This chapter's heading might seem a bit off the wall. However, before I can share more of the tips I employ to maintain my happiness levels at about 90 per cent good, 90 per cent of the time, it is just as important that you get Precept 3
as it was to get Precepts 1 and 2.
Precepts 1, 2 and 3 are indispensable. The others are important but not mandatory. Consequently, I will use a different colour for all those that follow. Please make sure that you really do get the precepts in red. But more, I ask you to revise them, practise them ... work them in your lives as though you were training in athletics. Take them off these pages, off your computer or wherever you're reading them now, and put them into your head and heart.
This precept says that we must know what we are feeling, rather than how we are feeling. You might already know and practice this, but it can't hurt to revise, so please read on.
Illusions we live by
Please take a look at this picture:
It's a rabbit, correct? No, it's a duck. No, it's a rabbit. Or a duck. We're all familiar with optical illusions. Our eyes are not perfect. Our brains aren't perfect. We can be tricked, as individuals, and even as whole cultures.
And this shows a spiral, doesn't it?
No, they are concentric circles. Trace around any one with a pencil and see.
(To find more optical illusions, click here, but after you get this chapter, OK? There's also a great set of illusions here.)
We live with many illusions. You and I have a profound understanding that Planet Earth is a sphere, more or less. And when we are thinking about space travel, or even international air travel, we conceive of it as spherical. perhaps even when we watch the TV news, we are in a mind-set that all those news items are happening 'around the globe'.
But just take a walk outside, or drive to the supermarket, and our world ceases to be on a ball; we are now on an earth as flat as that conceived of before Columbus.
Here's another illusion we all live with. We know from childhood that the earth revolves around the sun. Does this really seem the way it is when we watch a sunrise or sunset? Despite our knowledge, we still tend to see the sun come up and go down. It's all illusion.
I presume you are now sitting on a chair. A solid chair. No you're not. You, and I, are sitting on mostly empty space. We all know that; the space between the atoms is far greater than the size of the atoms themselves, and the atoms are just energy. We rarely recognise it, though. We live happily with the illusion of solid matter. There are lots of these illusions that are part of everyday functioning for normal human beings.
Emotional illusion
For some unknown reason, most of us (I think probably all, but how could I know) live with an illusion about our emotions. I suspect it is not so much a cultural phenomenon, as something all human beings share.
Unless we have a particular belief about some unproven power of 'vibes' transferring between us and things, or us and other people, most of us, I feel sure, know that emotions are felt in the body. These feelings occur via a whole complex of chemical and electrical reactions. There is an overwhelming body of research to support our understanding. Without this knowledge, most of modern biology and other sciences would not make sense.
Certainly we know that our emotions are in our bodies, but that's not how we behave, is it? Don't they seem to us to be maybe in our bodies, sure, but also 'somewhere' outside us?
Do we not look at a lovely tree at a distance, and somehow 'feel' that the tree's beauty, and our feeling of the beauty, are not only within us, but somewhere between us and the tree?
Another illusion we all seem to labour under is that other people, or circumstances, make our emotions 'happen'. (We will explore more of this later, but here I must say, most emphatically, that we make entirely our own feelings happen, mostly subconsciously. Nothing outside our flesh does
– at all.)
The illusions are strong. We even have expressions that perpetuate them, such as:
"Sandra hurt my feelings."
"John makes me feel young again."
"Bob Marley turns me on."
"Winning the lottery made Laura happy."
"Jennifer
Lopez bores me."
"That idiot makes me so mad!"
"I can't pay the rent, and that depresses me."
In fact, all of the emotions referred to in these examples are entirely generated by us within our own meat –
our nervous system (especially the brain), our endocrine system, our
lymphatic system – the whole miraculous complex of compound chemicals that we call the body.
Fortunately, although the English language has limited emotional symbology, it actually does contain words and expressions that relate to the bodily presence of our emotions: gut feeling; haven’t got the stomach for it; spineless; hot under the collar; tense; heartless, and so on.
Whenever we feel like we are on an emotional roller coaster, where is this roller coaster actually taking place? Clearly, it is all in our bodies, not in the air around us, nor outer space. It just appears that way sometimes. If you consider this, I'm sure you'll agree, it's really in the chemicals that make up our bodies, but it seems to be in the air.
So we need to tune into our bodies' feelings quite precisely. Once we can internalise, at a deep, 'gut' or 'heart' level, the truth that our emotions are physical phenomena within our personal 'chemistry sets,' we are well on the way to being able to act as our own alchemists and quite quickly become masters of our own emotions.
Not the label, the body feeling
By the way, it is absolutely essential to separate the label we give emotions, from the feelings themselves. I ask myself "What am I feeling?" because it is more useful to me than "How am I feeling?" I need to know what I am actually feeling within my body as my emotional barometer fluctuates.
The goal is to feel our bodies so precisely, so attentively, that when we have an emotion, we know where and how it is occurring in our bodies. We would do well to cultivate an inner dialog something like this: "It’s not up in the sky, so where exactly is this feeling? Is it in my arms, abdomen, upper chest, neck, or a combination of these? Does my face feel warmer and redder? Is there a flow of some chemicals to the top of my shoulders, or do my hands feel somehow different? If so, what part of the hands?" And so on.
Words like 'angry,' ‘sad,' 'joyful,' 'reverent,' 'contented' and so on are merely convenient labels. They help us name our true feelings. Just as a gardener needs to intimately know the plants themselves and not just their names, the answers to our questions about our own emotions are better in terms of sensation rather than labels.
Working backwards
The mind, the body and the emotions are all interlinked and each affects the other. What we do with our minds influences what we do with our bodies, and vice versa. For example, first we decide to paint a picture, then our bodies do it; we pick up a paintbrush, and we start thinking like a painter.
What we do with our emotions affects our minds, and vice versa. We feel anxious, and our thoughts become like a swarm of bees:
(Feelings 
thoughts)
We think of ourselves as funny, and we start feeling funny :
(ThoughtsFeelings)
What we do with our bodies affects our emotions, and vice versa. We slump our shoulders and faces in a posture of depression, and we feel depressed:
(BodyFeelings)
We are feeling bliss and our breathing, heart rate and posture change to ‘bliss’ mode:
(FeelingsBody)
