Thoughts And Emotions

What is the difference or similarities in thoughts and emotions and how does the dynamic between those work in the manifestation of our experience?

 

Thoughts always accompany emotions and emotions always accompany thoughts. I think emotions are just thoughts that haven't been processed by the more linguistically inclined areas of our brain. Sometimes we may "just feel" a certain way, but it seems that always, after sufficient probing, there is a thought behind that, though it may have been somewhat buried, or perhaps even constructed after the fact.

As such it becomes evident that upon close inspection our vocabulary is not so great at this level of resolution, and we can say that really thoughts and emotions are kind of the same thing; and emotion being a non-verbal thought that you somehow feel, while thoughts being verbalized emotions that you somehow feel in a slightly different way perhaps.

The way they interact to manifest our experience is that they are the arena in which our awareness swims and they constitute the entirety of our experience of all manifestation. We are consciousness experiencing consciousness.

 

I agree for the most part but I'd phrase it slightly differently.. I'd say emotions are our subconscious interaction with the world. I "feel" that thoughts are the crust of our experience which, when our "pattern" of self is recognised, enable us to step outside a purely instinctual rhythm of existence.

I'd say that the thought behind the thought we find after probing, is a result of an emotional occurrence from which a thought or a rational record is crystallised. It's easy access to the memory, but I have found that it's generally the emotional context of that thought that is most important in relation to personal healing.

-----

And interestingly enough, I was just watching this.

http://youtu.be/UZDeYe93rFg




Edit: Thought is the melody that plays over our emotional chords. Not always harmonious, but dissonance can only resolve.
To extend the analogy, for shits and giggles, I'd say genetics define our rhythm.

 

Simplifying it...if I put my hand down and it lands on a wasp or redhot oven...I am going to feel pain which has nothing to do with my thoughts.....the pain is there for survival....to quickly remove my hand and tend to it.....

Many feelings do come from our psyche interpretation of the world around us, too, though.....

 

The primary distinction between thought and emotion is that as thought becomes increasingly complex, it becomes more organized and structured. On the other hand, as emotions become intensified it elicits increasing reactivity.

They coalesce in direct experience, with one often subverting the other to an extent depending on different circumstance and variables such as: environment, familiarity, health, culture, etc.


As far as this pertains to LSD, it tends to elicit radicalizations of thought and emotion, in a way where the general patterns of how we experience thought and emotion becomes less constrained, thus allowing us to peer into how limited we approach thought and emotion in normal reality.

There is usually a strong balance and appraisal of the two throughout an LSD trip, I will attempt to provide contrasts of these radicalizations in which a whole spectrum resides between. In the disparate parts of thought and emotion prompted from LSD, there is sometimes a misapplication or incongruency with the normal dynamics of processing, so one may make no sensible connection between stimuli (I.e. anthropomorphizing and having an unfounded connection with a floor tile) to a unification of thought and emotion where they become unified and the interconnectivity of things are recognized (I.e. noticing the systems of nature which allow for particular plants to grow near a creek, which are situated in a particular type of soil and may provide food)

 

I can have an abstract thought - but can I have an abstract feeling? I don't think so.

I think thought and feeling are different things. Animals have feelings (some say plants too) but certainly don't share our ability to think. Animals just react to their feelings. We name them and sometimes act on them.

We put language onto all our feelings. If I get a twinge of pain in my back, immediately I think of the words 'pain' and 'back'.

And some thoughts can induce a certain feeling, even if they're quite abstract. Thoughts about the complexity and beauty of nature could for instance lead to a feeling of awe.

There's also the communication aspect - I can easily communicate using sentences I've thought of. It's more difficult to communicate a feeling. Describing the feeling doesn't mean the person reading that description will actually feel as I felt when I described it.

 

^ Are emotions synonymous with feelings?

 

I'd say they are one kind of feeling.

 

Oh ok, I ask because you didn't mention the word emotion once in your response. I am trying to gauge if that in-and-of itself may be evidence of the abstract quality of emotion, or maybe you just see it as interchangeable with feeling.

 

No - I wouldn't say the words feeling and emotion are interchangeable.They may be used in that way though at times. I used the word feeling because it seems to encompass more than emotion. We constantly have feelings that are purely physical with no emotion attached to them.

Obviously I'm not suggesting that there isn't a very close intertwining of though and emotion. We live in our mental world. When we feel something we think about it. It's not easy to get into a state of pure feeling with the absence of any thought. Or vice versa.

