Each emotion has its own terrain, its own hallmark sensations, its own facial and somatic peculiarities, regardless of the necessarily fuzzy boundaries between it and other emotions. Even so, pervading the heart of every emotion is a singular kind of meta-emotion, a primordial feeling manifesting objectively as vital communicative force incarnate, and subjectively as the inherently aware (and thus self-illuminating) “sensation” of undifferentiated Being.

This feeling -- the feeling of Being -- never leaves us; we leave it, drift from it, forget it. Our attention easily wanders away, a multiheaded, suctorial browser fastening itself to an enormous array of objects, both inner and outer. Fasten-ation. Then our emotions become little more than overdramatized affect organized around an obsession with objects, the subjective center of which usually masquerades as us. Attention that is velcro’ed to objects (whether inner or outer) is attention that’s inattentive to us.

But still the feeling of Being persists. It doesn’t begin here and end there. It’s not in time, nor in space. It is, however, still a feeling -- not a feeling of anything in particular, but still a feeling. Being may appear to be its object, at least linguistically, but in fact is neither its object nor its subject.

That is, the feeling of Being is actually inseparable from Being -- to feel Being is, however slightly, to recognize oneself as Being. Such recognition, such primal intuition, makes possible the communication of the Incommunicable.

The feeling of Being is, in part, Love. Love without an object, Love without a second or opposite. Love that subsumes all, and excludes nothing. Love that is at once supremely Indifferent and immeasurably Compassionate.

This is not a paradox to Being. Paradox is simply the everyday mind’s reaction to -- and translation of -- the Mystery of Being. Intimacy with that Mystery leaves us knowing nothing and recognizing everything.

Where knowledge ends, we begin. Knowledge arises in us, but we arise in Being. And as Being. Over and over, yet always freshly, we ride the feeling of Being from the domain of knowing to the domain of not-knowing to the domain of What-Really-Matters, arriving where we began. Such sublime simplicity. Now.

Life makes sense when we stop trying to make it make sense.

Listen. What do you hear? What is the sound of sound? When there is no sound, what do you hear? When the walls, floor, roof all disappear, what of the room remains? When nothing -- no thing -- remains, what is still here? A radically epiphanous understanding -- too real to have meaning -- awaits animation, obliterating my would-be translations, all my words but instantly scattered confetti in endless sky.

The primary language of Being is Silence. Such Silence perhaps speaks most palpably and eloquently through the feeling of Being. Everything’s said without anything needed to be said. Silence then is the answer that dissolves every query, the answer that literally makes light of even the deepest question. Universes come and go; Silence remains.

And, it seems, so too does the feeling of Being.

Even now, no matter what your condition, emotional and otherwise, the feeling of Being runs through it and all of its permutations, like the string of a necklace through its beads. Sacred connection in the raw.

Get friendlier with whatever emotional state you are now in, get very friendly with it, divest it of its egoic agendas and ride it into the feeling of Being, until only What-Really-Matters remains. But what is That? Wrong question. Better to ask, at least initially: Where do all questions die? Where do all questions vanish without a trace?

Where something more real than answers seizes our attention by the heart, rendering us incapable of distraction.

When no answer is the answer, we simply live and breathe -- and are lived and breathed by -- the Mystery of Being, at first permitting Communion with That to consume us, and then permitting something even closer to Home, and then...

Let’s leave it at that.

Wingprints evaporating in boundless sky. An impossibly wild, mad poetry using what’s left of me to outwrite itself, these words less than the feeblest echo of it. The closer we get to IT, the less we know IT. And the less we know IT, the better we recognize IT. In such radical recognition, we are, however fleetingly, actually already Home, lit up in our little boat of consciousness and feeling, at once shipwrecked and safely moored.

When we invite our suffering onto the dancefloor, we are taking the hand, however leprous or clammy or shy, of our feeling self. If we won’t dance with that one, if we won’t touch and care for that one, we’ll simply reduce the feeling of Being to a concept, a goal, a mere abstraction on which to hook our spiritual ambition.

Dance with anger, and you might have to go a few rounds with rage, but eventually that rage may, if worked skilfully with, mutate into joy, the joy of being nakedly alive. Dance with fear, and you may have to spend some time with terror and maddening expectation, but keeping that dreaded one close to your heart will eventually bring about a miraculous transformation: The monster will fade, leaving a quality of loving acceptance that is but the human face of a Peace that surpasses all understanding. Dance with shame, and you might well have to take a spin in guilt’s sleazier hangouts, but staying there, befriending both the parental and childish sides of guilt, will divest it of its fear, until it is but shame unplugged, and then not even shame, but only forgiveness in its merciful purity.