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January 7 - January 27, 2018
The movie’s directors, the Wachowski siblings, had given Keanu Reeves three books to read in preparation for playing Neo. One of them was a book I had written a few years earlier, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life.
One of the Buddha’s main messages was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly and leave us thirsting for more.
Vinod Khare liked this
Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.
accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness.
Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.
And then there is the famous Buddhist idea that the self—you know, your self, my self—is an illusion. In this view, the “you” that you think of as thinking your thoughts, feeling your feelings, and making your decisions doesn’t really exist.I
If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together—the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness—you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems.
Both of these ideas would strike most people as dubious, if not crazy. Then again, since the premise of these ideas is that people are naturally deluded, it would seem perverse to let people’s natural reactions to them keep us from exploring them. This book is in no small part an exploration of these two ideas, and what I hope to show is that they make a lot of sense. Both our natural view of the world “out there” and our natural view of the world “in here”—the world inside our heads—are deeply misleading. What’s more, faili...
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Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment. Typically these judgments are about whether these things are good or bad for the survival of the organism doing the feeling (though sometimes they’re about whether these things are good or bad for close kin—notably offspring—since close kin share so many of our genes). So we could say that feelings are “true” if the judgments they encode are accurate—if, say, the things they attract the organism to are indeed good for it, or if the things they encourage the organism to avoid are indeed bad for it.
We could say feelings are “false” or perhaps “illusory” if they lead the organism astray—if following the feelings leads to things that are bad for the organism.†
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.
“default mode network.” This is a network in the brain that, according to brain- scan studies, is active when we’re doing nothing in particular—not talking to people, not focusing on our work or any other task, not playing a sport or reading a book or watching a movie. It is the network along which our mind wanders when it’s wandering.
Becoming enlightened, in the Buddhist sense of the term, would entail wholly ridding yourself of the twin illusions from which people tend to suffer: the illusion about what’s “in here”—inside your mind—and about what’s “out there” in the rest of the world.
“I consider myself an average man except for the fact that I consider myself an average man.”
Along some dimensions, Asians, on average, do less self-inflating than Westerners; along other dimensions—notably “collectivist” virtues, such as loyalty to the group—Asians tend to do more self-inflating than Westerners.
And Kenrick and Griskevicius sometimes sound pretty enamored. They divide the mind neatly into seven “subselves” with the following missions: self-protection, mate attraction, mate retention, affiliation (making and keeping friends), kin care, social status, and disease avoidance.
Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns running the show—and, in a sense, seizing control of the show. If the way they seize control of the show is through feelings, it stands to reason that one way to change the show is to change the role feelings play in everyday life. I’m not aware of a better way to do that than mindfulness meditation.
Vipassana, with its emphasis on mindfulness; Tibetan, which often steers the mind toward visual imagery; and Zen, which sometimes involves pondering those cryptic lines known as koans.
Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.
When we decide to do something, we decide on the basis of a feeling.
Self-control has often been described as a matter of reason prevailing over feelings.
Nothing “can oppose or retard the impulse of passion but a contrary impulse.”
There’s an acronym used to describe this technique: RAIN. First you Recognize the feeling. Then you Accept the feeling (rather than try to drive it away). Then you Investigate the feeling and its relationship to your body. Finally, the N stands for Nonidentification, or, equivalently, