Thoughts, Feelings & Emotions

Jared: Welcome to Delicate Fire. Today we'll be exploring the aphorisms of effective choice by Forrest Landry. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments or head to delicatefire.com and join the Signal community. Be sure to like and subscribe and follow along. Thanks so much. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Hey Forrest, great to see you again. Thoughts, feelings, and emotions. You have, uh, three, these three words that are, we have kind of our own ideas about what they mean. To me, feelings and emotions are kind of like tied together, like, are, is there a difference? Or what is the difference between those? And I have a general idea of what thoughts are, but I'd love to hear your perspective or how to clarify between the words thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

Forrest: Great. Yeah. So primary distinction between what we would describe a feeling and what we would describe as an emotion is roughly the difference between talking about the quality of something versus how intense it is. So I can think about, like, if I'm listening to sound, it can be textured or at different pitches. And I can also talk about how loud it is, or again, with sound, where it's coming from and where it's going, how much intensity it has and what direction it's sort of flowing from and flowing to, how much energy transfer that is. That would be metaphorically talking about the emotional aspect is the intensity and the kind of flow of energy. Whereas the quality is going to be kind of a sense of what pitch is it, how many overtones does it have, what are the sort of timbral kind of, again, I want to use the word quality, but it's like we can tell the difference between someone playing a flute versus a piano versus, you know, a stringed instrument of some sort, a guitar perhaps. And it's just because they sound different. They might be playing the same note, some instruments may be louder or quieter than others, but the quality of the sound that allows us to tell what the instrument is, that's the feeling part. And the loudness is the emotional part. Basically, it's how much energy is moving.

So in the sense of these three sort of aspects or dynamics of mind, the thinking is about the form. It's about the shape. So using this music metaphor, the sound metaphor a little more, it would be like the melody. Or the rhythm. So something that kind of has structure in time, basically. That would be kind of metaphorically what we think, like there's a sense of there's a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it has a subject-verb-object kind of construction if it's a sentence or stuff like that. But anything that would be held in mind that has shape or has form is basically a kind of experience that, that is the aspect of that experience, which is form, is what we're going to call thinking. And the aspect of that experience, which has quality, we're going to call feeling. And the aspect of that experience, which has energy, which has, you know, the ability to move you, like if you feel excitement, for example, there's a sense in which you can say, yes, there's a feeling of enthusiasm. And at the same time, there's an energy that is giving you an impulse to engage. And so that would be the emotional component.

So in this sense, every experience is going to have all three of these qualities. Like if there was no intensity, then you won't sense it because there's no energy transfer. But if there is an energy transfer, then it's going to have some structure, a beginning, a middle, and an end, some sort of pattern to it, basically. Moreover than that, each moment-by-moment experience of that is also going to have a particular quality. So we use these terms, thought, feeling, and emotion to distinguish these aspects of experience, basically. And, you know, it might be asked, well, why not just treat it as that the feeling and emotion are the same? Well, it's because there are actually times where we really want to distinguish between the quality of something versus how intense the experience is.

Jared: Yeah. And I'd love to kind of run this by you. I had this idea or this metaphor as well when I was, I saw, I was listening, I read one of your manuscripts and it had this as a rough idea, but I'd be curious this next kind of iteration, a laser pointer. We were playing with the laser pointer with our cats and there's a little twisty thing on top that you can twist it and it turns into a mouse or a butterfly or a dot. And there's all these different shapes. So to me, that would be something like the form, like the shapes of the things that are on the wall. And that would be associated with thought, and it would also be associated with rhythm and melody if you're going to mix these metaphors together.

Forrest: Pattern.

Jared: Pattern, exactly. Then the color of the beam, it being red, can associate with the feeling or also the timbre of the instrument, something like that.

Forrest: Yeah, it could be a green laser or blue one. Exactly different colors and the form can be the same, but the color can be different.

Jared: Right, exactly. And then how strong the beam is. So it could be losing battery or it could be a beam that shoots to the moon, right? There's that intensity that would align with emotion or it also align with something like volume in music. Is that close?

