The Thinking Affective

Great experiences happen all the time in all our lives.

Our lives we’re given, happen every day, though most of us do not perceive many of our days as anything significant. Our dreams make it known to us — via the messy and inevitable rise of the unconscious mind in the deeper hours of the night — that our lives are full of significant things that cause us much concern.

We don’t think without feeling — thinking with feeling is the thinking affective. (The word “affective” relates to moods, feelings, and attitudes.) The thinking affective is how we think in the regulating of our moods, feelings, and attitudes.

Even if we think we can control our thoughts without feeling, we have chosen a feeling: ambivalence, stubbornness, presupposition, etc.

Feeling informs thinking, just as the opposite is true. Thinking can help feeling, but only if thought listens to the primacy of what’s truly felt. We cannot ignore our truths of feeling and hope that all ends well.

The wise mind brings what feeling bears upon the consciousness, and it reasons, with fairness, what is communicated. It considers with reverence what is felt, but has sufficient capacity to weigh it logically; hence, it’s capable of a self-engineered cognitive-behaviour therapy. So both mind and heart, heart and mind, are interdependently related.

The elevation of thinking over feeling, or feeling over thinking, can only best be a situational imperative — as the situation dictates. Wisdom takes upon itself the burden of considering all inputs, weighing them according to their contribution.

The thinking affective means thinking-with-feeling.

When we cooperate with the wishes of God, we understand our modus operandi has to include thinking-with-feeling — as a package — if we are to rise to the prominence of God’s use of our lives.

So what with all this... what am I trying to show that is of any significance?

It’s this.

Life is an opportunity, every day, every moment of every day, to be awake, to be aware, to be perceptive, and to make the most of our unified minds and hearts. In tune, one with the other, we have the keys to the kingdom of this world, which is verily the key to understanding the other world.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that wisdom flourishes when both thinking and feeling run in cohesive tandem. Merged in importance, but independent and respected as individuals, thought and feeling have capabilities all of us need — capabilities that are completely different and entirely complementary.

The thinking affective is a term to carry with us. It reminds us of the power of right thinking in aid of undesirable feeling. It reminds us also of the power in right feeling — the honouring of our felt truth — in the presence of ambivalent thinking.

© 2015 S. J. Wickham.