Working notes on What Came First?

Some thoughts on the Chicken or the Egg: What comes first, the thought or the emotion?

When the question came up in meditation this week, I wasn’t sure exactly how to answer, except to draw on my own experience, which is that sometimes the thought comes before the emotion, and sometimes the emotion comes before the thought. I know from experience that my emotions include thoughts, but not every thought I have involves an emotion.

I don’t like to ‘cook things up’ as an answer if Im not 100% sure about it, so thought best to have a good think, read, check, and this is what Ive come up with so far: (so, this is a work in progress.)

Seems I’m not alone! The world of neuroscience is only now starting to investigate this element of our brain, and psychology can’t agree on which comes first either, the thought or the emotion. Some branches of psychology believe it all starts with our thoughts, others believe emotion is what underpins all our thoughts. And so we are left with a ‘chicken or the egg’ scenario.

Buddhism doesn’t distinguish much between thought and emotion, which is probably one of the reasons it didn’t ring a bell for me on Monday: its not something I’ve ever had a long discussion about with anyone, because it hasn't come up.

In a purely biological sense, emotion serves as a signal and the purpose is to get us moving very quickly without us having to think it through. It's base brain stuff, and it seems the emotion of fear, for instance, comes before the thought in cases of an emergency 'fight or flight' situation.

Psychology's branch of Cognitive Therapy, on the contrary, believes emotions are triggered by subtle thoughts in the background of our mind.

However, since we’re talking Vipassana, I’m taking the Buddhist model of the mind and the Buddhist view into consideration.

The Buddhist model of the mind doesn’t create the sharp distinction between emotions and thoughts the way we do in the West. It understands them to be intertwined. Which, interestingly, is a view closer to modern neuroscience and studies of the brain. According to the Buddhist model of the mind, thoughts are considered normally to be reinforced by emotions but emotions are also heavily underpinned by our narrative, our thoughts.

In the meditation sense, thought includes various other aspects of mind, such as intention, causal relationships, virtuous mental states, attachment and aversion. In Buddhist philosophy we talk about virtuous and unvirtuous states of mind, one of the strongest unvirtuous states of mind being attachment. If we have a powerful attachment to something - an opinion, an object or person - the attachment causes the emotion or 'felt sense' of grasping, with the thought “I want that”. Similarly anger can cause hatred or other negative emotions and all sorts of associated thoughts. In this instance the emotion comes before the thought.

But Buddhism believes in causes and conditions - or causal conditions - i.e. nothing exists without causal conditions. B happens because A happened at some time previously. Nothing exists or comes into being in a vacuum. Therefore emotions have causes, even though the causal conditions are not always obvious.

Buddhist psychology has concepts for the 'cause and mechanisms' of the arising of anger, for instance, which is literally translated from Tibetan as “mental unhappiness”. But is better understood in English as something like 'habits' or 'habitual propensities'. Something that is in our nature, that is pre-conscious, remaining in our unconscious until something is the catalyst for bringing it to the surface.

Concerning the mechanics of thought or emotion, science doesn’t know much about how emotions or thoughts are actually triggered, but it seems to happen automatically. As we know from sitting in meditation: our thoughts don’t stop, they keep coming up. They are there. But we experience emotions or thoughts only from the point of becoming aware of them. Emotions can therefore sometimes take us by surprise, for instance, and pop into our awareness suddenly.

So I'm thinking perhaps sometimes we believe the thought comes first because we become aware of our thoughts before we become aware of the emotion and vice versa?

Going back to science, one of the books I was reading supports that the brain doesn’t make a clear distinction between thought and emotion, and every area in the brain that has been shown to be involved with thought has also been found to play a part in emotions. The “circuits” for emotion and thoughts are therefore intertwined.

And then I find emotions are also so interesting, not only to observe in yourself as an energy, but because you can generate emotions too. Take Metta (loving kindness) for instance. When we practice Metta meditation, the meditation's focus in on generating the feeling of Metta, first through memory, and then the feeling develops into direct experience. In my view, generating Metta is remembering previous metta, thinking about it, and then a strong feeling is developed, i.e. the emotion is generated by thought. In this instance the thought is before the emotion.

But interestingly, I don’t think you can generate anger through thinking about anger. If you have experienced anger, thinking about it afterwards doesn't seem to engender the same emotion. It's just pretending to be angry.

I'm also not sure you can generate fear by thinking about it, which leads me to believe it’s not possible – as far as I have experienced – to generate negative feelings by thought, but positive feelings can be generated by thought. Although, having said that, thinking about or remembering a scary movie might cause fear?

Ultimately, although very interesting, practically meditation doesn’t focus too much on what comes first – thought or emotion. It sees both as being intertwined, inseparably linked. What’s more important in meditation is that the emotion is a message to us and should not to be ignored, but investigated.

In meditation it's also considered very important to recognise the emotions or feelings in ourselves, to be able to put those emotions into words, to discover the underlying or associated narrative, and also recognise those same feelings in others.

Compassion and empathy. Meditation's self-discovery is only half of it. Without the other half - compassion, empathy, loving-kindness for others - meditation becomes only a self-absorption.

But I’m still thinking, meditating, on it, and will see where else I go with this. Any comments are ve-ery welcome!

Mx