The Secret is Feeling

By Karči Cole Kňazovický

Feeling is the secret to both Courses, ACIM and ACOL. Feeling is the secret to forgiveness. Feeling is the missing link to Everything—to God, union, dialogue, and to the peace that passes understanding.

This unseen yet felt part of us is misunderstood, avoided, controlled, manipulated, conditioned away, maligned, and denied. Yet it is the missing link to healing the over-stimulated spiritual mind—the mind that, as ACIM says, plays the game of “seek but do not find.” (And if found, would still not use what it has found due to this misalignment with feelings.) 

You may say, “I feel! Of course I do!” But do you really? Or are you actually imagining feelings through the mind? Obstructed receptivity to feeling is one of the major barriers to love’s presence.

In Luc Besson’s movie “Fifth Element,” the four classic elements – earth, air, fire and water — were just carved stones that needed to be ignited. What ignited them was an expression of their quality. The mind names feelings, but any feeling that has been given a name is very likely a mind-construct, tucked away in files of the ego. Who names feelings? Who condemns the feeling? Ego-mind.

I would say that ACIM and ACOL have four “elements” — thoughts, feelings, and heart, which together manifest as form. 

As in the movie, these four “elements” need ignition for real transformation to happen. ACIM trained us to dislodge the labels and set the mind free. ACIM is especially helpful to ignite the mind. Not just that, ACIM trained us to be present—a now-moment presence essential for ignition. But just to over-amp the mind with light is not enough. More light is not necessarily better. This happened to me at the beginning. I had so much light I was virtually blinded by it and my spiritual ego was enlightened (temporarily, thank God). 

ACOL is especially helpful to ignite the heart through its training to be in unconditional acceptance of feelings. Not to get lost in unevolved feelings, the emotions of the karma drama, but the true feelings of the heart. The feeling “body” ignites and powers the heart, which can then generate true feelings, feelings that are not labeled or controlled. And all this together illuminates the whole. This is why there is so much emphasis on feelings in ACOL.

Back to the movie. Even with the four elements ignited, the evil planet is still on its way to destroy life on earth. What stops it? A Supreme Being—in the movie, a woman. She is useless, however, unless she is—what?—truly loved.

How do we know we are truly loved? Remember when someone told you they love you but you just could not feel it? Or when they said “I love you” and melted you completely? What was the difference? Feeling. Feeling is that in which dialogue can begin—not just a chat, but true Dialogue. True communication happens when all four elements are ignited (enlightened) and deep intent to love is also present. Even a Supreme Being has to be loved to ignite the power surge that stops the evil planet from annihilating life on the earth. That’s one crazy movie with a profound message (hidden amongst a blizzard of bullets).

Since we were children we got the message to keep feelings hidden, unexpressed, until feelings shrunk into unknown entities. They are hidden but not gone, and they eventually bring about sickness in the body, or otherwise haunt us in dreams and dark nights of the soul, or just make us feel shy and ashamed when they emerge in tears and embarrassment. (Now we can stay home and send out posts via social media that never make us too visible to others.) Unpleasant feelings are kept safely at bay.

How often people apologize for tears, yet they are more real than ever! These are all signs that feelings are not OK, not loved, unacceptable to the predominant “spiritual” mind, the seat of power and control. Ego-mind without feeling causes disease. Align mind with true feelings and disease is no more. This is the true power of forgiveness.

So let’s address true forgiveness and watch it work. If a situation that needs forgiveness shows up, it’s already too late. It has already demonstrated the unforgiving mind in action. To a truly healed mind, even the idea of forgiving by overlooking untruth is not necessary because nothing appears to need to be forgiven. All forgiveness is self-forgiveness and is known by its results. Sound far-fetched? Here is the missing link and why feeling is the secret.

