It is difficult to grasp the basic difference between feeling, emotion and mind and this is because of an innate tendency in the human condition to identify with whatever is happening at any given moment. We observe something in ourselves and assume that it is part of who we are. It is this tendency to identify with movements in consciousness that is the cause of confusion in our lives.
‘We are not, and can never be, the feelings, emotions or thoughts which arise in consciousness’. To grasp this fact and to understand it clearly, are the first real steps towards self-realisation. What then are these forces which move us in one or another direction?
Feeling and thought, for the individual, are two basic differentiations in everyday experience, and that which is registered in the interplay between the two is emotion.
What does this mean?
With the development of mind, emotion is revealed, yet mind is not emotion. Thought, which is a process of mind and a much later development in the long cycle of evolution, discovers the world of feelings.
The turning of the searchlight of the mind into the world of feeling (a world steeped in glamour and illusion) reveals the reaction to these feelings.
These reactions, as revelations of mind, are termed emotion. To put it in a different way: thoughts do not arise out of our feelings; feelings are aroused first as gut reactions in response to life and living. When the mind is sufficiently developed (and for many this is not yet the case) feelings stand revealed, and the result of the revelation by the observing mind to this world of feeling, is emotion. It is the activity of mind in relation to feeling which reveals emotion.
Emotions are then dealt with more effectively through the use of the mind as it employs greater intelligence and discrimination. This leads in time to a life directed through the power of reason and not blind feelings.
Emotion that is registered by the image-making faculty of the mind, and the THOUGHT FORM which is created as a result, can be so powerful that it persists in the memory and is constantly revitalised by the recurring emotion.
The mechanical process of thoughtform building in the early stages of mental development is the cause of fixed emotional habits. They are created because mind still lacks the power of discrimination which is the means for disbanding emotional fixation. It is said that the widespread inability to differentiate between feeling, emotion, and thought, is due primarily to the present point of evolutionary development, but in some cases, such lines and differentiations can be, and are drawn clearly by those who have already developed the power of discrimination.
Within the human race, as it now stands, there are many who are as yet unable to distinguish clearly between thought, emotion, and feeling. The ‘mechanical thoughtforms’ which are created as a result of indiscrimination, and which memory guards blindly due to habit and lack of intelligent analysis and comprehension, are indeed the cause of much fixation and psychological difficulty in daily living. It is the ability to discriminate accurately which sets apart the more mentally developed man/woman from the average person who is still goverened primarily by feelings. The most troubling aspect about the undeveloped mind is the resulting tendency towards impulsive behavior, which is a physical and instinctive reaction to life’s eventualites.
The power of discrimination is a fundamental characteristic of the developed mind. In the ability to discriminate between mind, emotion, and feeling, we discover that clearly defined thought is the effect of the principle of intelligence dealing with life and empowering the mind with the knowledge and certainty to say:
I am not my body.
I am not my feeling apparatus, my emotions, or my thoughts.
I am not that which is developed through the interplay between myself and my environment.
I am something other than all this.
I am.
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