Enlightening the Passions - Day 13 (Clear Delight)

One must have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star. -- Friedrich Nietzsche

One of the truly aspects of this study turns out to be the malleability of feelings - or maybe it isn't the feelings themselves but the way the are perceived. But I guess, I don't have to decide what is what here, and simply be with what I experience, and how I experience it.

Take for instance jealousy. I've now had quite some experience with that feeling as you know. I've known the feeling when it's very low key, nothing more than a tiny "pang!" in the art, nothing more than a mere irritation than can be easily hosted to a violently destructive flare that robs me of almost all my capacities to move, think or do anything.

Yesterday I was telling about the possibility that one and the same feeling can have a distrustful or curious face. And without going too much into why I think this is so again I've had the experience today of feeling the same feeling that in one circumstance I called jealousy and that, as I found out, can also be called intense sensuous joy. I say that because feeling intense sensuous joy there was this amazing flare inside of me that, and this only showed so in my reflections on it, was almost the same as in jealousy.

It reminds me of a very revelatory experience I had more than 2 decades ago.
I had fallen in love with a wonderful character, someone who wiped me off my feet, as they say. And I was sitting on a bench near an Amsterdam canal, still reveling in the feeling - that was mutual to my good fortune - when suddenly it dawned on me that the feeling of "falling in love", or  this wonderful romantic feeling in my body actually felt exactly like advanced nervousness or stage-fright. Only as romantic feeling it was very desirable, and as stag-fright it was quite the opposite.
When I was with this girl it was also hard to be and express myself, just as when standing on stage or being afraid of what's next. Only "in love" with someone who was under the same spell it was just beautiful...

So most of today, especially the morning hours - but it's still there with me - there is this wonderful intensity of being, where your whole body tingles with delight in just feeling alive, there is this spaciousness in and around the head, there is this clear space everywhere and this moving with everything heart...
Having decided to be with my feelings today was utterly easy and pleasurable. It's like breathing this intoxicating stuff called air!

I don't want to make too much out of this (remember what I said about the rose cloud a few days ago?) but it seems to underline the basic idea that whatever feelings are in truth they seem to have deep similarities between their positive and negative expressions. I don't know, really, if curiosity and scepticism or sensuous intensity and jealousy are actually the same feeling, but it seems to make sense to me to see them as deeply interpenetrating phenomena.
The idea might help in times when the so called negative expression comes knocking on the door of my guesthouse, helping me to open the door wide and not only welcome them but be a good host to them as well.

But whatever might come out of this, it's wonderful and I wish you could be here with me :-)