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Sunday, 23 February 2020


Feeling, or affect and mood ought to be distinguished but not sharply. It's suggestive but wrong to think of a palette, or scale or perfumery of feelings because it misses their highly intentional nature. Desire, appreciation, hate and anger, for example, all belong to feeling. Mood seems to be less intentional since it is directed back towards the subjective condition of feelings  - in the plural, a mood being a condition for a plurality of possible feelings, which it colours. Feeling to mood might be as taste to smell, but then what you desire is not so much a feeling but a rare mood and entire way of being in experience. The attendant considerations is what preoccupies you, even discursively, much of the time, the active and purposeful engagement with the ever flowing affective condition. In existential terms the whole thing might be mapped in a two dimensional way according to self and other, being and nothingness, but the Samkhya triplet of the gunas, tamas, rajas, and sattva, all eminently intentional, seems to produce a far more detailed mapping. The self then appears as a labial mollusc delicately responsive in the heart of this flow, now sustaining and now irritant. The key point, however, is that such a self is an inevitable illusion arising from the fact of mistaking this for the source of consciousness, rather than its conditionally embodied expression.

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