ABSTRACT
For all of us, there are times when the world seems somehow distant, not quite there, when we feel strangely dislodged from everything and everyone. On other occasions, we feel unusually at home in the world, secure, at peace, even ‘at one’ with our surroundings. Such experiences are not localized; they concern an all-enveloping sense of reality and of being rooted in a world. For most of us, most of the time, this changes only in subtle ways. However, more pronounced changes, which can be fleeting or enduring, are phenomenologically conspicuous and often remarked upon. They are usually described in terms of ‘feelings’, rather than ‘moods’ or ‘emotions’. My attention was first drawn to these feelings in 2005. I was writing a paper and thought about calling it ‘The Feeling of Being’. So I did a Google search to check whether anybody had already used that title. I was immediately struck by the variety of feelings that appeared among the results, most of which did not feature in standard inventories of moods and emotions. To illustrate this, I selected the following examples from the first 50 hits:
The feeling of being: ‘complete’, ‘flawed and diminished’, ‘unworthy’, ‘humble’, ‘separate and in limitation’, ‘at home’, ‘a fraud’, ‘slightly lost’, ‘overwhelmed’, ‘abandoned’, ‘stared at’, ‘torn’, ‘disconnected from the world’, ‘invulnerable’, ‘unloved’, ‘watched’, ‘empty’, ‘in control’, ‘powerful’, ‘completely helpless’, ‘part of the real world again’, ‘trapped and weighed down’, ‘part of a larger machine’, ‘at one with life’, ‘at one with nature’, ‘there’, ‘familiar’, ‘real’.
(Ratcliffe 2005, 45)