# Actual Freedom ~ Frequently Flogged Misconceptions Frequently Flogged Misconceptions ## Feelings Are Actual
| Can one feel other’s feelings? Thoughts? From a distance? In that case is it not that the ‘connection’ is actual? If somebody can feel the thoughts and feelings of the other from a far distance, does it not mean that there is some kind of ‘actual’ transmission or connection going on? So if feeling being in body A affectively/ psychically affects feeling being in body B, such as feeling being A experiences anger and body A has the resulting hormonal secretions, and being B experiences fear, and body B has the result hormonal secretions, isn’t it so that those hormonal secretions are actual? And regardless of the affective nature of the emotions that cause them, doesn’t that mean that the hormonal secretions are not only actual, but also actually linked (transmitted, connected)?
| Also, why do you say emotions are not factual? They are chemicals, what is not factual about that? Now regarding ‘a feeling is not a fact’. This is so tricky. The amygdale identifies various sense data with the need for certain chemicals: for a tiger you need this chemical, for a baby you need that chemical. But no, that would mean identification (thought) comes first. So that means that prior to identification happening, we get chemicals, based on unidentified sense data?
| You said in your email that the feelings are creating the feeler. So it seems logical to me that the feelings, must exist prior of the feeler, because the creator must exist prior to its creation, right? So the feelings are innative to the human being, that means they are actual. Instead the feeler is a real entity, but not actual. So we have reality and actuality. Reality comes from the Latin word ‘res’, which means thing. A thing is manmade.
| I agree with you that belief is insidious. We ARE the beliefs. We like the control of the belief, for then we can just ‘kick’ back and live by what we ‘believe’, think, and the most insidious of these beliefs is the belief in our own knowledge. It is on the soft, comforting pillow of knowledge that we lay our heads, hearts, feelings. I have no belief in my feelings. These are ‘actual’. There are feelings of ‘sadness’; ‘pleasure’, the labels, but these are actually emotions, not feelings. By feelings I – mean something ‘deeper’ than thought, than emotion ... something connected to something more real ... like insight. By ‘no belief in them’, I mean that they do not offer security, do not offer something from which I derive comfort, are not something lasting. They are what they are, from moment to moment. They are always new. So by feelings, Richard, I mean something more than the feelings that cause wars and hunger and great disparities, emotions.
| I wonder Richard, why folks confuse ‘feelings’ which are not real and are removable with ‘emotions’ why are of the humanness, real and non removable?
| One thing about actualism that has never been explained to my satisfaction is why thought is classified as actual, whereas feeling is not. Actualists say that thought is simply the human brain in operation. Why shouldn’t feeling have the same ontological status? Why should the thought of the number 42 be considered actual, while the feeling of hunger is not? In both cases, the only actuality is the human brain in operation. In other words, an actual brain in the process of thinking has the same ontological status as an actual brain in the process of feeling ... does it not?
| The reason for drawing your attention to the above text is because the recent “Burnt Toast” thread, on the Discuss Actualism Online forum, is where Rick has painstakingly constructed a teetering edifice of such a flashy magnitude—an inverted pyramid teetering so gaudily on its illegitimate capstone as to register 7.4 on the Richter Scale (and surpassed only by his infamous ‘affective feelings are actual’ thread which registered 9.6 on that eponymous scale)—as to render it more than passing strange how none of the thread’s responders ever noticed it.
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