Language, Thoughts, Feelings and Emotions

[King Merk]

I’ve been trying to practice “not-knowing” or simply contemplating on things with as clean a slate as possible. Dropping all prior beliefs and notions. 

The subject of my contemplating recently is verbal communication. Specifically, language. What is language? What purpose does verbal language serve? How was language created? What was prior to language? Etc. 

I’m playing with the idea that language is a tool of division. A way that we, meaning the ego/self, differentiate reality. We carve things via language into “this” or “that”. Literally sculpting all that “is” into separate “things” that we pinpoint by placing conceptual label/symbols onto.

Which explains why language exists dualistically. 

This train of thought then led me to the nature of thought itself. Can thought exist without language? I certainly do not see how it can. Not unless one created an entire new system of thinking separate from language itself.

Our current system of thinking is imbedded intirely in language. Don’t believe me? Try to think without using words. You can’t. 

The moment you stop your typical linear line of “thinking” with words, you start “being”. You stop differentiating everything into concepts such as wall, carpet, computer, rug, cat, light, etc and rather experience the supposed wall, carpet, computer, etc for what they actually are... which obviously isn’t the word/concept playing through your head but the thing itself.

Which led me to consider the sameness/difference between thoughts, feelings and emotions.

I’ll save you my logic (so you can think through it yourself ) but I came to the conclusion that thoughts, feelings and emotions are all one in the same. They’re all judgments, labels, conceptualizations or creations that we apply on seemingly external/internal stimuli that are build upon the division created by language. 
 

I will say... 

At the end of the day I’m not directly aware of most of this so I recognize the opportunity for self deception is huge. In fact I’m probably full of shit and this is all mental masterbation hog wash. But I’m not attached to any of it so feel to tear it all apart

watcha think?

thx for reading(:

[JustThinkingAloud]

@King Merk

I love your thinking, just try to remove all “noise” and go directly to the source or nature of it. Language is man(women?) made, it’s a great tool to communicate and a bit of a short cut for the memory. You can actually think in images, sounds etc. Whatever you choose to receive through your senses, you can retrieve back. But of course there's probably so much more to it. 

[SpiritualAwakening]

So are you saying people who are born deaf cannot think? 

[JustThinkingAloud]

8 minutes ago, SpiritualAwakening said:

So are you saying people who are born deaf cannot think? 

Luckily they can amongst many other things, our brain is so amazing. We spend so much money on researching the world around us but how can we truly understand it without understanding our brain first? 

Edited November 5, 2019 by JustThinkingAloud
a lot of typos

[Leo Gura]

34 minutes ago, King Merk said:

I came to the conclusion that thoughts, feelings and emotions are all one in the same.

Careful... this is incorrect.

Thoughts are distinct from feelings. You can have a thought without a feeling and a feeling without a thought.

Thought is also possible without language. Thought can be in the form of images.

You are on the right track, but this stuff is more nuanced than you think.

Of course language is used to divide up reality into categories, all categories are dualities, and then those categories are reified or made "objective" through the creation of these categories, and then language is used to construct meaning. And all of this is ultimately imaginary.

[Milos Uzelac]

Great I've been thinking (not contemplating unfortunately) of how the poverty of words and concepts in communicating with others (be it people or books) or lack there of (in my current situation) reflects on thoughts (as a product of some sort of communication with the environment) (as for example of poverty: swearing, jargon and so forth) which restricts your sense perception's and knowledge of the workings of reality and self in parts and as a whole and magnifies your negative emotional reactions to events due to thought loops created by the experience of poor communication and interaction with the environment (people in my environment including often me swear a lot at due to negative outcomes and circumstances produced by the effects of poor language communication and concept transaction where as states are not often communicated precisely with adequate honest terms but broadly with undescrptive and emotionally reactive jargon terms disabling the capacity for honest self reflection due to keeping up tough appearances  (constructing a social self as way of ought behaving for members of that society as they believe it should be as the only way to last, survive, make social bonds and have hope of prospering) created by thoughts and emotions of dishonest unprecise poor language communication which stems from the discourses of the people who run the state by that way of communicating or at least propagate it into the rest of most of society. This is my theorizing - as well at least and I saw the subject and wanted to contribute my ruminations of it over the last few days though they are mostly related to social theorizing not contemplation or relatively new concrete direct experiences but dispersed and blurt past ones that I had. 

