FEEL

Arthur Schopenhauer: "A man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants."

Our lives are woven together from three strands: feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. They wrap around one another so tightly that it's almost impossible to tell where one ends and another begins. A feeling becomes a thought. A thought becomes an action. An action produces another feeling. Like a Möbius strip, the inside and outside collapse into one continuous surface. The question is not which comes first. The question is: who is having them?

Feelings arrive differently than thoughts or behaviors. A thought often feels like something I can entertain or reject. A behavior is something I choose to perform. But feelings simply appear. Joy, grief, fear, love, or anxiety announce themselves before I have a chance to consent to them. They feel less like something I create than something I experience as part of my environment.

This distinction matters. Thoughts and behaviors are what I do with experience. Feelings are the experience itself. So who is doing the doing? I've come to think of that performer as something I call the Alleger.

The Alleger resembles what many traditions call the ego, but I think of it more as a persona, something like a carefully constructed mask built to give shape to the mystery of consciousness. It is the finite representative we point to whenever we say, "I."

Why do we construct it? Because existence without boundaries is terrifying. The world appears to consist of separate things with clear edges. We trust what can be named, measured, and contained. Yet our deepest nature resists all of those categories. As the Buddhists say, you can't hammer a nail into the sky.

Unable to grasp the mystery directly, we create something more manageable. We invent a finite identity that seems solid enough to carry us through the world and it works only because it alleges to be us completely. That identity is the Alleger.

The Alleger begins with the illusion that it has been separated from wholeness. From that belief arises desire, which is the constant attempt to recover what it imagines has been lost. It spends its life comparing itself to others, mirroring what it thinks others want, chasing possessions, achievements, relationships, certainty, and recognition in hopes that one more accomplishment will restore completeness.

But as the 19th century philosopher Schopenhauer puts it:
"A man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants."

The Alleger can choose between alternatives, but it cannot choose the desires that drive those choices. Those are always given to him by others. This is why feelings are so important. Feelings do not belong to the Alleger. They arise from somewhere deeper, from the unknowable source beneath the identity we've constructed. They are signals from the mystery itself, translated into a language we can experience but never fully understand. Although we might think we are the Alleger, we are actually the mystery, so feelings are like a message from the true self.

In that sense, every feeling is a gift. Not because every feeling is pleasant. Not because every feeling should be acted upon. But because every feeling reveals that something deeper than the constructed self is still alive within us.

The Alleger receives these feelings but does not create them. Its role is interpretation. Sometimes it translates them into thoughts and behaviors of love. Other times it distorts them into thoughts and behaviors that hurt others.

The key is that ultimately, the feeling itself is neutral, but our response is not. This is where freedom lives. Freedom is not the ability to stop feeling. It’s also not the ability to choose our behaviors. It is the gradual unveiling of the Alleger so that its seemingly automatic performances lose their authority. The more clearly we see the mask, the less completely we mistake it for ourselves.

The mystery beneath it remains unknowable. We will never possess our true self intellectually. But we can become more transparent to it. We can allow it to shine through our thoughts and behaviors rather than allowing the Alleger to hijack every feeling in service of its endless search for completion. The more the Alleger is broken down the better we can live as our true selves.

The goal, then, is not to destroy the Alleger, we need it. It is the identity that allows us to navigate the practical world. It pays our bills, remembers our names, raises our children, and keeps us alive. But it makes a terrible master. Our task is to care for it while refusing to let it define us. Which leads to a different question altogether. Instead of asking, "How can I feel better?"

Perhaps we should ask: What feelings do I want my presence to awaken in others?

If I can recognize my own feelings as gifts rather than threats, then perhaps I can translate them into behaviors that help others experience them. Perhaps I can become someone whose presence reminds another person that there is something deeper within them than the identity they've spent their life defending.

Maybe that is what it means to truly help another person. Not to solve their life. Not to remove their pain. But to create a space where they are free to feel. Because when we reduce life to feel, we momentarily step outside the story the Alleger tells about who we are. We stop trying to control the mystery and instead become available to it. We become ourselves fully, if even for a moment. It is the moment when excellence seems effortless.

Watch the greatest athletes, musicians, craftsmen, or leaders, and eventually you'll hear them describe their finest moments in the same way. They stop talking about thinking and begin talking about feeling. A baseball player no longer calculates the swing. A pianist no longer searches for the next note. A craftsman no longer consciously measures every movement of the chisel. A leader no longer recites principles from memory before making a difficult decision. Somewhere along the way, everything gives way to feel.

What we often call instinct, intuition, rhythm, flow, or "being in the zone" may be something deeper than unconscious competence. Perhaps it is the rare moment when the Alleger lets go. The identity that spent years learning finally becomes quiet enough for something beyond itself to move through it.

Feeling is not the destination. It is the doorway. And through that doorway waits the part of ourselves that can never be named, possessed, or understood. Only lived.
​
If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love THE ART OF WAR AND BASEBALL!! Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com