If Knowing is Acting, how do we go beyond the intellect in order to really feel, understand, and truly know what the sages know so we can act accordingly?
If you ask the “how” or the process, I won’t be able to tell you in a precise way.
The process is different for everybody.
What I can only say is based on my version of the story which, naturally, is based on personal experience.
The “how” of every transformation necessarily involves the emotions.
Emotion is more powerful than the intellect. Emotions move the body, whereas the intellect may or may not. Intense emotions penetrate every fiber, every cell of our being, causing the transformation of these very cells; the transformation of our physical as well as energetic bodies.
How potent emotion really is?
How do you think people like Hitler are able to influence, as if in a spell, large numbers of people including undoubtedly highly intelligent ones? People whose I.Q. are even much higher than Hitler himself? He appealed to these people’s emotions.
How do you think political organizations and governments, religious institutions, capitalist companies and the media, stir and play with people’s emotions to advance their interests? By evoking fears, insecurities and even sympathy.
How do you think highly intelligent and technologically advanced aliens, such as the Greys, look up to us, very much desirous of that one thing that we have – our ability to feel? You would think that these advanced beings, on their way to greater evolutionary heights, fully equipped with high intelligence and technological prowess, would not be bothered to take an interest on little dramatic earthlings like us. But they do because of what we have which they had long killed within themselves in their unbalanced quest for technological advancement.
We can learn from their experience as they learn from us.
If emotions can be used in very destructive ways, it can also be used in very positive and transformative ways.
Deaths, separations and breakups profoundly affect us that their effect on us are almost always life-changing. Emotion is so powerful that people in love go crazy and it changes their body chemistry.
Emotion is a very effective tool for personal transformation which may eventually lead to that which we seek – enlightenment.
To use emotion for personal transformation, it is crucial that one is able to feel deeply and intensely. And you feel deeply when you fully engage with the world. You interact with other people who serve to trigger within you deep and intense emotional reactions that almost always lead to changes in your life.
In spirituality, this technique or process seems to be the opposite of the other path which involves withdrawing from the world. That path of withdrawing from the world, a path which many in the past have taken, may actually be a longer path.
It was after seeing the truth, after he was enlightened, that the Buddha aptly advised his followers to take the Middle Path.
In my personal process, I am both a recluse and a “party girl”. I immerse myself fully into the world and then extricate myself to contemplate on my experiences and extract the insights I got from them. I follow my passions and whatever it is that is summoning me. This oftentimes requires boldness and vulnerability as I can get hurt and wounded in the process. But each time I come out of an emotionally charged experience, I gain more invincibility and a new level of illumination.
So feel deeply. Live passionately in the world. Play hard. Taste fully the flavors the world has to offer. Seek balance between the two extreme paths. You do not have to deny yourself one thing in order to get another thing.
Finally, do not wait until you “know” what the sages know before acting on their deep realizations and teachings. Because deep inside you, something already knows what the wise ones know.
Allu Kuy: The Storyteller 