Some, maybe most, of our feelings serve us reasonably well; they don’t much distort our view of reality, and they help keep us alive and flourishing. My attraction to apples, my aversion to grasping knife blades and scaling skyscrapers—all to the good. Still, I hope you can see the virtue of subjecting your feelings to investigation—inspecting them to see which ones deserve obedience and which ones don’t, and trying to free yourself from the grip of the ones that don’t. And I hope you can see why this is difficult. It’s in the nature of feelings to make it hard to tell the valuable ones from
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