Forrest: And similarly, like with lasers, for example, they have different classifications for how much power. Lasers that are sold on the open market need to be less than 5 milliwatts because you don't want to actually blind somebody with them. But in industrial use, you could have lasers that are way strong, capable of delivering a lot of energy. But in the same sort of way in common world, it can be uncomfortable for people who are experiencing you or someone else as being very emotional. Like if there's a lot of energy flowing, that's something that wants some minding.

And similarly, like with patterns, there's certain patterns which can be potentially hazardous. Like if we're talking like virus, for example, there can be things which just are disabling to one's physiological health. Similarly, there can be some ideas that are well adapted to your circumstances and other ones which are not. And even with feeling, we see this too, like we've all had the experience of, well, I don't know, digital today, but back when I was going to school, chalkboard was a thing. If you drag the chalk across the chalkboard — yeah, you know exactly that expression. Doesn't feel good. Right.

So we could talk about the utility of these things in a specific sense, because the quality of the feeling of that sound, it can be worse if it's loud, but it's just bad whatever volume, right? What effect does a sense of wanting to distinguish these aspects so that we can therefore name the pattern aspect is out of bounds or actually really helpful for circumstance, or the sound quality is something we really enjoy or we don't. There's some instruments that just sound better to our ears. Stringed instruments usually sound pretty good, right?

And similarly, we need to navigate the intensity aspects of it because there's a range in which our hearing can work or a range in which our emotions can be expressed in a social context, which is appropriate to that context. If it's too much, then people can kind of basically say, yeah, that guy is just way too angry to deal with. Or there's all sorts of variations in terms of just how people navigate their emotions, how they express them in social situations. There can be circumstances where, if you're at a funeral, it is entirely appropriate to be expressing sadness and grief and tears and such. But if you were in a business meeting and that just wasn't the time, then again, so there's a sense of really wanting to distinguish these various aspects.

And metaphors like music and lasers and the various sort of ways in which we can talk about it. There's a metaphor of a river, for example, where the banks would, the shape of the river, the banks would be the thinking component, because that's the shape, it's the form. And the color of the waters, because some rivers are going to be brown, other ones will be like a spring, like clear, clear colors, different shades of blue. Sometimes you get other things if it's got algae in it or whatever. And then, so that's the sort of quality, like, is it a river going through a flat space and kind of swampy, or is it a space going through mountains? Totally different feeling associated with those two sort of situations.

Finally, we can talk about how much water is flowing. Like, is it a fast-moving river and it's big and wide and therefore has a lot of power behind it? Or is it like a mountain stream, for example, where it's moving quickly but there's not a huge amount of water, or maybe it's moving slowly and it's just small. There's all of these variations.

So really this triple of thought, feeling, and emotion is a kind of tool to navigate the interior subjective spaces, to be able to hold the subjectivity of self with a language that we can relate to in some really just basic ordinary sense. So it's not really meant to be complicated. These metaphors are really just ways of introducing this idea, but it is just genuinely simpler for us to just know what we're talking about when we're referring to these things.

Jared: Beautiful. And what comes to mind now is like this idea of so often we perceive something, we take something in and it gets filtered through a form in our minds, whether it be a thought or belief or something that then causes a, or I guess maybe the word cause is that, but it would—

Forrest: Be, if there's a feeling, you feel—

Jared: Something, there's like a certain tone of feeling and then that tone of feeling—

Forrest: Releases energy, you react to that, you feel something, and then there's this upwelling of energy of that feels important, you know, like it matters, right? So there's a progression. And so, ultimately when we're talking about these triples, we are actually referencing this larger body of knowledge called the metaphysics, or in this particular case, the immanent metaphysics. And so the sequencing of, I perceive something, I perceive a form. So there's a thinking component that results in an impression of a feeling, as in that feels good or it doesn't, or some reminder of some previous experience that you have that may shape how you experience that form. Like it might be something that reminds you of a really good day at home with family, or it might remind you of a pretty difficult situation that you had in school or the office or military or something.

But there's a sense here in which we may, through that association, that feeling element, that sensory sort of what does this feel like, then result in a kind of mobilization of energy. Do I need to do something right now? Do I need to back away or maybe engage? Maybe I see something, there's a bottle of milk that's falling off the counter, right? And it goes quickly, right? There's a sense in which I perceive that happening. I feel, kind of a sense of shit, right? And then there's an energy of reach and grab the thing, right? Just try to catch it. And so these processes can move very quickly. It's not like we're wanting to say that these notions, if we're spelling them out like this, don't move fast through self. They can move slowly, they can move quickly, the full range of things. But the notion here is that that sequence is regular. It's always going to be thought, feeling, emotion, thought, feeling, emotion.

