Addressing a few things posted since I was last here.
Yes, Frankl, nolla. I'm familiar with him. Good reference. There are many interesting things to learn from those who spent time in the concentration camps. Well, and prison, also. If they survive they seem to learn a certain control over the way they view corporeal existence and of time.
As far as which comes first, feelings or thoughts, and which influences which, this is something I've pondered. My conclusion is that sometimes one, sometimes the other. But it is true that one can learn, through gathering knowledge, new ways of thinking which will then have an influence on our feelings.
I think it's important that we don't always and only operate on feelings first. That pesky balance concept. Truly then our behavior can become animalistic.
Principles of Rational-Emotive Therapy are practice of this skill.
And a comment on whether animals think. I've owned cats all my life and am convinced that some of them are savvy thinkers. I presently have a cat which can make distinction among objects and where they belong in the home. I've never seen that before in cats though have seen it in dogs.
We've got simians "signing" and forming sentences which they weren't taught. Much evidence to indicate that animals are capable of human-style thought. And, since I was a child, I've NEVER bought that scientific blindness which insists that animals don't have feelings. Remember some pretty interesting conflicts about that in high school.
They once tried to teach me
tabula rasa upon which my intuition called bullthit. Turns out they've rethought that one and I expect they'll be talking more about animals, feeling and thought in time. It's all so esoteric, anyway, that it's difficult to express for me. I mean in the sense of reducing it to chemical reactions in the brain, which it also is besides having an interactional component.
Think I've wandered somewhere to the odd side of topic here.
