Feelings underlie consciousness

So much of what we attempt to do to feel better is to approach ourselves through our cognition or to alter our cognition.  But feelings underlie higher thoughts, “like a cork floating on the surface of an ocean, consciousness rises and falls with each wave of feelings that passes through the body.”  Try listen to an emotionally evocative piece of music and watch the constant flow of feelings, thoughts, sensations and images that arise with each moment by moment happening as you listen to the music.  Moreover, both feelings and thoughts have a common origin in bodily states or movements.  The process has been described as, “when the nerve impulses, set off bodily movements, reach the lower brain centres, a person becomes aware of feelings.  The impulses stop at these lower centres, however, but passes on … to the cerebral hemispheres, where images formation and symbolic thoughts take place.”  Neuroscientist, Antonio Damascio asserts that feelings are intimately connected with the body-and constitute the basis for conscious thought. “Our minds would not be the way they are if not for the interplay of body and brain during evolution…The mind has to  be first about the body, or it could not have been,” says Damasio.  So movement/dance is not just a creative, expressive device but fundamental to the transmission of feelings, symbolic thoughts and images and thus to awareness of our consciousness or our Self.

Nicholas Humphrey, evolutionary psychologist and philosophy presents to assumptions: 1. consciousness stems from the having of sensations. 2. The subject of consciousness, “I”, is an embodied self.

A mind requires boundaries.  Primitive animals, including our ancestors, had  a sense of “me” from “not me.”  A physical boundary (skin or any membrane) forms a threshold across which exchanges of matter and energy take place.  Sensory stimuli are processed and experienced.  Such as temperature, pressure, pain or other sensations.  ” Any animal that had the means to sort out the good from the bad-would clearly  have been at a biological advantage.  Natural selection was therefore likely to select for ‘sensitivity’”, Humphrey writes.

Early ancestors and some animals were able to ask, according to Humphrey, “what is happening to me?”  but also detecting whether it was good or bad and what to  be done about it.  So the ability to hear your thoughts enunciated in your head as you are thinking and reading.  In Buddhism or mediation practices this is often described as the “observing self.”

As we have advanced we are able to better understand what was happening to us, able to receive incoming stimuli, but to link them to the “I”, the source, the inner and to be curious about the source.  There is then a basic awareness of things being out there and in here.  At this stage the “I” is not just a passive receptor of external stimuli but an awareness of existing in the world in our own right.  A personality can now take shape with more abstract thinking (such as symbolization, categorization) and creative expression (e.g language, culture and art) is possible.

Moreover, though noticing an awareness is reached that sensations, feelings and thoughts do not go on indefinitely but have a certain quality and duration.  They exist in time, past, present and future.  The cornerstone of our consciousness is the realization that we are mortal and will one day die.  So our time in living, our human existence has a time limited and thus the need to appreciate ourselves and others.  According to Humphrey, none of this would be possible without embodied feelings, “I feel, therefore I am.”

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