Because we are surrounded by so many lopsided people who are intelligent, or should we say clever, people who are good at solving narrow problems through analysis in order to get what their self wants, and whose lives are dysfunctional in many important ways, namely the fact that they can't really love anyone, we get a sense that the intellect, by itself, is limited.
This leads many people to the conclusion that emotions are the way forward in an intellectual time. Clearly, if the mind by itself is blind to what matters, such as love and beauty, and because love is clearly an emotion, then we need to turn inwards, not spend so much time objectively dissecting the Reality out there, but also feel the inner wellspring in us, the one which colors our experience with subjectivity and interiority, and from which arise emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and so much more.
Or so we are told. This picture between objective analysis and subjective emotionality is a false dichotomy, because they both arise from the splitting self. There is me, as a subject here, separate from the object there, and debating between objectivity and subjectivity is about locating the center of importance in one or the other. But this begs the following questions: where does this split come from? to what degree is it accurate or truthful? what does it make us blind to? and what could be beyond it?
Rather than answering directly, I will take a detour through the limitations of subjectivity, and how mere emotions make us blind to the Reality around us. 1 Have you ever seen someone try to express love or beauty, and all they could do was reach out for the most banal platitudes and imagery? I am not just talking here of a lack in skill, even if it is an important part of it, I am referring here to a much more concerning lack, one of authenticity rather than craft, as if they are mimicking love, acting out what they believe they are supposed to feel, rather than simply love, or act spontaneously.
This points to the fundamental distinction between emotions and feelings, the former being tight, leading people to avoid the situation, or try to control it, whereas the latter are expansive, leading people to accept the situation, and act from it if needs be.
Thus, if I live a very emotional life, as is typical in our times, I will look out at the sky and complain that it is not sunny outside (and if it were sunny, I would find a way to complain about how it's too hot or what have you). This will cause me to tighten in my body, something too subtle for many to even detect, and this will lead to even more emotionality and contraction as I go through my day, identifying what I dislike and being more and more controlled by it.
Emotions are ruled by likes and dislikes, whereas feelings come from qualities, the aura of the room, the tone of someone's speech, the mood of the day, the strange hum in the silence, the wide panaroma of the sky, and so on. We all have likes and dislikes, only those with no taste and discernment don't, but people who cannot recognize anything beyond those are immature.
Someone who for instance cannot admit to the genius of a musician even if their style isn't up to their own taste, or someone who cannot recognize that their child's preferences, beliefs and habits are different to theirs, or someone who cannot eat anything outside of a narrow range of what is essentially junk food, or someone who cannot accept the difficult task of mastering their craft but still want to be considered as an artist, all of these examples we rightly see as immature, but things become more tricky when they are closer to our lives, to the likes and dislikes that we tightly hold onto.
The problems with likes and dislikes start when they are tight, because then I need to hold onto the conditions which allow me to like something or not. This is why emotions as I presented them here are antithetical to love, because there is nothing beyond my likes and dislikes which I could soften into, it's all rigidity in order to please my self. A life of emotionality leads to an obsession with crude pleasure, the kind of satisfaction which does not last for very long and invariably gives way to a down emotion, with enough delay that the causal link between the 'up' and the 'down' is not clear, and that the circumstances at hand can be blamed.
Thus, another key departure from feelings is that emotions lead to more emotions, in the typical addictive fashion of up and down, 2 whereas feelings invite stillness, and if need be, appropriate action.
We are conditioned, usually from our family life, and definitely in school, to chase a supposed 'good', whether it is a good grade, or a good meal, or a good toy, and later on, good sex, a good pay, a good car, a good house, and so on. Not that those aspects aren't desirable, of course they are, but the problem is that they are chased with the kind of narrow attention which can only bring misery, because it highlights the very same lack it is supposed to relieve.
It's like remembering a joke you found hilarious, and trying to repeat it again, and again, and again, hoping to get the same enjoyment from it, not realizing that it had its time and place, and that now that moment is gone, that repeating that joke is like pulling up a dandelion from its roots and wondering why it's withering away.
Emotionality is never in the present, it's either stuck in the past, depressed at all the things you have done or haven't done, regretting this or that thinig you said, playing an embarrassing moment (that no one remembers but you) over and over again. Or it's projected in the future, worrying about things you have no control over, and which most of the time aren't even real, or fantasizing that something will happen.
Feelings are in the present, they allow you to be one with the situation, something which incidentally can only happen when you are relaxed. Comedy and love can only arise from the present moment, which is why we can gesture at them, but ultimately, our literal descriptions of them pale in comparison with the direct experience of laughter and being in love.
This is why feelings are not addictive, because the present moment is beyond (but includes) my self, whereas addictions are when I only experience my self. It's when I start chasing something which is not in the present that I start becoming dissatisfied, moody, anxious, worried, restless, and addicted, because that's when my mediating self starts lodging itself between my conscious experience and the situation at hand, as if it knew better, and wanted to control both of them: what I feel becomes what I like and don't like, and what the situation is becomes what the situation should be.
