TL;DR

Thoughts = structure
Feelings = quality
Emotions = energy
They are distinct. Treat them as such.
Love is at the root. All other emotions can be traced back to it.
Clarity of thinking and clarity of feeling are both equally important.
Desires are entry points to what matters.
Real clarity emerges from welcoming, honoring, and giving agency to what arises.

Many in this community are clear that emotions convey information. I'm hoping to bring more clarity to this understanding by introducing thoughts, feelings and emotions as distinct from one another. When looked at with these distinctions, we can then begin to see what they want for you, and what is underneath the first thought that arises. This will lead to more flow and aligned choices.

Thoughts, Feelings and Emotions.

Thoughts, feelings, and emotions are distinct, inseparable, and non-interchangeable aspects of mind.^[1]

Emotion - strength, direction, intensity and flow of energy.
Feeling - quality, color, tone, and flavor of energy.
Thought - form, structure, or pattern of a perception or expression.

We often confuse and lump together emotions and feelings in Western culture. This leads to deep misunderstandings and a sloppy resultant ontology.

Think of the mind as a flashlight:

Emotion is the intensity and direction of the beam.
Feeling is the color of the light.
Thought is the shape of the beam - what patterns the light forms.

With these distinctions, we can begin to parse our emotional reactions effectively. We may perceive a threat (thought), which creates an opening sensation and adrenaline in our bodies (feeling) that leads to fear being expressed in an action we take (emotion). Thoughts act like the stained glass window, through which the light of emotion shines into the room, creating the feeling of what the room is like.

The 5 Primary Emotions

The field of emotions is a highly contested one. There are models with anywhere from 4 to 27 distinctions. This model^[1] refers to emotions as the direction and intensity of the flow of mind, distinct from thoughts and feelings. There are 4 transitions between 5 emotions that flow in an orderly, reasonable manner. Each emotional transition has an accompanying thought and feeling - a perception or belief (thought) that leads to an opening or closing, transparency or opacity (feeling). The 5 emotions are as follows:

Love is the base layer. It is unconditional, potentiating, and enables choice.
Fear shows up when you believe something you love might be lost.
Anger arises when you believe something needs to change in the world to protect what you love.
Frustration signals that something is blocking that needed change.
Depression is what happens when you believe the thing you love has already been lost, and cannot be recovered.

Why these five? Because they form a minimal, generative set - much like primary colors can be mixed into any hue. They are also general and abstract; anger can be understood as passion when manifested in an especially conscious and healthy manner.

Distinctions in Practice

Many in the rationalist community already operate with a stance that emotions convey valuable information, even if their “surface claims” are not always accurate. In Generalized Hangriness: A Standard Rationalist Stance Toward Emotions, @johnswentworth describes a model where emotions are treated like semantic claims: they say something about the world, and those claims can either be true or false. Anger might claim that someone acted unfairly, when in fact, you’re just hungry. But this doesn’t mean the emotion should be dismissed - it still encodes something useful, like a physical or psychological need.

The post frames this as a kind of social and cognitive hygiene: the move is to ask “What is this intensity (emotion) trying to signal beyond its apparent content (thought)?” This dovetails with the framework I’m proposing: emotions, when distinguished from feelings and thoughts, reveal directionality in the flow of care. From the Hangriness post:

“Let’s say I feel angry, so I imagine that my anger is a character named Angie and I ask them what’s up. And Angie starts off on a rant about how this shitty software library has terrible documentation and the API just isn’t doing what I expected and I’ve been at this for three fucking hours and goddammit I’m just so tired of this shit.”

Your “hanger” (named Angie in this case) is signaling that it wants something to change (code library) to protect something you love (your precious time). If you HALT and address your hunger, anger, loneliness and tiredness, and there’s STILL signal there, then this signal is significantly more trustworthy. The anger, when welcomed, honored, and given agency to express itself in a safe container, may give way to a fear of wasting time on things that are not aligned with your highest aspirations - reorienting you towards doing something more meaningful. Or, it could clarify how much you care about this specific project and give you a second wind to code the night away. Either way, it is pointing to something meaningful, and clarifying your connection to it allows for more ease and flow.

Here are some examples of questions you can ask yourself or a friend when stuck in one of the emotional states that will begin the flow to the next one higher in the stack:

Fear - “What are you afraid of losing?”
Anger - “What do you want to change in the world to protect what you love?”
Frustration - “What is blocking the change you wish to see in the world?”
Depression - “What is impossible to change that you wish you could?”

Effective Choices

An effective choice^[2] is one made in full awareness of your deepest desires clarified through coherent thought and felt-sense integration. These choices tend to be omni-considerate: enabling more freedom and creative possibility, both for oneself and others.

In contrast, ineffective choices result from a lack of internal clarity. To use the metaphor of a pool of water as our subjective experience, it gets harder to see what is at the bottom the deeper and murkier it gets. Ineffective choices happen when we can’t see what’s at the bottom of the pool. This happens because parts of us are doing their best to protect us without having access to the fullness of our being.

If we are solely using rationality to make choices without incorporating our capacity to feel, we are letting a smaller part of us make choices. This part is usually motivated by a surface desire to make sure that we don’t feel something (fear), which is a less effective basis than if we were choosing from a deeper place of care (love).

Clarifying Desire Through Feeling

To make effective choices, we must feel clearly. One modality I’ve trained in - called Unfoldment - provides a systematic and direct method for clarifying feeling and restoring coherency in ones subjective experience. It combines somatic inquiry with precision attention, surfacing the underlying structure of emotional blocks.

Unfoldment is a one-on-one practice where we welcome everything that arises. Sometimes it is at the depth of parts, where a part of the client is angry at someone, while another part is ashamed that they are angry and tries to suppress it. Sometimes it is at the depth of process, where the client feels a molten ball of lava in their stomach that moves upwards into their throats. And sometimes it’s at the depth of presence, where they feel the innate joy, will, strength, love, value and inner knowing that signals that they have a clarified connection with "deep self".

Through this process of clarification, the client becomes a more integrated self and chooses from a more inclusive basis, becoming more aware of the values that they care about and enabling them to live more virtuously.

Final Thoughts

Next time you're feeling "hangry", ask yourself "what else does this anger want to protect? What is worth caring about?" You may be surprised to find that the surface level discontent with your immediate situation is actually pointing to something you actually care about a whole lot.

This work is worth doing. The cognitive, propositional knowledge of this information is of a different type than the embodied, procedural knowing of how to deal with emotions real time. For that, I recommend practice.

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The Dynamics of Emotion
http://uvsm.com/dvol/control/pcore/own_books/white_1/wb_web_2/zout/upmp_emotion_1.htm#2_emot_dyna
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Effective Choice
http://uvsm.com/dvol/control/pcore/own_books/white_1/wb_web_2/zout/upmp_ch6.htm#2_effectivity