Your thoughts and emotions are things that you perceive, not things that you are. They can be ignored if they aren’t helpful, or changed for the better through practice.
You don't need feelings for consciousness. Feelings are a biological mechanism to increase odds of survival in a potentially hostile environment. They have nothing to do with consciousness or intelligence.
These articles are getting tiresome. Anything thinking must have feelings to motivate their thoughts, otherwise the brain is useless. The basic assumption should be that anything with a brain has feelings.
That idea keeps creeping up, but it isn't just in our group it won't fly. Reality doesn't care what you are or what your feelings are - in a vaccum a feather and a steel ball fall at the same speed, regardless of your opinions, feelings or suggestions on the matter.
So in this case our POV is absolutely right. (Feelings do matter when you deal with humans, but that is also the only area in which they do).
You can't have thoughts without emotions. There is such a thing as being too emotional and letting the emotions take control and prevent you from using proper reasoning, but this isn't the absence of emotions. Emotions are highly useful, but like anything it is more about balance. Don't try to be a Vulcan Mr Spock, you're human too.
Agreed, sorry, I wasn't meaning to appear to disagree with your statement, rather more suggesting that feelings don't tend to care about any intentional outcome, only what is.
> I think our feelings, as well as our thoughts, should be listened to
But why? Not asking to be difficult; I'm trying to understand why we should listen to either.
I've learned that my thoughts are often filled with unhelpful nonsense baked into me at an early age by the conditioning of traumatized parents. I've learned that I can change the kinds of thoughts that I have by learning new skills and reframing situations so that the next time I encounter a situation that would lead to unhelpful nonsense thoughts, those are no longer the default reaction. My thoughts aren't me - they're the results of processes in my brain. I've learned that often the most useful thing is to not listen to my thoughts, because they're spinning narratives that simply aren't true ("I'm worthless", "everything is my fault", "<person> must be thinking awful things about me", etc).
Our interpretation of feelings are mediated by thought. Given the susceptibility of thought to conditioning and external shaping, what makes a feeling worth listening to?
To be clear, I'm not saying that thoughts/feelings are never useful or true. We depend on them to make sense of the world and to survive our environment. I'm saying that they're often not true, and this raises the question: what differentiates the useful/true ones from the ones that are not? Simply having the thought/feeling isn't enough.
I went through a period of time in my life when I experienced thoughts/feelings "as me". I felt identical to them. Once I realized that they're appearances in consciousness alongside every other appearance in consciousness: sights, sounds, physical sensations, smells, etc., my relationship with thoughts/feelings shifted. I appear to be closer to "that which is aware" of these appearances in consciousness. When you start observing these thoughts/feelings playing out from a distance, it becomes increasingly clear that they're often just plain wrong, but wrong for understandable reasons (e.g. the anxious brain borne of childhood trauma).
There's a whole eastern philosophy around this sort of sentiment. The idea being that things aren't inherently 'anything' but we do attach emotions or ideas to those things. You can take a 'meta' step back and notice this.
Do you not believe that feelings come from thoughts and that your thoughts are not your own? Or do you believe in a more connected and behaviour based approach?
It seems the root of things is that emotions beat thoughts, and personal experiences help deliver the emotional argument without having to directly argue the emotions.
Strongly agreed. Thoughts certainly can dictate emotions, but I've often observed that general emotions are floating around in my head. I can take the effort articulate these emotions into thoughts, and those thoughts may perhaps be negative / harmful. But in many, many cases it's clear the emotions preceded the thoughts.
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