Like the movement of energy can create new patterns in the world and fuse, like you might say something with some real potency, some real power that matters to other people because of the level to which it matters to you, and they'll feel that energy. So again, they'll perceive the form, they'll feel the energy, they'll themselves maybe potentially have emotion in response, mirror what you're experiencing, and around and around it goes, but it's this sequence.

And so noticing both the specificity of thought, feeling, and emotion, but also the sequencing of it gives us again, a kind of clarity as to what is actually happening. What can we distill as being essential elements of this whole experience that is all of this together? And that's, again, it's part of the language, but it connects back to this underlying idea about this, in this particular case, that flow is modeled by something called Axiom 2. And so there's a whole pattern here, and anything that effectively is following this pattern is within the scope of the teaching of the metaphysics, essentially.

Jared: Beautiful. And what came to mind, I was curious about, is there, in what context is the distinction between emotion and let's say like action? Is that a way that like, I remember seeing that there's like parentheses action somewhere in the metaphysics. Is there a way in which you could hold thought, feeling, action as a triple? Like, is that something that—

Forrest: Well, action requires energy.

Jared: Yeah. Right.

Forrest: So in this sense, when we're saying emotion, right, that's shorthand for energy in motion. Yeah. And the key aspect of this that's actually interesting is that it's an energy that can move from one level of self to another. So in effect, this thinking, which is basically a cerebral event, it's an abstract event. Like I, my eyeballs see something. And then this gets processed by the visual cortex and I have a thought, oh, there's a dog, right? But in this just perceptual thing, there's no energy with it yet, right? But then I could have a kind of recognition. There could be a kind of, that is my dog. And I have love for this dog. Like I feel this sense of connection to the dog, and that releases this flow of emotion, this sense of love, right? So I might reach out and give the dog a hug.

And so in effect, there's a sense in which, oh, we are now looking at a very embodied action, right? To give the dog a hug because you care for it. And it's just your partner, it's your friend, you've had it since you were 16 or something, right? And in this sense, the conceptual is connected to the embodied through the channel of feeling and the energy that flows through that channel is the emotion.

Jared: Okay. That's right.

Forrest: And that energy expresses into the world in the embodied world, in the physical world as action.

Jared: As action.

Forrest: Okay. Right. So in this sense, we can think about it as the form of the channel, the crossing of types of world, the abstract world versus the embodied world, and the flow of energy to manifest in the embodied world. And that's the emotion part. It's the energy flowing to be the basis for manifestation, which in this particular case means your arms, rather than sitting still at your sides, reach out and make an embrace.

Jared: Right.

Forrest: So yeah, this idea that the contents of mind are not just abstract, but touch the physiological, the psychological to physiological integration, the mind, body, spirit wholeness, essentially. When we're talking about pattern, we're usually doing it within a domain, within a particular layer. When we're talking about feeling, we're talking about things that are essentially channels between layers, the same way that you can think about structure within a layer. So feeling is essentially kind of a between layers. It's like a connection between layers. But in order to have any of either of these, emotion energy itself to—

Jared: Create shape, flow through it, to create—

Forrest: Connection across layers is occurring. So there's this thing called Axiom 1, which basically says in this translation, that emotion is kind of the basis by which we even know our thoughts and know our feelings, right? Because there's still an energy flow, even in the sense of from the embodied world, there's light as a physical phenomenon entering the eyeball and the nervous system is essentially processing that light signal into electromagnetic transmissions through the cellular process that is the nervous system. And that requires energy. It's not like it just happens without some input. If you don't eat food for a long time, your brain will stop working.

So there's a point here in which the energy is moving across layers and that is the basis of thinking and the thinking becomes the basis of feeling and the feeling becomes the channel through which the energy then is enabled to flow, which enables the whole cycle to begin again. Right. So there's a sense in which we're looking at that sequencing again as basically being something which is directly enabled by and indirectly enabled by and so on.

