The Primary Sensation

from Listen Deep in My Heart Itself

"In every moment when you are motivated to seek, the root of the motivation is a sensation. That root-sensation is the self-contraction. It is the avoidance of relationship. If you examine that root-sensation and feel it, you can effectively practice the “conscious process” and “conductivity”, and feel beyond it. That practice eliminates the search. Therefore, there are two aspects of your practice in My Company. There is the primary process I have just Described to you. And, secondary to it, there is all the proper discipline you must apply to your habit of seeking and the circumstance of you life.

The core of the primary process is self-understanding, or the awareness of the sensation that is characteristic of every moment and that motivates every kind of seeking and that makes the moment complicated, stressful, and difficult. Even in pleasurable moments, the sensation is there. You tend to allow both pleasure of the pleasurable moments and the pain or the difficulty of the painful or difficult moments to override your awareness of this consistent sensation, which arises previous to both pleasure and pain, or distress. It is this sensation that must be located, or observed, and felt beyond.

And observing the self-contraction at its root is the core of the self-transcending process.

Instead of truly, consistently, moment to moment observing and feeling beyond this knot, however, you tend to ride in the periphery of your search, in the emotions associated with it, and in the objects, others, ideas, whatever, that you are pursuing or to which you are attached. Therefore, you are only dramatizing. Instead of locating the primary sensation and dealing with it and feeling beyond it, you remain embedded in these peripheral activities, which are only the results of sensation, the original knot, which can be observed directly in any moment, in every moment.

The core of self-understanding is to locate and surrender that motivating sensation, not be wandering in the reactions, the desires, the search itself, the objects, and the others, and becoming more and more complicated and dramatic as a result. Steadiness of practice of the Way of the Heart requires the capability of feeling the primary sensation of the self-contraction and feeling beyond it.

You have complications, all kinds of involvements in seeking. You do not understand that you are seeking, and you are not responsible for what is motivating you. If you do understand this, and if you do feel beyond the complication in the moment, then the problem does not exist. Although you have established the circumstances of you life as seeking, they are clearly able to be dealt with if you will deal with the root-motivator and transcend it. Then there is just a simple-circumstance to be addressed in a simple, disciplined fashion.

My Lord, I feel this is the principle that we are dealing with as beginners. We are involved in a peripheral activity, the observation of the self-contraction, and because we have some understanding we are trying to work it out.

No, you are not observing the self-contraction. You are observing its results. In other words, you are seekers. The Way of the Heart, responsibly engaged, requires that you understand just that about yourself, understand the motivator, the primary sensation that is motivating you to be involved in the urge that eventually makes things difficult for you. Through the practice of self-surrendering and self-forgetting devotion to Me that I have Given you, the activity that is your seeking will become a matter of your responsibility. And then the circumstances that you have created and made difficult, because you did not understand and transcend the contraction, will become simple and straightforward to deal with.

But you are always trying to improve the circumstance of your life relative to this, that, or the other thing. By itself, such is just life-manipulation. It is seeking. Therefore, I Call you to address the motivator, the sensation of the knot, the sensation of self-contraction, which is the reason that you are seeking, the reason that you have a problem, the reason that you want to be involved in whatever is problematic. "