This disconnect from the situation is why the self-informed (and thus emotional) self so often engages in clumsy actions, either too "passive", wallowing in the impossibility of a task, or how unfair the world is being, or keep delaying, delaying and delaying so as to pretend that the problem doesn't exist.
Or they are too "active", trying to control everyone around them, blaming this or that person, obsessively trying to remove everything they dislike about the situation. Most people however prefer to express their dislikes through constant complaining, which has the benefit of social reassurance and not having to put yourself out there, but ultimately none of those emotional strategies are informed by the situation, they are informed by my likes and dislikes alone.
Feelings on the other hand lead me to accept a situation I cannot meaningfully change, or take responsibility for my life and act as simply and directly as I can manage. Feelings allow me to learn from the pain of my mistakes, because it is not taken personally, as opposed to emotional people who take everything personally, as if Reality itself was plotting against them (but then when they screw up, it's everyone else's fault, go figure).
Whereas emotionality leads to an endless cycle of problems, and energy aimed in the wrong direction—victim energy, blaming another person, working away at the wrong problem 3—feelings lead to less problems. Of course no one is perfect, even if they are decently conscious after having been humbled by life, and inspired to do better by others, but by and large, people who listen to their feelings tend to be more conscious as they age, broader and deeper in their worldview and in everything that they make, whereas emotional people tend to become even more emotional as they age, thus more miserable, desperate for excitement, and narrower in what they feel, do and create.
I have taken up isolated aspects of emotionality and contrasted them with those of feelings, giving a picture that the distinction between the two is complicated, when it is actually incredibly simple, especially in how they manifest in one's entire life over time, or in matters of love, humor (or lack thereof) and health—the body never lies, which is why loveless people live loveless lives, which has a way of atrophying the body through its tightness.
The reality is not that feelings are complicated, they can be subtle to feel out but they are direct, as opposed to mediated, but rather that we live in an unfeeling world, ruled by egoic likes and dislikes rather than qualities. There is simply no rational reason in a world bounded by self to experience anything beyond your self, which is why consciousness is useless at best, but quite a detriment at worst.
It is deeply unpleasant to attend to the inner qualities of the people and the situations around us when they are so devoid of feelings, but full of emotions. Modern movies and TV shows in particular are almost entirely devoid of conscious qualities, which have been replaced by crude emotions, to the point where talking about pornography is not even an exaggeration, it's an accurate description of how titillation is the only thing which keeps people watching them. Thus we get the superhero movies, the action movies, the cutesy inoffensive stories, or the perfect "romances" 4, all popular because they appeal to the emotional self.
Modern people and conversations aren't much better, because we now live in a world so devoid of real, direct interactions that the hollow movies and the hollow conversations blend into one, the "real" people in the office talking like characters in the show and videos they just watched, and the people in movies having inane conversations because the writers and actors haven't experienced anything else.
The distinction between emotions and feelings is important because the former ultimately lead to an unsatisfying life, whereas the latter feel nourishing as we experience them. But in a world which has no need for present experience because it is obsessed with "progress" and the reach of the technological system, the number of people who even feel like something is missing is dwindling every day. 5
Fortunately, people who are grounded in feelings have a way of recognizing one another, since after all, the body is always beaming with the life that you live, especially as you get older. A relaxed person has a relaxed posture, gait, speech and gaze, a funny person has a funny way to write, speak and even make love, and a lovely person has a lovely smile, tone to their voice, and a soft attention they bring to their experience.
Which is to say, the ensouled person brings a quality which other souls notice, something which is not useful to the system and the system-people it is built from, but which speaks to something far more lasting than it, which is why feelings are the bonds that link together a rather strange society of people, most of whom are dead but who still speak through time by the intermediary of their writing, and which the alive people wish to honor by their own life, because we all drink from the same fountain of eternity.
1 Hopefully I can write about the false dichotomy of objectivity and subjectivity in the following pieces about consciousness.
2 As Barry Long puts it: "Happy today, unhappy tomorrow"
3 A mistake which is not accidental but rather strategic. Self knows how to work on everything but itself, because deep change is essentially death. This is why cowardly people will admit to everything expect that they might have a courage deficit, because admitting that you are a coward is saying something about your being which needs to change, whereas believing that you aren't clever enough, or don't have enough money, or were born with a difficult life, all allow the self to not take responsibility and change itself.
4 Or on the other side of the spectrum, the negative type of pornography, the one that appeals to the self through fear (horror), or hatred of the bad guy (dystopias), or disgust.
5 Or is it? Maybe as the collapse of our world continues, more and more people will wake up from the unworld that we inhabit, since there won't be many material things to attach yourself to. But the problem with this view is that while it is possible to get a sense that you are living in a nightmare while immersed in it, waking up from it is another matter altogether.
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Emotions Feelings Subtledistinction
2026-02-16