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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Illusions are things that seem to be true but aren’t—and what would it even mean to say that feelings are “true” or “false”? Feelings just are. If we feel them, then they’re feelings—real feelings, not imagined feelings. End of story.
The Buddha said anger has a “poisoned root and honeyed tip.”
Some feelings, after all, are more than feelings; they don’t just imply judgments about whether doing certain things will be good for the organism; they come with actual, explicit beliefs about things in the environment and how they relate to the organism’s welfare. Obviously, such beliefs can be true or false in a pretty straightforward sense.
If you accept the idea that many of our most troublesome feelings are in one sense or another illusions, then meditation can be seen as, among other things, a process of dispelling illusions.
“The cost of survival of the lineage may be a lifetime of discomfort.” Or, as the Buddha would have put it, a lifetime of dukkha.