So yeah, I mean, that's why to some extent I think about emotion as not just being a psychological event, but also a physiological event. And this is actually really clear. Like if we were to talk about fear, you would feel it in your body. You feel it in your gut. It's something that triggers the adrenals and enables you to run if you need to run or act if you need to act. So emotion is certainly not just psychological. It's definitely also physiological. And so how do we see the connection between these layers? Well, we can talk about it in terms of forms transducing into feelings, transducing into energy movements.

Jared: Incredible. What comes to mind now, there's like this trope or this idea of, like emotions are like messy and reckless and you really need to rely on your thinking and you can't trust your emotions and you just shouldn't even ever like, you know, like, why am I even trying to do anything with feelings and emotions? Thinking is the way to be logical, rational, and make choices that are like good. And so I'm wondering, like, for those people, is there something that you could say, or was there something that would kind of make this clear here?

Forrest: First of all, we are all always going to have all three. And so to some extent, it's a bit like trying to condemn the weather. Well, it's raining. Okay. Well, yeah, it's raining. You can accept the fact of that because you really can't change it much. Right. It's just gonna do what it's gonna do. But in a certain sense, you can reframe how you regard that.

So in much of the world, it's desert, right? And if it's raining, that's actually a really good day. Where I live currently, we don't get rain very often, but when we do, that's when you see all of the plants and flowers start coming up. And it's actually something I'm really looking forward to. It's like the world goes from being pretty brown to all of a sudden being this really vibrant green. And I see all of this new color and it's actually something that most people will think a rainy day, that kind of sucks. I can't go out, play very much or whatever. But honestly, I experience a rainy day as an extremely good thing.

And so it's not to say that one point of view or the other point of view is better or worse than the other, but it is to say something like, it does kind of help if we frame it in a way that actually makes sense with respect to reality. And so in this sense, it is equally as important to have and to regard feelings and emotions as it is to think. You want to do all of them.

And I'll be a little bit specific, like in a given day, a person's going to have a lot of thoughts. Most people, they kind of have this running monologue. Not everybody, but a lot of people do. And so maybe there's 1,000 thoughts in a day. I'm just picking a number, but I don't know for any individual how many that would be exactly. But it really doesn't matter. It just means there's going to be a bunch, so which ones are worth writing down? Which ones are worth remembering? How do we prioritize?

Well, somewhere along the way, you have to sort of land with what you care about, what matters to you. And so what signal are you going to get that lets you know what matters to you? Well, you're going to feel the care. So feeling is important.

Jared: Yeah.

Forrest: But then the emotion's gonna tell you how important.

Jared: Uh-huh.

Forrest: Right. So in effect, the feeling is gonna say, this is important. I care about this. But the emotion's gonna tell you, you actually care about that a lot. Like, this is either, yeah, it's important, but so what? Versus no, I really care. This matters. I need to write this down. I needed to remember this one. This has been shaping my whole life for a long time, and I don't want it to ruin the rest of my life. Or, wow, this insight is so amazing that it's going to basically help me as a tool for every bunch of situations down the road.

So in this sense, it's the feelings and emotions that give you the keys to distinguish between ho-hum thoughts versus wow, this is like a real insight that really matters. And bear in mind, this is like, in one sense, this should be obvious, but for those people that have kind of moved into rationality, they've basically said, well, to some extent, to figure out the truth, we want to be dispassionate about it. We don't want to care what the outcome is. We want to discover what the outcome is.

Well, that's great. But there are also times where your personal artistic expression matters or your choices as to what topics to study. So yeah, maybe you went into mathematics and you wanted to learn a particular field of topic, but if you weren't caring about that body of mathematics, if there wasn't some reason why you were choosing this as your personal life path, then you're not really in touch with your own nature.

Now, this isn't to say that there aren't certain forms of trauma that can happen where a person detaches from their body. Maybe they've just experienced physical discomfort for a really long time and like they just don't want to be in touch with their feelings or emotions too much. So that can happen. I mean, I'm not saying that's good. It's basically like being numb. If you are in a space where you've entered into that sort of disconnection, you have a kind of numbness, then you might notice that you're a little attracted to the kind of things that make you feel less numb, which could be, in worst cases, addictions of various kinds, but also a kind of inability to feel good in the world, feel anything.