When any situation confronts you, addressing the situation and then forgiving it is not enough because that which called it in stays unchanged. Every situation is only there because you hold something that draws it to you. If you simply use some line of thinking to help you “forgive,” you play a mind game on yourself. Soon a similar scenario with new actors arises. The same hidden, unloved feeling magnetizes it to you.

It is here that forgiveness has not been understood. The hard part is to accept the feelings that any situation triggers. Feelings are slower than the thoughts. The mind rushes in to tell you what to think about the feeling. It may tell you that “feelings are not real.” This is the ego-mind’s effort to save itself. It’s a miracle when one can even determine what the true feeling is—THAT is a miracle, because feelings don’t talk. They feel! And the mind is determined not to give credence to true feelings. But as ACOL says, there is “no escape” from that which has been ejected, rejected, repressed, suppressed. They must be recognized and integrated into the Self.

Here is the hard part: When a true feeling is felt, you have to see what is your attitude toward this NOW-felt feeling. Your attitude will not be comfortable. Yet it is in this place where true forgiveness must take place, and where acceptance plays its major role.

The ego-mind is in unconditional non-acceptance of true feelings. You have to find acceptance even for non-acceptance! When ego-mind doesn’t accept feelings, it puts a subtle and at times not-so-subtle pressure to hold feelings down until they become unseen. Then the mind makes false feelings to replace the truth of who we are with its substitutes. When asked what you feel, your ego-mind will say, very quickly, “angry” or “sad” or “scared.” Yet your true feelings stay covered over, unexpressed, and cannot shift to the pure joy that is your true nature.

How do you heal this non-acceptance of true feelings? Remember, unconditional non-acceptance will accept NO true feelings. Just telling yourself “I accept” doesn’t work. It takes a while to truly accept your own non-acceptance but it’s doable if one can stay honest and look at the depth of your non-acceptance.

Caution! The spiritual ego will say “of course I accept.” It doesn’t. At some point, though, when the impossible situation is clearly acknowledged, your own true compassion for yourself sets in. This is the way to true healing because it is true acceptance. This undoes the fortress, the thorny crown, of non-acceptance. Non-acceptance will be no more. Once you genuinely accept—accept even your mind that had been determined to be non-accepting—loving yourself even for the mind’s innocent blindness, this ego-disease will slowly give way to a presence of heart.

Then your mind shifts to genuine acceptance and eventually to unconditional acceptance of feelings. Only then will feelings receive the love they deserve. Only then will they gain life and begin to flow upwards. Without this movement comes aging, sickness, seriousness, loss of playfulness, spiritual righteousness, and in many cases constant regurgitating of the spiritual musings and texts that don’t really make sense unless feeling gives them movement and the release that comes from revelation. Allowance of this movement IS the resurrection. The barriers to love’s presence have been dropped. Giving and receiving have become one for you. You need do nothing, for any “doing” will stop the flow. Mary is resurrected along with Jesus.

When feelings are free they no longer draw to yourself situations needing forgiveness because the magnetic flow can only draw to it what is like unto itself, which is Love, the only Reality. True self-forgiveness is complete. There is nothing to forgive. Feelings have become equal—and essential—partners in Creation.

This flow IS always (and in all ways) New. New in constant freshness and undefinable grandeur. And now new again. And just now new again. Forever new. Feel it? Know it in every part of your being and even as you don’t recognize it because it’s being born again right now, and now. Giving and Receiving have become One.

Karči (Cole) Kňazovický is a classical guitar teacher, composer, and performer, a couples therapist, and a professional facilitator of men’s groups and mixed gender polarity work with a focus on masculinity. Cole extensively explored deep feelings through channeled material called Right Use of Will and is also a long-term teacher of ACIM focused particularly on the Workbook as a means of feeling application. Cole says: “At first I read ACOL like a book, but at some point the book came alive in my feelings. How so? I don’t know. It just did. It began to translate into feelings and the feeling began to correspond. The inner Dialogue began.” Cole’s ten year-old son, Juni, lives with him in a community near Byron Bay, Australia.