What are the physical and metaphorical differences between thoughts and emotions. I understand that thinking, problem solving, analysis etc are a different function that can interact with emotions and experiences, but aren't they both part of the brains thought processes?
I guess our ego or personality would be a mixture of our mental capacity, intelligence, education, knowledge, experiences, instincts, emotions and genetics?
It's ironic that our emotions precede our thoughts, and are basically the fuel (drive) and purpose of our thinking and intelligence. We use our minds to exist and thrive, which is driven initially by our instinct to survive and be content.
My reason for asking is a desire to understand what is meant by the words "spirit" and "soul"? I always assumed the soul was our personality or self image, and that the spirit was our 'conscious' life force supplied by another hidden source, separate from the physical world. It made sense to me that a body combined with spirit, eventually developed and matured into a unique soul. We all have different DNA, circumstances, experiences, education, desires etc, which I believed in time made us a mature individual.
So our purpose might be to leave an imprint on the spirit and be released upon passing from this shell (body)?
There are historical misuses of terms that complicate arriving at an assertion in the matter that gets us closer to an accurate answer.
Today, however, we've learned a little more about both aspects of the matter, the physical and the spiritual, that improves over the past couple of thousand years or so, that also allows us to correct some historical misuse of terms to improve our understanding of this matter.
Today we know that our brain's lateral asymmetry provides us with a mind, where we think and from which we relate to the world outside of our self, the world of things, and a soul, where we feel and relate to our body from sensation and experiential kinesthetics.
Our world relates to our body as well, and we can feel about the world as well as think about our body, and our brain can store bilaterally our thoughts, feelings, and experiences, not only for sensual reference but emotional reference as well.
This mind, as we call it, orients in one of our cerebral hemispheres. Our soul, as we have just begun to accurately call it today, orients in the other cerebral hemisphere. Each is a collection of neuroclusters and networks, and although such gives us a somewhat illusory but definite "spiritual experience", this physical structure, by itself, is not spiritual in nature. But the illusion of such accounts for why we've called one of those collections the soul and why the soul has been erroneously labeled in religious circles as a part of us that lives after we die, which is because it is only felt, almost zephyr-like in experience, and when our mind dominates, as it most often sadly does, the "barely there" experience of the soul gives it an almost "other worldly" nature.
At the nexus of the hemispheres, in our hypothalamus-thalamus region, it all comes together, and we now are beginning to understand that that region is what has been metaphorically referenced in romantic literature as our heart.
Interesting, is that during brain probe experiments with a conscious patient, the surgeon could prod various hemispheric areas rather strongly and the patient would essentially relive sensation, thought, feeling, emotion and meaning of the stimulated moment experience and relate it back to the surgeon .. but if the surgeon just barely even touches the hypothalamus-thalamus region it sent the patient into a coma that sometimes took a couple weeks before the patient awoke.
We have for some time believed that our spirit (what has been historically referred to as our soul, which we are beginning to realize was an erroneous reference in terms) is a part of us that lived before our incorporation materially and will continue to live afterward and that had a mysterious yet transcendent relationship to the universe as a whole.
In the late 19th century, physicists became more aware of something called the zero-point field, essentially photons existing at absolute zero in dark matter, and that this dark matter field was essentially everywhere and constant.
They began to factor this constant out of equations because it was simply that, constant and everywhere and apparently at the time fairly benign.
But more recently physicists have come to experience this phenomenal zero-point field as something much more. As they begin to learn more about it, how it provides an instant connection from one "end" of the universe to the other, that it appears to wave in unique and distinct-infinite-number-of-frequency waves, that they've begun to suspect it as being the spiritual link we've surmised.
Indeed, today physicists and spiritualists are forging some unexpected common ground with respect to the zero-point field as we've come to realize that there is dark matter in each of us and that each human brain has a frequency of operation, so to speak, that is unique, a unique frequency that can "tune" and thus connect with the same frequency in the infinite dark matter zero-point field.
This connection of the material with the spiritual is now believed to be that which gives us our experience of not only being here and now as a physical entity, it provides centering, heart-centering, as well as an awareness-experience that there is more, more to us than just the physical, more to our world than just the physical on this planet here and now, that there are dimensions of existence reaching infinitely within and without us, that we are part of a great cosmic whole, and that there is more to us than our physicality, and that there is more to us than our time here on Earth.
It's quite fascinating, I believe.
We're only just scratching the surface .. and I would love to be here another 1000 years from now to see what we've come to learn and experience then.