"A thinking mind cannot feel."

[sushil_yadav]

FourthBase,

I want to thank you.

When I check my profile here it says I joined in 2007 but never posted until today.

I don't know how this happened....I joined but never posted.

[Sounder]

Hello sushil and thanks for stopping by our little outpost in the wilderness.

I like the experiments you propose and think the results could be interesting. One concern I do have in regard to the framing of your thesis is your treatment of the category you call ‘thought’.

For instance, earlier in this thread C2W? expressed the opinion that the way you use ‘thought’ correlates with stress. I would second this but also suggest that there is a more primary correlation between your use of the word ‘thought’ and passive emotions.

The following is from a link (for a different thread) provided by Jack Riddler and comes from the perspective of ‘ex-Christians'.

http://youtu.be/uaqUJyUBozI

For Spinoza, there are two kinds of emotions: passive emotions and active emotions. Passive emotions are reactions to external circumstances; it’s what simply happens to us when external circumstances cause us to react to it in a certain way. For example, if I see a Lion in front of me, my emotional reaction would be fear. The existence of the Lion in front of me, including my perception of it, causes me to be in the emotional state of fear. This makes me into a passive being. However, on the other hand, an active emotion derives not from external circumstances, but rather it derives from the power of understanding. This power of understanding is our natural capacity, by exercising this natural capacity we exercise the power that gives rise to joy, which empowers us to live well. The difference is that with the active emotions it follows from exercising our natural capacity to understand ourselves and Nature, whereas with passive emotions it follows from external circumstances having power over us.

So, you might consider that thought and feelings could be quite intimately connected. And that the use of active and passive emotions might stand in or serve as useful markers for two different strains of thought that may relate to the fast/slow questions that seem central to your interests.

From my perspective a ‘fast’ paced society would be prone to be driven by passive emotions and reactive mind expressions because we make no time to listen to signals of the heart.

While normative models of reality bring us a degree of understanding with its codification of categories and their correspondences, they also inhibit creativity by effectively having as the measure of intelligence, conversant understanding and adherence to existing models for reality (nature).



The following is cross posted from Willows excellent thread ‘Everyday Sexism’. It is used to illustrate how passive emotions and active emotions seem to have a different source.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=36274

Confessions Of A Former Misogynist
February 14, 2013

What about the men?


……“I’d like you to learn from this, but you won’t. You’ll just chalk me up as another “mad girl” and carry on repeating the same stupid mistakes.”

Again, that hit my anger button, and I was fuming about it for days. But a few months later, I thought about it more, and decided to start analysing why I was so angry.

The latter was key here. I’d never tried to rationalise my anger before; I’d just followed where it led. Of course, the problem with irrational anger is that you can’t analyse it while you’re irrationally angry. You need to give it a few days to cool off and then look at it. tumblr_kokum0jiBq1qzm6njo1_400

Revelations

What I found began to horrify me. I’d write down why I thought I was angry a few days ago – lists of statements such as ‘she overreacted,’ ‘she’s being arrogant, selfish and hypocritical.’ Then I looked at each one individually and asked myself what had actually happened. What was the truth? Without the shield of irrational anger, I began to realise that half of what was on the list wasn’t even true, and the stuff that was true couldn’t in anyway justify that level of anger and hatred.

Why was I so angry and hateful? Even now, I find this difficult to explain. It was probably a combination of an inability to accept criticism, insecurity and hormones, but I began to see that it was very seriously clouding my judgment. I continued to talk to people about my difficulty attracting women, sustaining relationships and my feelings about feminism, but when I got challenged, I decided to genuinely reflect on it rather than just getting angry and staying with the same views.

It didn’t work exactly like that, of course. Feminism still pushed my anger buttons, and I still argued a lot about it. But if something made me angry, I’d go home angry about it, silently rage about it while trying to sleep and then a few days later try to rationally analyse what had made me angry.

In turn, this led to a larger sense of self awareness. I knew about self awareness before, but I mainly just saw it as being self-deprecating in order to get compliments. Actually being aware of what you think, how you appear to other people, and why, made a massive difference, not only in terms of self-reflection, but also in terms of empathy.

I soon realised that my empathy had been severely skewed for years, but I’ve found that this can be unlearned once you’re self-aware enough. I’d only ever considered myself as the subject of empathy, or other men who were in my position, I’d never considered the emotions and feelings of the women I’d been emotionally abusing.

When I realised how my behaviour must have made my girlfriends feel, I felt sick. There wasn’t a feminist conspiracy to deprive nice men from getting sex and girlfriends. The girls I’d been out with hadn’t dumped me because I was ‘too nice’ or because I was depressed, but because I was an emotionally abusive arsehole. That’s not an easy thing to admit, but it’s a lot easier to fix once you’ve done it.

What followed over the next few years was an epiphany as I started to consider sexism and misogyny in the wider world. I spent several years married to a feminist (we’ve since separated, but I still thank her for patiently opening my eyes to so much of this), who would point out areas of sexist culture to me when it arose. At this time, despite no longer being an all-out misogynist, I still subscribed to the idea that sexism was largely a problem of the past, but I now see that it isn’t……

I am so heartened by this fellow’s description of his commitment to the growth or evolution of his consciousness. His ‘practice’ strikes me as being a fair representation of Vipassana Yoga because he made himself the object of meditation. He effectively examined the unconscious drivers that were the source of passive emotions, expressed here in this case as sexism.


Stress is a natural by-product of trying to cover-up internal contradictions in ones modeling of reality.

We can release stress by stopping participation with the cover-up.

“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

Consciousness evolves, more so if it were to be encouraged rather than inhibited, as it is with our current modeling of reality.