Edited November 5, 2019 by Milos Uzelac

[remember]

5 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Thoughts are distinct from feelings. You can have a thought without a feeling and a feeling without a thought.

Thought is also possible without language. Thought can be in the form of images.

You are on the right track, but this stuff is more nuanced than you think.

Of course language is used to divide up reality into categories, all categories are dualities, and then those categories are reified or made "objective" through the creation of these categories, and then language is used to construct meaning. And all of this is ultimately imaginary.

careful wit this as well it`s correct regarding definitions in the classic way, but doesn`t say what it really is and brings distortions if you start studying something about how all of this works in a more biodynamic setting.

6 hours ago, King Merk said:

Which led me to consider the sameness/difference between thoughts, feelings and emotions.

I’ll save you my logic (so you can think through it yourself ) but I came to the conclusion that thoughts, feelings and emotions are all one in the same. They’re all judgments, labels, conceptualizations or creations that we apply on seemingly external/internal stimuli that are build upon the division created by language. 

all i would say now about the differences between them is: a thought happens mostly in the head area but it is not percived from there. a feeling starts often diffuse in the areas of sensation but it`s not percived from there, until it localizes in an area connected to emotion (or thought) and radiates from there, a thought is an emotion. you can`t say a thought is absent of emotion, it is not. but on the other hand there are thoughts that are absent of feelings. so bringing together thought emotions and feelings has much to do with localizing them, although a lot of people would not understand if you point towards some place and say it hurts there - you need to define for yourself what that means for yourself or another person.

vision is prior to word, a line or dot is prior to a sign, being is prior to all symbols.

Edited November 5, 2019 by remember
forgott some dotts... and lines

[JustThinkingAloud]

12 minutes ago, remember said:

careful wit this as well it`s correct regarding definitions in the classic way, but doesn`t say what it really is and brings ditortions if you start studying something about how all of this works in a more biodynamic setting.

 

all i would say now about the differences between them is: a thought happens mostly in the head area but it is not percived from there. a feeling starts often diffuse in the areas of sensation but it`s not percived from there, until it localizes in an area connected to emotion (or thought) and radiates from there, a thought is an emotion. you can`t say a thought is absent of emotion, it is not. but on the other hand there are thoughts that are absent of feelings. so bringing together thought emotions and feelings has much to do with localizing them, although a lot of people would not understand if you point towards some place and say it hurts there - you need to define for yourself what that means for yourself or another person.

vision is prior to word, a line or dot is prior to a sign, being is prior to all symbols.

I like that, thank you for sharing 

My theory is that we attach the emotion to the thought. The confusing bit is that we might've attached that emotion in the past so when we think the same thought now as we did in the past, it brings up the same emotion that we attached to it in the past (thoughts, images etc meaning the same thing).

Edited November 5, 2019 by JustThinkingAloud
small typo

[remember]

@JustThinkingAloud in sense of physiology/biology/chemistry, what is a thought? what is it made of? so then tell me what is the difference between a thought and a memory? and what is a thought made of in the spiritual sense?

sorry, maybe a little confusing, what i want to point at is i`m not sure about the attachment, i think/feel the attachment is not an attachment but the source itself, what we need to get detached from is not the thought/emotion but the meaning we assign to it, if it blocks us from being a more fullfilled and radiating being. sometimes i even think it`s important to add some meaning, and then the emotion gets a complete new quality.

Edited November 5, 2019 by remember

[JustThinkingAloud]

5 minutes ago, remember said:

@JustThinkingAloud in sense of physiology/biology/chemistry, what is a thought? what is it made of? so then tell me what is the difference between a thought and a memory? and what is a thought made of in the spiritual sense?

The thought feels like it came out of nothing but I have a suspicion that it's fed from out body's energy and we just manipulate it to whatever we want. Our memory is our past thoughts that we stored. There's this current thinking part of our brain (conscious) and the memory is like a hard drive for storing past information (subconscious).

[JustThinkingAloud]

@remember Sorry, this is only my personal direct experience, it's not fully baked yet. 

