Lucky, i haven't mastered emoticons at this point so:

love to you.

This morning I woke up and went to sit in the sun. I was thinking about this categorization of emotions and I asked myself what i felt. Basically, I felt peaceful and calm. I asked myself whether this was an emotion. I feel that sometimes the delineation of these things is lacking and more than that, confusing. I have listened to people say something about making a decision from the heart and not the head, but to one who is attached to an emotional feeling or perspective this is quite meaningless, because our sexuality can be involved in decisions too and it all gets very messy. What is the heart and what is the head, for example one might think that 'feelings' are from the heart, but this can also be greatly misleading. When we are being driven by something hooking onto our emotions (foreign energy), locating the thing driving us - not the emotion itself - seems to be the only thing that has given me perspective, because the driver is not just an emotion it is a conglomerate of things, attachments, agreements, justifications, needs, bids for attention or power....

So this morning I was feeling the energy in my body in centres, like chakras, rather than emotions, and i believe this is a more accurate way of describing where our feelings are located and what they are and indeed what feeling from 'the heart' is. If one centre is dominating with a stuck emotion we are out of balance and lose perspective. Whenever we are in a state of forgetting ourselves - which to me means we have no memory of our emptiness - we actually have nothing to refer to and no real perspective. It is the state of emptiness that gives a reference point and therefore perspective.

Emotions too, are like receptors, like in our bodies where we have receptors for different chemicals - in our being we also have emotional receptors, this allows us to 'feel' people in a very accurate way. So much so that sometimes people here have said they were not sure whether the emotions they were feeling were from them or the people around them. Again, it is our emptiness that gives us perspective.

Then I tried to articulate an emotion. I tried to separate various emotions, sure some are pretty strong, but even then they may clearly be masking another. I found there are subtle things we feel that are hard to describe as emotions, yet they are certainly feelings. Where then do we draw the line, or state the difference? To me to say affection is not love, or that affection is not an emotion is pretty slippery. So I feel that, like Tiffany said at the beginning of this thread, 'to perceive the world directly' - cuts through alot of this; and to not cling as Glance said also, to not attach and to reference our emptiness seems to me the way to not get bogged down in classifications that in themselves may have reference points in our own imprints and emotional experiences.

It has taken me all day to finish this reply as i have been tiling a floor, so there may be other replies since i began - I hope mine is not too out of context by the time i post, but this thread has been very interesting.