Hi Kay,
Yes, without thought how would it be known there was a difference?
It cannot be known without thought.
How would it be known that one is more ‘intense’ than the other?
It cannot be known without thought.
How is it known that sensation is located at the ‘feet’ or located in a ‘chest’?
It cannot be known without thought.
And what exactly does that link appear to be?
There is no link, it's all just AE.
1) Imagine holding sensation in the right hand and thought in the left hand.
Does thought, on the one hand, and sensation, on the other, know about each other? Is there a link between the two?
They are not two separate things, they are all AE.
2) Imagine sensation and thought are resting on either side of a pair of scales. When sensation is looked at it gets heavier. When thought is looked at it gets heavier.
Is it possible to look at both thought and sensation at the same time to balance the scales?
No.
Have these exercises answered your questions regarding 'emotions'? You can of course, exchange the word 'fear' with any other 'emotion' - sadness, depression, anger, resistance, irritation, boredom, happiness, bliss etc
Yes, very excellent exercise. I see truth about 'emotions' and their relationship to AE of thought and AE of sensation.
In step 1 when thinking about their respective qualities, did you ‘choose’ the qualities? Or did they kind of appear by themselves? If some preferences manifested, did you ‘choose’ these preferences? Or did they just pop up by themselves?
There is no 'choice', it just kind of appears. I looked at this for a long time, it's really amazing how 'my' preferences are really just manefestations of AE.
In step 2 when you counted to 5, if the preferences took the back seat while the numbers took the front seat, did you ‘choose’ this sequence of event? Did you ‘choose’ to shut down the preferences to give way to the counting? Did you directly experience a mental function or faculty doing the ‘choosing’? Have you seen this function in action?
While I counted to 5, the 'choice' was already made. It was not 'I' that made this 'choice', but rather the action of AE of thought.
In step 3 where you made a choice, did you actually witness or directly experience a mental function or faculty doing the ‘choosing’? Did anything arise that announced, ‘I am the chooser’? If so, what does this function look like?
My experience negates the existence of 'choice' and a 'chooser'.
Sometimes we describe this sense of choosing as a ‘feeling’: It feels like ‘I’ did the ‘choosing’. But the question is, can a feeling ‘choose’? Is it in the nature of a feeling to ‘choose’?
A 'feeling' is just AE of thought; it cannot 'choose'.
GREAT exercise. Thank you!
Jeremy