My friend, I like your disctinction.

As I often do, you built your comment tangentially off of the words you highlighted, which were not mine. They were Douglas's words in his essay about why he thinks certain schools of Buddhism miss the mark, and I quoted them to connect the dots to one of my impressions on the living versus existing question.

Anyway, it all comes down to how one defines thinking or mental processes, as you said. Are feelings and intuitional impulses entirely separate from thoughts? Are they not processed at some level of the brain even before one consciously engages wth them?