Session 4, assignment 5

Fields of Feeling (KTS 381-383)

This short chapter considers the influence of feeling in experience.  It employs the image of a ‘field’ in a similar way as have recent readings: the field is both influenced by and an influence upon all that we experience and we can benefit from looking within the content of whatever arises for the presence of this overall field.  This looking amounts to taking a step back from being helplessly dragged along by the content of whatever arises and the consequence that we then have no say in the elements of the possible we can experience.

This chapter adds several new perspectives.  Instead of a single field–which I always considered must be the local representative of Great Space in its holistic presence in our lives–there are now individual fields, each corresponding to particular domains of the senses and other faculties (partly physical, partly ways of knowing) where each has its own connection with feeling and emotion.  And instead of one great field sending out individual “field marshals” to accommodate each kind of engagement in the human realm, this chapter speaks of ‘field determinations”.

         “Determination operates within each field as the ‘self-evidence’ of knowledge.”  KTS 383

This is very encouraging.  It suggests that all the specific manifestations of our experience, as we engage the opportunities of our lives, in their very specificity are determined through the operation of knowledge.

In the readings of the past several weeks, there has been the similar suggestion that whatever appears is more than a barrier, since all apparent limits are the face of what has no intrinsic limits.

This chapter goes a step further” announcing that even the most conditioned elements of experience—such as emotionality and the operation of the physical sense faculites—are the presence of “knowledge”.  In fact, without such knowledge, nothing could be specific, determined, and available for us to experience.