Feelings
Feelings are emotions tinted with thoughts where the emotion preponderates. They are based on our mundane experiences of concrete physical objects, events and people.
Feelings can't be classified easily. It's impossible to say what exactly constitutes one particular feeling, because there are so many mental factors at play. The variety of feelings is clearly there, but when it comes to analysing the details, the differences become very vague. That's why it's impossible to say how many different feelings we can actually feel. Yet, they can be grouped in classes and categories to make the survey easier to comprehend.
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Feeling = emotion + thought
Emotion preponderates in feelings.
Feelings are emotions tinted with thoughts
An emotion is pure biological arousal (excitement, energy) experienced in consciousness. When emotions intermingle with thoughts (mentality), they turn into feelings. Feelings are ‘intellectualised’ emotions, in which the emotional aspect is stronger than the thought. Human feelings are far more complex than the animal ones, because our emotions intermingle with thoughts, adding a bit of rationality to what otherwise would be a purely animalistic, emotional arousal.
Feelings, being emotional manifestations, can be experienced as pleasant or unpleasant and in varying degrees of intensity. Pleasant or enjoyable feelings are called positive, unpleasant or painful feelings are called negative.
Positive
pleasant, attractive (likes, desires)
Negative
unpleasant, painful (dislikes, hate, pain, disgust)
Selfishness = emotional-mental complex focused solely on body and physical-emotional pleasures.
Body = a material unit seemingly separated from the rest of its environment.
Emotional Excesses
The weakness of thoughts in feelings makes it possible for people who do not control their emotionality to lose themselves in emotional excesses. An emotion can run along the whole gamut of positive and negative impulses unrestrained. If the intellect isn’t strong enough, the emotion can overwhelm thoughts, with the result of e.g. an angry person becoming furious, a sad person sinking in depression, or a joyous person indulging in rapture.
Egoism
When we neglect to develop intellectual interests and cultivate emotionality, we begin to strive mainly for pleasures and emotional passions. Partying, sex, material comfort and personal status become the only motives considered worth striving for. We become so self-absorbed that we react angrily or aggressively towards fellow humans when we feel hindered from pursuing our goals - a typically egoistic behaviour.
Selfishness or egoism is a point of view in which you consider yourself as a unit separated from everything and everyone else.
That separated unit is the body as it expresses itself through urges and negative emotional complexes. An egoistic attitude is always intermingled with fear in pursuit of materialistic pleasures which derive from urges, the most primitive layer of our nature. Urges derive from the survival instincts of the body. Whoever acts truly selfishly throughout life is trying to maximise their bodily pleasures and personal power even at the cost of other people.
Urges are part of human evolutionary heritage and nature. They only become an obstacle in our development if we yield to them fully without fostering our higher emotional and intellectual interests and capabilities.
Emotionality can overpower mentality and lead to emotional excess. In feelings the intellect succumbs to emotions.
cultivation of noble feelings and mentality
Human development implies the strengthening of mentality, so that we can become more independent from urges and emotions, make our feelings more rational and develop the power of imagination. The result is increasing freedom from emotional dependence.
Feelings develop Imagination
Mentality develops under the influence of feelings that are occupied with more intellectual interests. Emotionality becomes more intellectualised and the increased mental capacity fosters the power of visualisation. Imagination ensues which is the basis for creative work. Imagination becomes the next driving factor for emotional-mental development and in in connection with noble feelings it creates the phenomenon of a cultured individual.
