•

does the Buddhist prescription help us see the world more clearly?

•

one of the main parts of the Buddhist prescription is viewing the world mindfully

•

this can change your relationship to your feelings

•

there are feelings that perhaps used to mediate your interaction with reality in a way they no longer will

•

but does this changed relationship to your feelings help you see the world more clearly

•

what was the relationships between the feelings and reality to begin with

•

we will consider two feelings: anxiety and rage

•

the Buddha talked quite a bit about hedonistic tone

•

pleasant feelings

•

unpleasant feelings

•

neutral feelings

•

not talking about emotions

•

he did not address emotions as categories

•

he's talking about raw feeling

•

positive or negative

•

pleasant or unpleasant

•

most emotions are either overwhelmingly positive or negative like joy or fear

•

feeling tones are essential ingredients in our emotions

•

what is the evolutionary function of positive and negative feelings?

•

our base feelings are fundamentally about approach and avoidance of phenomena in our environment: approaching a rattle snake feels bad, approaching food feels good

•

we assume our primate relatives have these feelings as well, and this may go down to very simple organisms

•

it may be that even water fleas "feel" at some level attracted to the blue light, and when the blue light turns off, they feel let down

•

feelings are about motivating behavior

•

direct way

•

hand in an open fire

•

indirect way

•

think of someone you don't like

•

have a litany of grievances against them

•

feelings influence our thoughts

•

we feel their impact

•

Buddhist assert that when they meditate, they are aware that feelings are not real, i.e. they can get their thoughts around them, and change them

•

when you get outside them, meta-think around them, they may not feel substantial the way they normally do

•

you sometimes hear that feelings are not "true"

•

what does it mean that feelings are true or false

•

it can mean various things

•

if indeed the evolutionary purpose of feelings is to steer the organism away from things that are bad for the organism

•

and steer it toward things that are good for it

•

in this case, feelings are judgements about what is good and bad for the organism

•

and judgement about behavior

•

it is most likely the case that base feelings in humans arose in more primative organisms that weren't smart enough to logically think through whether something in the environment is good or bad for the organism

•

in this way feelings are the encoding of primal judgements about the environment

•

and these judgements can be true of false

•

natural selection is in general good at forming organisms to have appropriate feelings for their environment, but the environment can change, and in the case of modern humans, our environment has changed radically since feeling were baked into our psyche

•

and we find ourselves in situations that natural selection did not design us for

•

look around you, does this look like a hunter/gather village to you? no.

•

we're living in a radically transformed environment that is nothing like the environment we were designed for

•

this can influence whether feelings are accurate judgements about things in our environment

•

a simple example is powdered sugar donuts

•

they are not good for my body

•

why am I attracted to them?

•

because the environment in which humans were designed, sweet things were generally good for you, fruits, and they were quite rare, so when you found them, you craved them, thus eating as much as you could to store up on them

•

the the sweet tooth that helped us survive in a hunter/gatherer environment can, in our modern environment of easily accessible junk food, lead us to do things that are not healthy for us at all

•

another good example is rage

•

in a hunter/gatherer environment, it was very important that you sent the message that you were not to be exploited or taken advantage of

•

when this happened, it made sense to got on a rage, not only to send a message to the person who exploited you, but to the whole clan audience

•

but let's look at rage in a modern society, e.g. road rage

•

the person you are sending a message toward is most probably someone you will never see again

•

so there is no value in sending them a message

•

everyone who's watching this are also people you will never see again

•

so there is no point whatsoever in pursuing your rage, and there is considerable danger since you are in a moving vehicle

•

yet as senseless as it is for us, people easily succumb to this road rage

•

so while a sweet tooth and a tendency for rage was once a reliable guide for living healthily in our environment, in our modern environment, for the most part, these feeling doing make any sense at all and have become inappropriate guides for us to determine appropriate behavior

•

public speaking

•

anyone who has done it has found at least a little anxiety

•

many people have felt a lot of anxiety

•

sometimes crippling anxiety

•

the anxiety itself makes some sense

•

what others think of us and what others thought of us during the eons of evolution matters since our social status and how many friends we had was correlated with the chances of us getting our genes into the next generation

•

so it makes sense that you would be concerned about impressing people

•

but what's not natural is that you would find yourself talking to dozens or hundreds of people that you've never met before

•

this is what causes anxiety

•

it's not something we were designed to do

•

so while the anxiety could be productive in getting you to prepare well

•

not being able to sleep the night before or during your speech not being able to find the words are examples of anxiety being counter productive

•

this anxiety is no longer being a reliable guide for how you should act

•

feeling mislead us

•

make us think a rope is a snake

•

can mislead us in the pursuit of happiness

•

suggest that pleasure is going to last longer than it lasts

•

while some of our feelings merely cause us to err on the side of caution when there is a threat

•

others such as rage and anxiety do not make sense at all in our modern environment

•

some say this is all the more reason to be mindful

•

decide which ones you will let get traction and that you will engage with

•

this is what Buddhism refers to as wisdom

•

Buddhism makes the claim that the self, that thing inside of you which you think is running the show, is itself an illusion, and there's a fair amount of evidence of psychology to support the idea that the self is in some sense illusory, which has radical implications for how we live our lives, how we view our feelings, which feelings we choose to let govern us, and which we don't.