A nice feeling

I love this quote from Syd. I think it's the only saying that comes close to an 'instruction', that I ever came across in the three principles community.

Since being around the 3P I heard this again and again and it's interesting for me to notice how the way I'm hearing it keeps changing.

In the beginning I skimmed right past the 'nice feeling' part.

Listening to truth sounded way more interesting. I pretty much thought it meant listening to someone else, telling me about truth. And I believed I needed to listen very carefully and try to understand what they were saying ...

But over time something changed.

When I think about it now 'listening to truth' to me means listening from a quiet mind. I could be listening to a 3P talk, I could be listening to the sounds of my surroundings, I could be listening to my husband telling me a story about work. I could be listening to what's going on inside my own head. No matter what I'm listening to - when I listen from a quiet inner space, I'm listening to truth. I'm listening to 'what is', without contaminating it with my personal judgment.

And I noticed that his kind of listening comes with a feeling of openness, of love, of simply being with what is.

There it is, the 'nice feeling'. 

When I first heard all the talk about 'looking for a nice feeling' I thought 'yeah, yeah, of course it's nice to be in a nice feeling, but so what?' I want to get somewhere, I need to understand stuff! 

It took a while for me to really hear what Syd keeps saying about all the answers lying in the nice feeling. I think at some point I saw it by accident. I was struggling with the same question for months, it kept coming up and driving me nuts, going round and round in my head. Something about my experience of pain. At some point I got so fed up with trying to figure it out, asking Chana (and everybody else I came across) about it and simply not understanding their answers, that I finally gave up. It occurred to me that maybe I could be in peace with not understanding it.

And suddenly I had an experience of getting so quiet, that the question was gone.

It's not that I had an answer, it was simply a space where the question wasn't important. Actually the question didn't even make sense or have meaning from that inner space.

And then, from this space of quiet, of freedom from the question, answers started showing up. Not necessarily the ones I thought I was looking for, but really really great ones.

Now, that really got me curious, I had never seen that before. 

From then on, when I was struggling with something, sooner or later it would occur to me to simply stop trying to figure it out. And instead wait and see, what it will look like and what might come up, when I rest in the not knowing.

I found out that it's a very reliable system. When I stop trying, when I drop out of my thinking, I fall into a more peaceful quiet feeling and from there fresh thinking/wisdom shows up. Pretty simple in a way.

So yesterday I heard Syd's quote again and I suddenly realized 'listening to truth' and 'looking for a nice feeling' are actually the same thing! They always go together!

When I'm in a nice loving feeling, I listen to truth. When I listen to truth with a quiet mind, I fall into a nice loving feeling.

Ha! I love that!