Feelings & Emotions.

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

From my original sort of waffly post and some of the rather waffly replies, I think I get why your saying that...but...

What I was trying to get at was the area that I think people like Eckhart Tolle and the many others who go on about; ‘thoughts in our head’. And there is little doubt to me that this is worth looking at, as feeling or emotions seem to arise from thoughts among other things.

There may not be anything too obvious that differentiates emotions and feelings and they might appear to be synonymous, as Laird suggests, but I think there might be something we’re missing. If we could learn to differentiate between these two, and if the two reactions are different, I think there may be something to it. Suffering seems to arise from these areas, as well as pleasant ‘stuff’.

I liked the first sentence that Max_Bs article threw up : “Pain is a feeling but not an emotion.”
I’d recommend the article he posted if you haven’t yet read it.

Maybe I am being ‘too clever’ and maybe I’m not. I definitely don’t see myself as clever, especially when I read Hurmenatar’s post - the 5th dimension - wtf ? And I totally respect and admire his posts, even when they are in Greek. 

I was going to add one more comment, but it seemed wildly off-topic in this thread. The gist of it was that the act of feeling was itself a part of a healing process when experiencing past-life recall. That is, one could not stand back and observe, it was necessary to participate. By participate I mean, be willing to feel, whole-heartedly, rather than shy away. Sorry if this seems a bit cryptic.

I was going to add one more comment, but it seemed wildly off-topic in this thread. The gist of it was that the act of feeling was itself a part of a healing process when experiencing past-life recall. That is, one could not stand back and observe, it was necessary to participate. By participate I mean, be willing to feel, whole-heartedly, rather than shy away. Sorry if this seems a bit cryptic.

I think it’s a very interesting idea, much less cryptic than a lot of stuff in this thread.   Off-topic? Maybe, but maybe not.

I liked the first sentence that Max_Bs article threw up : “Pain is a feeling but not an emotion.”

Can you give an example of a non-physical  feeling that is not an emotion?

I think it’s a very interesting idea, much less cryptic than a lot of stuff in this thread.   Off-topic? Maybe, but maybe not.

Thanks. The original post was much longer, perhaps clearer, but it did go on a bit too much about my own personal experiences. It seems whenever I start to write, no matter what the topic, I seem to come around to talking about myself. That may be what I should write about - but not here and now.

Can you give an example of a non-physical  feeling that is not an emotion?

Are they the same thing? Different parts on the brain produce them according to the article I posted. The same ‘feeling’ produces different emotions in different people. 

Maybe hurt? Like hurt when your girlfriend cheats on you. Is hurt an emotion? It’s mental pain. You can have possible justifiable emotions and then you could have negative emotions that might do you harm if you dwell on them? Such as sadness that turns to anger. One person might have overwhelming anger while another goes straight to guilt or sadness before these are processed. 

You got me thinking. Do psychopaths ‘feel’ anything non-physical?

Thanks. The original post was much longer, perhaps clearer, but it did go on a bit too much about my own personal experiences. It seems whenever I start to write, no matter what the topic, I seem to come around to talking about myself. That may be what I should write about - but not here and now.

Maybe you should. 

... when I read Hurmenatar’s post - the 5th dimension - wtf ? And I totally respect and admire his posts, even when they are in Greek. 

I put a disclaimer that I might be speaking total non-sense

Many have noticed that we tell the same stories over and over again only with different characters and different settings, but similar meaning. Archetypes are common elements across many stories.

Imagine your life as a story. How many material details can you change in your life while maintaining the same meaning? Suppose you go check the mail and the blades of grass are arranged a particular way in your lawn. What if they were arranged differently? Would it impact the story or the meaning of the story? What if your mailbox was a different mailbox. There's basically an infinite number of details you can change about your life's story and still have the same story. Sure, you could say, well chaos theory and the butterfly effect say that if you change the tiniest detail it has unpredictable consequences in the future... but that is taking the perspective that your story unfolds linearly. Instead if we take the author's perspective we could alter one detail here and change another detail there to cancel out any butterfly effect. So suppose in a slightly alternate universe you had a smaller mailbox and it was too small for the mailman to put a package in there so you had to go to the post office and pick it up and on the way you had a car accident and died. Well that is a different story with a different meaning. But from the author's perspective, you could correct that just by altering the timing of your drive by a few moments and more or less maintain the same overall story and meaning.