 

I'd say feelings are naturally abstract, as are thoughts, but I get what you're saying.

And communicating the sentence you've thought of is easy, but whether that accurately portrays the original thought for everyone else that lacks the experiential context is another story. Just like emotions, a lot of thoughts, or more specifically ideas, are limited to suggestion until language evolves enough to describe abstract phenomena more accurately. I think this is a result of the absence of psychedelics in our culture.


So far I'm seeing 2 spectrums.

One of feeling, between physical and emotional. e.g. Pain and love
One of thought, between concrete and abstract. e.g. Material and spiritual

Complementing each other, we have information that exists on a consensus level which is easy enough to suggest, and information that's harder to extrapolate due to it's seemingly complex nature as a result of subjective processing and past experience. This is why I propose both intellectual and emotional intelligence. By taking note of the feeling of prejudice indicates that it's time to wash the metaphorical windows as we could be missing something special.



A meaty subject indeed..

Mr. Bed is beckoning.

 

Funny enough, I was literally just contemplating this and then came across this thread in the LSD section of the forum. I'll leave my answer at that simply.

 

I think our funny coincidences are more to be anticipated than just curiously funny. Simply put we tend to find what we look for. I look to the observable functions of human being to understand the relationships of thought and emotion. We could call emotion a sensational awareness and thought we could call learned awareness. In terms of human function it is taste and knowing and these two are the communal elements of coming to know.

When listening to Pinker he says that thought must be something other than language but he doesn't hit on what that other is and to me it seems simply that the mind is naturally abstract meaning it deals in every instance with symbols. To think visually is called visualizing. Language is an eminently functional part of our conscious experience. We are hard wired to articulate thought for the purpose of communication in the abstract sphere in order to manifest things in the material sphere.

Initially taste serves as traffic control for the unintended and in this state you could say there is no accounting for taste, that is you don't know why you like one thing and not the other. Our sensational equipment includes the biofeedback loop of self refection on sensational cues. It is this process of reflecting on sensational cues that choreographs the process we call learning. As we learn then emotion becomes value added thought. We begin to refine our tastes as a matter of course say for example we learn over time that to party constantly no matter how stimulating can lead to disruption of circadian functions or we crash and burn so to speak which causes the circumspect to consider more broadly the terms of ones life. We become familiar. We might discover at some point that some kinds of emotions are only relevant within a certain range of associations and when we broaden our perspectives these types of emotions fall away and anger is one such that comes to mind. That is anger is a legitimate emotion so to speak within a narrow framework of considerations but it is not so within other frames of reference. Emotion then thought plus meaning and our devotion is keyed to our sense of rightness.

 

Thoughts and feelings aren't the arena in which consciousness swims. It's the other way around. Consciousness is the aware arena in which thoughts and feelings swim, and thus, can be mastered depending on where one's awareness is placed, which will naturally influence and effect your physical manifestations in life in accordance to your Vibration.

 

Consciousness is a property of matter. Certainly attention or focus multiplies effect as all thoughts must be cultivated to manifest in time. You make an important point about vibration and that is emotion is conception of a vibrational character. So there is a difference between saying something and having conviction or vibratory agreement with what you are saying or another way to put it, it is one thing to say something and another to mean it.

 

Based on things you have said regarding consciousness, I'm pretty surprised you present animals with having such a simplified level of consciousness.

I think many animals can weigh their feelings in some respects before reacting on them. Also I'm not sure we can truly know their emotional realms. For instance, I doubt Grumpy Cat is always really grumpy, it's more the human perception of the cat's appearance which we attach that emotion to, rather than anything the cat is feeling probably.

 

humdidiley hum dum.....

sorry

grumpy cat rules


so does moxy pug here

 

Ihave a very grumpy cat named Finnegan. Boy, is he always grumpy....ever since he was a kitten, too.
He does not look grumpy though. He has the prettiest melon green eyes like I have never seen on a cat before.

 

I'm not saying animals don't make choices. In a way they think - but what I meant was thinking in the way we experience it, in language.

Certainly people do project stuff onto animals. However that doesn't mean animals don;t feel. They feel more than we do I suspect.

 

Everything we experience is consciousness, by definition. So the universe, "the outside", is inside our head; but our head is also "outside" in the universe, and the two enclose each other in this way forever and ever. The brain evokes light and sound and sensation and consciousness; the entire universe. The brain is also part of this universe; the brain evokes the brain.

What is this?