The Layers Beneath Thought
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A question about whether thoughts and feelings are two sides of the same coin leads to an exploration of how emotions sustain mental narratives, and what deeper feeling awaits when those narratives dissolve.
The Layers Beneath Thought
A question about whether thoughts and feelings are two sides of the same coin leads to an exploration of how emotions sustain mental narratives, and what deeper feeling awaits when those narratives dissolve.
Are thoughts and feelings two sides of the same coin, where we mostly choose to see only one side? And if they are the same, how do we know which one came first, and why is it more important to engage with the feelings and not the thoughts?
My answer is that it's important to engage with all of it, but it's layered. I would say it's less two sides of one coin. That's a good metaphor, but I would describe it differently: feelings are the deepest layer, emotions sit on top of that, and thoughts sit on top of emotions. We usually live with awareness only at the surface of thoughts, with very little depth in our awareness of emotions.
The thought-emotion loop
Thoughts and emotions are actually mind. I would say thoughts and emotions are the same, and they produce a cycle. Emotions validate thoughts, and thoughts produce emotions. A thought is an imagination of a situation that invokes an emotion. That's what happens when we watch a movie. We get immersed and experience emotions that are not real in the sense that they're not actually happening in our life. But we have the emotional experience because we identify with a character. That happens because of how the mind works: you can imagine something and have an emotional response to it.
Then what happens is the emotion gives a sense of embodiment. The emotion sends a message to the thinking mind: "Don't you see? This is what reality is. The anger is justified. The action I have to take is justified." Because the emotion makes it embodied and real, it has a certain quality of validating the narrative.
This is a mental process that cycles. Thoughts and emotions I can distance from, disidentify from, relate to, and experience. Often I'm not actually that in touch with emotion; it's a surface emotion. And the narrative being sustained by that emotional world isn't questioned. It is seen as reality. As we look into the emotional landscape and feel more deeply, we can now see the story in its full nature.
Feeling beneath emotion
But then there's something even beyond that, which is feeling. It will be hard to distinguish emotion from feeling, but feeling is more subtle, more deep, and more simple. In a sense, what we long for in our human experience is to feel more. We long for that because we are living on the surface of thought and occasionally emotion.
So you're saying that feeling is more real than thoughts and emotions?
You could say it's deeper, closer to our true nature. In a sense, everything is real. What happens is that things aren't what they seem. Thoughts don't appear as thoughts; they appear as reality. But they are as real as anything else. By "reality" I mean what is true in our experience, in our story.
I guess it's hard to distinguish between feeling and emotion, as you say. And as with thoughts, emotions come and go, but feelings are more sustained.
That's exactly how it is. The more we do this work, the more something remarkable can happen: the instant you shift into feeling, the whole reality of that mental-emotional world you were in vanishes. You see it as completely distant and somewhat dreamlike, like a memory. Something that felt absolutely real, as in "this is what my reality is now," and then you shift into feeling, even for a few seconds or a few minutes. From that new perspective, there's a lingering shift: "That whole narrative, that whole emotional experience, it's there to help us avoid that deeper feeling."
I'm sure we've all had that experience, though it might be hard to recognize it or remember it in those terms. It's a really important part of this work, because as we see and disidentify with the narratives of what we are, it opens the door for these deeper feelings.
The goal isn't really to act on the feelings. It's just to recognize them and see how feeling is the engine of emotions and thoughts.
Yes, and also to have a direct relationship. "Recognize" invokes a bit more of a detached knowing or labeling: "Oh, this is the feeling." That's different from a full, direct, raw relationship where I am completely swimming in the feeling. And it's going to be grief, sadness, joy, excitement. It's often really strange because it's so unfamiliar. It's sometimes hard to name, and often uncomfortable because it's spacious and unformed. There will be a mental process of trying to make it something known. For example, love can be made into pain. Excitement can be turned into anxious worry. Open, loving vulnerability can be turned into shame and embarrassment.
Why we avoid feeling
Why do we do that?
There are many reasons. One of them is that we cannot exist in the way we normally are simultaneously with these feelings. The "I" that we believed ourselves to be cannot swim in those depths. And yet it's what we long for.
I guess it's the ocean of feelings versus the waves of emotions that we're caught up in.
Exactly. One teacher, Eckhart Tolle, calls this the pain body. I would say he's describing and pointing to exactly this mental-emotional loop that we identify with. It creates a localized, centralized, knowable sense of self.
Thought as invisible lens
It's like we're not seeing the bigger picture.
You're not seeing things as they are. You're seeing them through the veil of thought. Thought has this wonderful, magical power of interpreting reality, so you are no longer experiencing thought; you're experiencing what seems to be the nature of how reality is. It's like when you watch a movie and get immersed: you forget you're watching a movie. The second you think, "Oh yes, it's a movie," you know a hundred percent what it is.
Thought has that same quality, but we have a hard time doing that snap out, seeing, "Oh, this is thought." It is experienced as "this is the nature and reality of things, this is how things are." Only thought can do that. It can convert something. The direct experience of thought is always just what it is: it's always thought. But then our relationship to it, to our mind, has the ability to flip, and suddenly it's not thought I'm relating to. It's reality. In that switch, from "this is thought" to "this is now reality," we get lost. A hundred percent of the time that we do this, we are in illusion, in confusion.
But it has its purpose. We do that freely because there's something gained. Imagine you're in deep anguish. You cannot tolerate it, so you put a movie on and forget about the anguish. The movie ends, and you're back in anguish. But for a while, you had relief by going into the movie. It's the same with thought, except we have the ability to do that around the clock.
What waits when the narrative breaks
If we were to snap out of that making of reality with our mind, with our interpretation, we would feel something that at first would be either unbearable, overwhelming, or too difficult. The pointer here is: just keep going there. Something in our nature can swim at infinite depths. It just takes a bit of time to adjust. We have the capacity to go a little deeper, and then that becomes natural. There's an ease and a flow. And then going a little deeper feels like too much, and then we go a little deeper still.
I want to share something positive. You might not know this, but I've been working on my relationship with my son. There's been so much conflict. I get so angry so easily, and we just trigger each other. Ever since being encouraged to do this work, there have been a couple of times, just a couple, where the anger shifted to outright laughing. We were angry at each other, and then we just looked at each other, and it was obvious how ridiculous it was. He's way more in tune with his own feelings than I am, but that shift happened. And there is so much joy in it. Often that shift from controlling anger is just, "Oh, wow." It was unbelievable. So thank you for encouraging me to do this work.
You're very welcome. That's beautiful. That's exactly what I'm talking about. There's that shift, and suddenly what seemed so real and important, you're laughing at, because it's ridiculous. And what's underneath is joy. And intimacy.
It's like we were so angry at each other because we care so much about each other and have so much love. That's why we were fighting so much.
That's beautiful. I'm really happy about that.