So imagine all the infinite versions of your life where you might look different live in a different house, drive a different car, have the blades of grass on your lawn arranged a bit differently, smaller/larger mailbox, etc... but your life plot stays basically the same and contains all the same key meaningful moments.

Now imagine you have in your hand a circular plate, a sphere, and a cylinder. If you hold them just right in the light they will all cast the same circular shadow. You are projecting from 3D to 2D and although you have different shapes, when looked at in one particular direction, they can all appear to be identical. Whenever something is identical, this is a point of coincidence.


It is the same with your life. Your entire story could be thought of as a 4D object and when projected in a certain direction casts a "shadow" of meaning. There could be various shapes of this 4D object which all cast the same "shadow-shape" of meaning.

When a synchronicity occurs, it is as if you "randomly" encounter two or more different 4D shapes that are projected in such a way as to cast the same shadow.

So if we consider the dimension that is perpendicular to 4D spacetime to be the dimension of meaning, then we can hold steady in this dimension and cycle through a near infinite variety of stories or 4D objects that appear the same from a certain angle.

Imagine you have a stack of one thousand different pictures of an apple and you cycle through them. Each is unique, but each also contains a point of coincidence: each shares the same meaning signified by the word "apple". As you cycle through the pictures you are staying stationary in the 5th dimension and looking at multiple 4D shapes that all cast the same shadow into the 5th dimension.

Mass is what "creates" and shapes 4D spacetime. Similarly, meaning is what creates and shapes the dimension perpendicular to 4D spacetime. As such, meaning seems to exert a weak accretionary force. When gravity acts on an object the object accelerates into motion. When meaning acts on you, you experience E-motion or movement or energy in a direction perpendicular to your 4D existence. When a synchronicity occurs, it is as if you passed through a region of 5D space that  was "dense" with meaning because meaning had accreted in that location, so you see lots of the same "shadow-shapes" of meaning coming from unexpected unrelated 4D objects. Just as in the universe we see vast stretches of "empty" space punctuated by highly dense stars and planets, in life we go through vast stretches of 5D space without synchronicities and only occasionally find them punctuated by dense synchronistic spaces... of course some people seem to be stuck in the 5D asteroid belt and run into synchronicities all the time. 

This is sort of related to Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenetic field which could be summed up as: similarity attracts similarity. The universe seems to have a like attracts like principle and also the opposite principle: opposites attract. Meaning is a transformation of symbol or a "this is like this" statement. And symbol is subjective experience put in--formation.

I hope I made more sense here... I don't think anyone likes this idea although I've been talking about it here and on Skeptiko for a few years... I'll continue to throw it out there from time to time and bore people to death with it...  As I said, it could be total nonsense! 

I think it's fine, and I also think dimensions is the right sort of way to think about things... but personally, I'm happier trying to think about information being stored in less dimensions... just two for example (rather than 5)... and thinking about a collision between two of these two dimensional storage systems releasing the result of spacetime (4D) that we experience... and that the synchronicities we experience in spacetime, being the result of information being joined up more simply in just two dimensions.

You might imagine existing in a reality of two dimensions... when your reality collides with another two dimensional reality... resulting in one being born into some four dimensional collision... that needs to be understood, untangled and rewoven via this life... like a frothing wave moves over the surface of the sea... and the calmer water left behind after it's violence passes... I could image life being a bit like that.

Maybe we can apply transformations to mathematically represent our experience of reality in whatever number of dimensions we choose, but I think we have to consider our direct experience of dimensions as prime importance. Why do we perceive exactly 3 spatial dimensions? All of our conceptualization of higher or lower dimensions is an extrapolation of our experience with 3D.

To go back to the interference pattern analogy... if we arrange two filters red and blue such that our line of sight runs through both, then we see a combination: purple. If we change the spatial angle of our line of sight we see two distinct colors, red and blue. The double slit experiment is also a pair of filters but instead of being arranged in the same line of sight spatially, they are arranged in the same line of sight temporally such that we see recorded on the screen in the interference pattern a combination of two possible histories. By placing a detector over one slit we are effectively changing our line of sight into the past such that the two possible histories no longer overlap so we only see one or the other.