Of course, emotions are quite connected to thoughts. You will notice that usually a thought precedes an emotion. It may not be a conscious thought, especially if you are not used to paying attention to what the mind is doing, but there is usually a thought nonetheless before an emotion shows up. Emotions are usually responses to thoughts. Emotions that persist, and run underneath your daily activities constantly, like depression, are responses to mental attitudes. Mental attitudes might not count as thoughts, per se, but according to the emotional body they are thoughts that in turn create an emotional attitude. Consistent moods can be indicators of emotional attitudes. A pessimistic outlook on life causes an emotional response that is general rather than specific to a thought. A mental attitude is a general mental state, and the emotional body will generate a general emotional state to match it. This is why it is important to examine your mental attitudes when attempting to change your emotional attitude. It is not just your emotions, but also your mental states. Both thoughts and emotions are intertwined vibrational energy patterns, and physical reality is intimately intertwined with these as well. Science is finding that it really is all done with smoke and mirrors, and in fact, matter is not as solid as it seems. Matter is far more liquid than formerly believed and it responds immediately to thought and emotion.

Some emotions truly are connected to specific thoughts. Louise Hay says in her book You Can Heal Your Life (1984), "No matter what the problem is, our experiences are just outer effects of inner thoughts. Even self-hatred is only hating a thought you have about yourself. You have a thought that says, ‘I am a bad person.' The thought produces a feeling, and you buy into the feeling. However, if you don't have the thought, you won't have the feeling. And thoughts can be changed. Change the thought, and the feeling must go." Yes, some emotions are responses to specific thoughts. In a way, these are easier to deal with than general mental attitudes, because a specific conscious thought is easier to work with than a grouping of unconscious thoughts.

Nancy Ashley argues in her book Create Your Own Happiness: A Seth Workbook (1988) that thoughts and emotions are actually the same thing, just one is translated in words, and the other is not. She says, "Most people tend to make a big distinction between thoughts (beliefs) and emotions. Thoughts are in words, which makes them concrete and thus ‘rational;' emotions are wordless feelings, ephemeral and irrational. Emotions are generally considered uncontrollable. They ‘just happen.'" So, if we're to look at each thought as if it is also an emotion put into tangible words, and vice versa, we might find much information about our beliefs. If any emotion could be a thought in words, what would it say?

Nancy Ashley also says in her book Create Your Own Happiness (1988), "It is easy for a pleasant state to go unnoticed, but it isn't so easy to ignore an unpleasant one. This is precisely why the emotions serve as valuable clues to our beliefs—particularly mass beliefs—which make us unhappy, which limit us unnecessarily. If we can look behind the unpleasant emotions, which are so apparent to us, to the beliefs that they symbolize, which are not so apparent, we can discover a lot that we may not find out from simply asking ourselves whether or not we believe this or that… As we have seen, often what we think we believe we don't really believe. We want to, but we don't. However, what we feel is unmistakably either pleasant or unpleasant. If we think we believe, say, in a peaceful, cooperative universe, if we find ourselves, instead of feeling good, feeling bad…we can be sure that what we think we believe is not what we really believe. Our feelings always tell us the truth about our beliefs. In this sense they are like helpful friends to us. All we need do when feeling frightened or angry or depressed is ask ourselves what is behind the emotion, and we discover beliefs we weren't aware of, which may go against what we thought we believed."

Hmmm… very thought-provoking. (No pun intended!)