You can experience emotions and then experience feelings about the emotions you just had.  Feelings about feelings.  You might fall in love, a good feeling but then feel very uncomfortable about being vulnerable, perhaps a bad feeling of fear.  Good, bad – we judge our feelings.

This judgment is an act of thinking; we impose a thought or series of thoughts retrospectively on to a feeling or symphony of feelings.  It’s natural to do this but the feelings themselves are often much more interesting than the thoughts about them.  From the viewpoint of exploring the Mysteries, the feelings, not the thoughts or judgments about them, are the crucial indicator.  The feelings about your feelings are just as important to be aware of as the original feelings.

You might love being in love.  You might hate being in love.  You might love someone and hate him or her at the same time.  To love being in love might be a symphony of “complex and known” feelings.  To hate being in love might be a symphony of “complex and unknown” feelings.  Love is likely to be a symphony of all four groups of feelings outlined  on the grid.

Some may not want to unpack the symphony of feelings we label “love” but feelings are never diminished or lessened by being looked at.  Where this lessening happens, some may feel disappointment at seeing the symphony change.  Their disappointment comes because they try to hang on to the feelings rather than let them go and trust in them returning, refreshed and renewed.  But we cannot hold on to our feelings anyway and because we cannot, no real harm comes from examining all our feelings.  Within the symphony of feelings called love there will almost certainly be an Edge feeling or bundle of Edge feelings.  These Edge feelings within the symphony of love are the best for exploring the Mysteries.  (The reason for this I will come back to at some stage in the future).

 In summary:  it is watching feelings that take you deeper into the Mysteries, not thinking about them.  The act of watching is the key that delivers real exploration as opposed to collecting ideas.  As far as the Mysteries are concerned,  no matter how clever the ideas are, they remain as empty as a house with no one living in it.  No matter how beautiful and large the house is, it remains empty if no one is home.