.

So is survival the purpose of the body? I think so. I think my problem was to turn that into a problem. Maybe it's ok that it's all survival. In the end that's just a perspective. I just can't find something that contradicts that perspective.

 

@Gesundheit This is an interesting perspective you offer on how to look at fear and pain, but all I'm really saying is "why?". Is body "just a thought" if feeling is alignment with how the body feels?

Perhaps my question can be simplified as "What is feeling?". 

 

I do realize I'll have to search on my own. Opening this thread expecting to get from others what I can look at is a bit silly.

Edited November 19, 2020 by 4201

[Mu_]

46 minutes ago, 4201 said:

Why do things feel bad when you have a limiting perspective? Because this limitation is a nuisance to survival. All the other examples you give are also divergence form survival.

So is survival the purpose of the body? I think so. I think my problem was to turn that into a problem. Maybe it's ok that it's all survival. In the end that's just a perspective. I just can't find something that contradicts that perspective.

 

@Gesundheit This is an interesting perspective you offer on how to look at fear and pain, but all I'm really saying is "why?". Is body "just a thought" if feeling is alignment with how the body feels?

Perhaps my question can be simplified as "What is feeling?". 

 

I do realize I'll have to search on my own. Opening this thread expecting to get from others what I can look at is a bit silly.

I don't know if there is a objective "why" to anything in which you can track "some-thing" back to its origin, and in it find a note on it in which it says why it exists and why its doing what its doing.

For exploration sake, maybe practice dropping the why.  Just notice the desire to know why arise, and instead of getting into a series of emotions and thoughts around "why" just see what happens to not answer.  Try this here and there over a number days to weeks and see if its a quality you like.  I found at a certain time of my life, why's where just a form of suffering and constant control, was a real breakthrough learning to let myself not need to know why, and just let it be ok not to know either way.

[Gesundheit]

8 hours ago, 4201 said:

"What is feeling?"

It's awareness of change/movement within time.

[4201]

On 19/11/2020 at 2:06 PM, Mu_ said:

I don't know if there is a objective "why" to anything in which you can track "some-thing" back to its origin, and in it find a note on it in which it says why it exists and why its doing what its doing.

For exploration sake, maybe practice dropping the why.  Just notice the desire to know why arise, and instead of getting into a series of emotions and thoughts around "why" just see what happens to not answer.  Try this here and there over a number days to weeks and see if its a quality you like.  I found at a certain time of my life, why's where just a form of suffering and constant control, was a real breakthrough learning to let myself not need to know why, and just let it be ok not to know either way.

Being honest, the real reason for the "why" is to justify the idea that "I need a girlfriend" because the purpose of the body is survival and reproduction and thus the body will never let me feel good (and thus be happy) if I don't reproduce. I know that's a fallacy, but I don't see it. I still believe that fallacy and I suffer from that.

Thank you for guiding me toward deconstructing the why.

23 hours ago, Gesundheit said:

It's awareness of change/movement within time.

I wish I could see things the way you do but I'll have to get there first

Edited November 21, 2020 by 4201