So in effect, there's a sense in which we can't really navigate the world without some sensation, some sort of feedback. And if you don't have it, then you will naturally find yourself seeking that. Whereas if you are experiencing too much, like there's a sense in which you just need a little bit of space, then yeah, maybe it makes sense to basically pay attention to your feelings. Yeah, this hurts. Let's retreat a little bit to a place that's quieter, that has more peace, so I can actually be in touch with what matters to me rather than say, what someone is projecting on you to do.

So yeah, in this sense, feelings and emotions are guides. They help you to know not just what you care about and how much you care about it, but also they help you to choose what subjects to study or what subjects to engage with, what things you want to do in life. And so it's a bit like just because you use your right hand doesn't mean your left hand can't exist. Right? Like, you can do better with both hands. You can do things with two hands that you can't really do with one hand. So why would I say only my right hand is the thing that is the tool? Well, actually my left hand and my feet and legs matter. And if I've got all of myself, then I can do stuff that my right hand couldn't possibly do because I don't know, if I ignore the fact that I have legs, the thing I need to pick up is over there.

Intellect won't get you there, right? You can think all you want, but unless you engage your body to actually walk over there and I don't know, maybe you use your left hand to open the drawer or the right hand to pick up the thing you need to have, right? It's like there's a sense in which it feels just like a basic misunderstanding to think that there is only intellect.

There is instinct. And there is intuition. And the people that pretend that there's only intellect because of their unconsciousness of their own instincts end up being unfortunately more emotionally driven and more justifying in unreasonable ways things that they think are reasonable. They have this idea and then they're actually acting quite belligerent or defending points of view, which are kind of like, yeah, I don't know why you want to die on that hill, but honestly, man, it just feels insane to me.

Like there's a sense in which if you don't acknowledge the biological reality of your own instincts, then your instincts are going to come up underneath your intellect and are going to co-opt and corrupt your intellectual process. So you kind of have to at least know about and recognize and incorporate the reality because the instincts aren't going to go away. They're there for a reason. And so in effect, your biological health is going to shape how your thinking process happens.

And more than that, even, if you feel sick, that's a feeling. That's not you think you're sick. You notice that you're sick through the quality of your feelings. So being out of touch with your body means that to some extent, you're just not getting the feedback and you might basically be hurting yourself because you just don't feel the pain. Like that's a condition. People sometimes are so— there's things that can go wrong where they don't feel pain or they don't have feelings. And as a result, they tend to make basically bad choices because they put themselves in harm's way, or they cut themselves and they're just bleeding and they don't realize it. They're just going down the street and leaving a trail behind them. I can admit that's even happened to me once.

So trauma is a thing. It can be occurring. So in this sort of sense, my first encouragement would be, don't give up the intellect, but don't ignore the instinct. Don't overemphasize or underemphasize thinking, but in the same way, don't overemphasize or underemphasize feeling, and don't overemphasize or underemphasize emotion. Like, you want to have all three in a right balance, in a right flow. And a lot of people get that wrong because of social programming or cultural things or so on and so forth. I'm not really wanting to get into why does that sort of stuff show up culturally and what is it connected to and so on and so forth. That's kind of incidental with respect to this conversation in the sense that we can just notice that actually having all three is healthy the same way that having a right hand, a left hand, and legs and feet is healthy.

It's like you can be all of the above and that's actually good. And there's a right amount of balance between how much you use each of these parts. Ignoring that they're different aspects of you and not trying to emphasize one to the exclusion of the others. So that's roughly my answer to that sort of pre-emphasis that modern culture in the world, believing that everything can be solved with reason or everything that can be solved with causation or with the tools of science and technology. It's like, yeah, they're great insofar as they go, but it's not a panacea. Obviously, if it was, we would already be living in utopia. But we aren't. And the more that you try to treat it as a utopia, the more it becomes a dystopia, which we are collectively sort of noticing at this moment. But that's more of a just an observation of humanity in a lot of epochal sets. But we could talk about that some other time.

Jared: Thanks, Forrest. I appreciate it. I'll see you next week. This was Delicate Fire. Thank you so much for joining us, where we explore the aphorisms of effective choice. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments or head to delicatefire.com and join the Signal community. Please like and subscribe if you want to follow along, and I look forward to seeing you next week.