Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Emotion and Thought

I've finally come to realize what I've been trying to for so long, ever since I started having my dreams of death. It was there before, I'm sure, this is just when it started to become apparent to me. This is around the time that I felt I was going numb.. Or thinking it, however one prefers to put it. Anyway, I keep writing about this Feeling that I've been seeking. I've expressed my want of it in many different pieces, but this is where I first brought it up..

"When I think of death I imagine an intense emotional release. Pure feeling and complete understanding. This may come from a variety of dreams I've had on the subject, because within my dreams my emotions are very overwhelming. At the same time, however, they are very clear. The emotion is perfectly understood without the confusion that many find in reality.Inside I feel lost and empty. I know something is missing and I connect my attitude towards death to this void. I keep searching for that one thing that will fill the hole yet it always seems to elude me. At first I thought it might be something that only another person could give me, but upon further analysis I have come to discover that what I'm searching for is an emotion. Some may say love, but I am not too sure of this. I doubt it is any one emotion in particular, but rather it is the strength of the emotion. I want to be consumed with the feeling. Leaving no space for anything else."

I now know why it is I am seeking this. I don't feel things like one imagines feeling as being. I know how an emotion is meant to feel and by understanding it and having had it programmed into me I react accordingly. The problem is, I'm not really feeling it on that emotional level. It's completely mental acknowledgment of it. The thoughts of this has been lingering between my sub-conscience and conscience and so has been difficult to grasp. It's taken me over a year of looking for these answers to get to the one I've come to. I can't say I'm completely absent of emotion.. I can compare it to feeling in shades of gray.. or being bogged down by a fog.. Heavily muted. It's more logically based. The feelings just aren't strong enough. Figuring this out has explained a lot of the things I do that I didn't understand before. With every action I am trying to grasp hold of these emotions, but they keep eluding me. They never stay and I'm left with that same old empty ache.

I read an article on Logic and Emotion the other night and it helped explain some things to me. This part really stood out to me..

"Next mentioned is how emotions and feelings are just harder to identify then thoughts, and that therefore emotions and feelings are really thoughts themselves, or vice versa. If all thought is really emotion, and all emotion really thought, then all intelligence could vary and be dependent on emotions. This is further evidenced by the statement “thus once you find out what is causing the emotion it is no longer an emotion, but it is a thought”. That shows how an emotion is a thought that you just aren’t identifying. It is just a matter of definition of the terms. Thought is concrete things which are real in the world, and emotion is something that you feel but can’t visualize. So therefore intelligence is just the ability to do things which are real, versus feeling something, which isn’t as “real” as thoughts are."
http://cnx.org/content/m14310/latest

From this, I take it, that emotion is sub-conscience while thought is conscience. So.. it's basically saying that you "feel" an emotion towards something you don't quite understand, but once you figure out why it is then it becomes a thought.. So logically you know the feeling is there, but it's not as strong as the feeling originally was? Or do you no longer feel it at all? Or is it just through the thought of knowing the feeling that you still relate to the emotion?

I still have a lot of questions that I don't have answered, but this is a start.


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