During a conversation with a close friend we were discussing how we ‘think about and evaluate’ situations such as relationships, life path, vocation — and other opportunities (as well as threats). The first thing I noticed is something deeply familiar to me — we create an abstract idea (a generalization of what is ‘normal’ or ‘expected’) according to habits and the cultural atmosphere. There are a vast array of problems with this approach, but the first of them is that it is abstract: it’s not about any actual situation, it’s about possible situations. And whatever our concern is will direct the outcome of this kind of thinking. Any actual situation is really embodied, and much more sophisticated than our common thinking can encompass or handle.

But the second thing I was reminded of is that we experience life from a place of being-in-relation, not »thought. Being-in-relation (felt senses) always precedes thought, and thought arises »afterwards in some (often misguided) attempt to »explain (flatten the diversity/dimensionality of) or »describe (again, to model, to reduce the complexity to something graspable or measurable) an experience.

The thinking mind is not precisely friendly to being-in-relation, but it loves models, explanations and accounting. It doesn’t really have a role in relation to feelings, and so, in a sense, it wants to ‘overstand’ them. But when we give it a meaningful role in relation to feelings, then it is willing to participate in more useful ways.

The take-away here is that thinking isn’t like situations or relationships… it’s like models or norms. And it comes »after the actual senses we naturally experience in actual situations (even though it may pretend to completely grasp or understand them).

We don’t want to entirely get rid of thought, but it’s important to realize that our cognitive aspect can try to dominate situations… even before they arise (by predicting). The result is abstract and disembodied. If, instead, we can have our feelings and felt senses, and recognize those as fundamental, then we can find meaningful roles for our thoughts and evaluations, without being overwhelmed by them or allowing them to replace being-in-relation.