Feelings & Emotions.

I read or heard something recently about this, but as so often happens, I’ve forgotten the detail. I do remember the gist of what was being said, it was that we should try to dampen our emotions while encouraging our feelings. Feelings = good while Emotions = bad.

I have tried to think about this, but even the definitions of each seem confusing, meaning I don’t think they are well understood generally. 

As an example of where this might be going, I have an impression that we might have had a glimpse of ourselves in the future when we see ‘aliens’. They appear to be quite emotionless. We can’t know their feelings.

Any thoughts?

Disclaimer: I don't claim any particular knowledge or expertise in this topic. However, it reminds me a little of something I came across when reading about Buddhism - years ago now. There it said something like, the ideal state is to be a spectator. There was more, but regardless, I felt it was wrong and incomprehensible. I considered one should be a participant, not a spectator. But perhaps I've sometimes found that state, and the way to understand it is to be it.

I should add that I used to watch the "Kung Fu" TV series with David Carradine, and though it was fictionalised light entertainment, perhaps it illustrated something too. (I mean Carradine was in the programme, not that he and I watched it together )

Disclaimer: I don't claim any particular knowledge or expertise in this topic. However, it reminds me a little of something I came across when reading about Buddhism - years ago now. There it said something like, the ideal state is to be a spectator. There was more, but regardless, I felt it was wrong and incomprehensible. I considered one should be a participant, not a spectator. But perhaps I've sometimes found that state, and the way to understand it is to be it.

I should add that I used to watch the "Kung Fu" TV series with David Carradine, and though it was fictionalised light entertainment, perhaps it illustrated something too. (I mean Carradine was in the programme, not that he and I watched it together )

I think I know what you’re getting at here. Do you think that “being it” may be the only way to fully understand it. Sometimes I start writing posts only to delete it after a while, because I realise that language can never fully express that which I’m trying to say.

Btw I found this article which gives some thoughts on this which I thought were interesting. About the first thing listed by the search engine.

https://www.thebestbrainpossible.com/wha...-emotions/

I think I know what you’re getting at here. Do you think that “being it” may be the only way to fully understand it.

I'm not so sure now. I think maybe I was heading in a slightly different direction, maybe tangentially connected (more geometry!) to the topic you raised. More like the relation of consciousness and awareness.

The link you shared above was interesting, in that it did at least give something more substantial to take hold of. Though naturally I flinched at the physicality/brain-based terminology which doesn't necessarily help. Elsewhere I've heard it said that even in the non-physical, we are emotional beings.

I read or heard something recently about this, but as so often happens, I’ve forgotten the detail. I do remember the gist of what was being said, it was that we should try to dampen our emotions while encouraging our feelings. Feelings = good while Emotions = bad.

I have tried to think about this, but even the definitions of each seem confusing, meaning I don’t think they are well understood generally. 

As an example of where this might be going, I have an impression that we might have had a glimpse of ourselves in the future when we see ‘aliens’. They appear to be quite emotionless. We can’t know their feelings.

Any thoughts?

I don't really see the need to make a distinction between feelings and emotions since the words are typically synonymous... maybe whoever said it was trying to say that it is good to feel things but bad to be controlled by what you feel. If you have the ability to remove yourself and your ego and become a spectator then you have the ability to stop your emotions from controlling you. But maintain the ability to choose to stop being a spectator and feel things again so that you don't become a lifeless one-dimensional robot. 

I know this probably seems like a silly idea, but I think of emotion or e-motion as motion in the 5th dimension or a dimension perpendicular to 4D spacetime. "E" is the 5th letter so it is easy to remember. I imagine a 4D object as a story. If you move along the 5th dimensional axis while keeping the 4D coordinates the same you are moving through all the stories that have the same meaning.


Meaningful connections generate emotion. This might seem obvious for complex emotions, but is also true for even the simplest emotions. For example, if a random person walks up and punches you in the face, how can you feel fear unless you think they might do it again? You are comparing what just happened to what might happen again: same story/same meaning, mental movement between the two points generates E-motion. Or how can you feel anger without generating a story illustrating injustice? How can you feel sad without considering that you were in a better state previously? A baby playing peekaboo giggles because with every disappearance, anticipation builds and then is fulfilled with the reappearance. So all emotion is connecting past and future to present forming a meaningful story and comparing this story to another similar story. Biologically this is a feedback loop, but this is also where physics and abstraction intersect.

If two stories have the same meaning then the line between them is parallel with the 5th dimensional axis. It might seem absurd to make a geometrical statement about something as subjective as "meaning" but everything geometrical is also subjective because it is a pattern and there is no pattern without subjectively defined boundaries. Some physicists are saying that everything is information... well what is it that is IN formation? It is subjective experience. The physical world could be thought of as symbolic representation of experience. The observer is the one who builds the story - the one who compares what was or what might be to what is. If the observer knows which slit the particle goes through he can compare what might have been and build a story which looks like two lines. Without observing the particle, the particle itself is the observer and compares what might have been with what is and this self-referential feedback loop is the wave - a 5th dimensional resonance.

*All of these words might not actually mean anything.*

[Laird]

I do remember the gist of what was being said, it was that we should try to dampen our emotions while encouraging our feelings.

As trite and boring as this response might be, Steve, I'm pretty much with Hurm that (at least in this context) "feelings" and "emotions" are pretty much synonymous - other than perhaps, in some contexts, a slight difference implied in intensity, with emotions being, perhaps, somewhat more intense than feelings.

For reference, here are some dictionary definitions which pretty much support this assessment (note that I have chosen the senses which seem to be most appropriate in this context - follow the links for other senses):

"Feeling":

OED: An emotional state or reaction.
dictionary.com: an emotion or emotional perception or attitude

"Emotion":

OED: A strong feeling deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others.
dictionary.com: an affective state of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, fear, hate, or the like, is experienced, as distinguished from cognitive and volitional states of consciousness.

It seems to me that words are slippery and can be made to mean whatever we want them to mean. For example, my very first thought right at the start of this thread was something like this: we feel something, such as feeling hot, and then respond to it with an emotion, for example annoyance or pleasure. In this usage, feelings are inputs which we then process, one part of that processing is an emotion.

Most of the responses in this thread have been very different to that, apparently because 'feeling' has multiple meanings. What about 'emotion', does that have multiple meanings too? My initial thought was that it was more clear, less ambiguous, but again, that may have just been my own concept, to others it may also have multiple usages.

Now the terms 'intuition' and 'sensation' have been introduced. To me, 'sensation' might be more like the way I used 'feeling' above, for example a tingling sensation, this too could be an input. 'Intuition' might be the most difficult of all to pin down. It sometimes seems like a term when we reach a conclusion but cannot describe how we arrived at that answer. For example, some mathematical questions we might briefly consider, and make a rough estimate. Depending on the type of problem, and perhaps on our previous experience, an intuitive guess might be very close, or wildly out. But it is also used in situations where logic such as mathematics cannot be applied, for example we have a situation with not enough information, and use something possibly but not necessarily like psychic ability to come to an assessment.
     
But still, those are just my ramblings, and may not add much. In relation to the original question, I'd suggest being less concerned with words themselves, but concentrate more on how they are being used in a particular context. The more detail of the original source(s), the better. (Maybe this is not possible here.)

I think sometimes we try to be too clever but maybe that's just my conservative side showing?