[remember]

@JustThinkingAloud yes, if you even go deeper into the fractal of a brain/body (even if leo will say it is an illusion) you can see a thought is made up of bioelectronic impulses and transmitters there is no thought without an emotion, a thought is made up of emotion and transport of information, they are not attached to each other, they are that. although feeling is more a sensual phenomenon.

Edited November 5, 2019 by remember

[JustThinkingAloud]

3 minutes ago, remember said:

@JustThinkingAloud yes, if you even go deeper into the fractal of a brain (even if leo will say it is an illusion) you can see a thought is made up of bioelectronic impulses and transmitters there is no thought without an emotion, a thought is made up of emotion and transport of information, they are not attached to each other, they are that. although feeling is more a sensual phenomenon.

Exactly what I thought so maybe that when we attach an emotion, it gets stored but when it's unimportant to us or we reject it, it doesn't get stored. What do you think? I keep making a link to our current thinking and our memory.

It's a bit of an illusion because it all depends on how we personally interpret the information. That doesn't mean that the external world doesn't exist, it does, we just need to be careful that we interpret it without personal identification.

[remember]

@JustThinkingAloud it`s ok to make a link to current thinking. current thinking is also intertwined with memory. although for me this exact topic has more of a fascination touch to it, than a personal - while that probably is personal as it is something i have a memory towards with a good feeling to it. so identification and abstraction are not really disconnected but as the memory of it spanns over a long period of time i`m able to see it more abstract, while i asked you to follow me with feeling into it, what will of course interfere with present identifications, if you go through some spiritual work right now in that direction. but it can also help you find out about some emotions or images of yourself - so identify and then disidentify. maybe like that .

[JustThinkingAloud]

1 minute ago, remember said:

@JustThinkingAloud it`s ok to make a link to current thinking. current thinking is also intertwined with memory. although for me this exact topic has more of a fascination touch to it, than a personal - while that probably is personal as it is something i have a memory towards with a good feeling to it. so identification and abstraction are not really disconnected but as the memory of it spanns over a long period of time i`m able to see it more abstract, while i asked you to follow me with feeling into it, what will of course interfere with present identifications, if you go through some spiritual work right now in that direction. but it can also help you find out about some emotions or images of yourself - so identify and then disidentify. maybe like that .

I definitely think you're on the right track. Keep going, we all need as much knowledge as we can get. I even started thinking that one single brain can't absorb all the information, we need to specialize and share our specialty with the world. So thank you 

[remember]

if it`s a specialisation being a generalist, i`m giving my best.

thank you, i enjoyed dipping into this memory.

Edited November 5, 2019 by remember

[JustThinkingAloud]

4 minutes ago, remember said:

if it`s a specialisation being a generalist, i`m giving my best.

Good point haha

Maybe all the scientists should get out of their boxes and work together. Too much specialization!

[remember]

7 minutes ago, JustThinkingAloud said:

Good point haha

Maybe all the scientists should get out of their boxes and work together. Too much specialization!

some of them would start pulling the sticks out - and snarl.

[LastThursday]

7 hours ago, King Merk said:

The moment you stop your typical linear line of “thinking” with words, you start “being”. You stop differentiating everything into concepts such as wall, carpet, computer, rug, cat, light, etc and rather experience the supposed wall, carpet, computer, etc for what they actually are... which obviously isn’t the word/concept playing through your head but the thing itself.

There's a kind of rabbit hole you are not entering here.

Take an activity such as driving a vehicle. I think you'll agree that you need a certain level of proficiency behind the wheel, otherwise you are likely to die or at least be badly injured very quickly.

Maybe you'll also agree there is very little "thinking in words" going on when you drive. Maybe just the odd mental note like "I'll take the next junction", but otherwise not much.

But you must very definitely still differentiate the world in to concepts. You will need to have concepts such as other vehicles, pedestrians crossing the road, speed, weather conditions, time of day, traffic lights, police, vehicle handling and so on.  Without these concepts you would die.

The differentiation doesn't just go away because mental verbalisation stops - it just removes a layer of interpretation.

[JustThinkingAloud]

2 minutes ago, remember said:

some of them would start pulling the sticks out - and snarl.

Yep, story of my life. Time for a change!