I think your second statement (italicized) is correct and that it's correct because it recognizes the deeply integrated nature of consciousness and the world as we experience it in both feeling and thinking. I don't know in detail what yogis can accomplish, but my sense is that the deep inner states of something close to 'nothingness' reached in deep meditation involve the dissolution of the palpable world in the yogi's mind and of the self with which he/she has apprehended it, no doubt producing a peace that passes understanding and also perhaps an incomparable sense of the being of the world at its ultimate minimal 'graininess', beyond the differentiation of things and perspectives on things. This is not a state of mind/recognition that I have ever personally desired or yet sought, being enchanted all my life by the phenomenal appearances, sounds, textures, feelings, and expressions of innumerable other humans and also innumerable other forms of life, other forms of consciousnesses, that populate the natural world and find fulfillment in their experience of it.
We also find in the phenomenal world we humans experience a spectrum of cultural responses to it, ranging from those that are further reason for celebration of existence, others from which we shrink in terror and despair. The world we live in is thickly sedimented with meanings (positive and negative) generated by our species at its best and worst, and it is at times an arduous and painful place for every existent [and, most tragically, for many members of our species it is a blighted place]. I don't wonder that many people in many places find relief in practices such as those of the yogis, which certainly require an immense discipline and likely provide unique rewards. That path is not for me, though, since as I see it and feel it, this world (the earth world) is the place of our being and becoming in this life.
As to a hard distinction between feeling and thinking, I don't think this is possible for human existents. We begin our experience here at the level of feeling; it is what enables our connection with others and our environment, out of which our thinking begins to emerge. Child psychologists have theorized that even children in their first year of life develop a 'theory of mind' enabling them to adjust their own behaviors and expectations to those these sense in their caregivers. Children choose the peers that become their best friends out of the rapport they sense forming with certain others, and this is surely something learned at the level of feeling. Why do we choose the fields we specialize in farther along in our education? Why do certain subjects draw us toward them, make us happy in their pursuit despite the hard work they require? Why do we gravitate to one philosophical approach rather than another? It's partly the influence of those around us, especially our parents, and partly encouragement from certain of our teachers who recruit us to their fields. But I've known a number of people who later realized that they found no personal satisfaction in the subjects they'd devoted their lives to and made radical changes in career or just in what they devoted themselves to 'on the side'.
In one of his major poems, W. Stevens writes:
“... Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves,
So that they become an impalpable town, full of Impalpable bells, transparencies of sound.
Sounding in transparent dwellings of the self,
Impalpable habitations that seem to move
In the movement of the colors of the mind.
Confused illuminations and sonorities,
So much ourselves, we cannot tell apart
the idea and bearer-being of
the idea....”
I think with Stevens that our ideas are borne into our minds by the "bearer-being" of those ideas in our lived experience, which is both emotional and intellectual, grounded in what we feel as well as think. Here is an interesting short essay/talk by a sculptor named Timothy Segar who is discussing what he is doing in his artwork, what he attempts to show in it, contextualized in his reading of the long poem I just quoted from. He gets at how much of what we think emerges from our prereflective as well as our reflective consciousness of the phenomenal world we inhabit and which we attempt, in innumerable ways, to bring to expression for others.
FORGOT to add the link to Segar's talk:
”Reality and the Nature of Perception in Wallace Stevens’ ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,’” « Timothy J. Segar
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