I will begin with your question - yes, Wendy, you are making sense.
I’m simply stating that thoughts do not register without an emotional impetus whether we understand that impetus is another story. Often, when emotions pool under the surface of our daily experiences, we will not understand why we feel the way we do and our thoughts will at times be counter productive or moot in regards to figuring out the state we’re in, for those thoughts did not inspire our underlying feelings ie. the thoughts don’t jibe with our baseline emotions which may be called negatively angst or positively hopefulness.
Unless I am not comprehending your deeper meaning here, it would appear to me that you are agreeing with me that emotions affect thought just as much as thoughts affect emotion…well, perhaps not just as much. That might depend on the individual. That would be my human experience. Emotions do have a way of fogging up our so-called lenses of perception.
I kind of look at the dynamic between thought and emotion as a teeter totter. When all is well and still, the teeter totter is in balance, equilibrium has been achieved. Otherwise, one rules the other - depending on your perspective. Higher or lower could be both more negative or more positive - if that made sense.
I think that there is a guide here. It is somewhere below the conscious level where that little Buddha (I will call it) sits by the river in stillness until it sees and hears the river’s agitation and churning.
It is capable of making itself known through intuition or in this case through sensing and observing things which we are not quite aware of or deeply aware of in our conscious level. I think that it comes to people who are more aware and pay closer attention on that level. It is capable of whispering to us “Be Still”. It stands between thought and emotion, soothingly whispering “Shhhhhhh”.
Perhaps if we can often imagine and place ourselves as the little Buddhas deep within who are sitting by that river unaffected or unprovoked by that which lies above or around, we can even without commanding it to, affect the river’s movement back to stillness.
Listen to the Buddha’s Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
I wonder just how much that answered the question - what is an emotion? lol