Why everything feels like one thing
When thinking, feeling and sensation merge in experience
If you try to observe yourself in the midst of ordinary activity, something else begins to appear.
Not only does attention shift, and not only do reactions feel convincing, but what is happening is difficult to separate.
Everything seems to arrive as one.
A thought appears, a feeling arises, the body responds. These are not experienced separately. They come together as a single event.
We experience only the result.
This is the third difficulty.
It can be seen in simple situations.
You are engaged in something, and a reaction forms. There is a sense of irritation, or pressure, or unease, or simply a feeling that something is happening. If you look closely, it is possible to notice that several things are happening at once: a thought about what should be happening, a feeling in response, and a set of physical changes, tightness, shifting balance, altered breathing.
But ordinarily, this is not how it is experienced.
We do not say: a thought has appeared, a feeling has followed, and the body has adjusted.
We say: something is wrong.
The different processes are not distinguished. They are fused into a single experience that feels simple and self-evident.
This fusion makes observation difficult.
Even when attention is present, what appears is already a composite.
It is not clear where one element ends and another begins. Thought blends into feeling, feeling into sensation, sensation into action. The whole is taken as one continuous event.
Because of this, it is hard to see what is actually taking place.
A thought may be taken as a fact. A feeling may be taken as a conclusion. A physical tightening may go unnoticed entirely, even as it shapes what is perceived.
Each element influences the others, but the interaction remains hidden.
Attention, when it is present, often lands on the already-formed whole.
It meets the experience after it has taken shape, rather than seeing how that shape has emerged.
It becomes necessary, gradually, to distinguish what is happening within the experience itself. To see that what feels like a single event is composed of different processes unfolding together.
At first, this is difficult.
The moment one element is noticed, the others are already shifting. Attention is drawn toward one aspect, and the rest recede. The whole reorganises itself before it can be clearly seen.
But even a brief glimpse is enough to suggest that what seemed simple is not simple at all.
What appears as a single, unified experience may in fact be a convergence of processes, thinking, feeling, sensing and acting, forming together.
This is not how it appears.
Upward Thought 
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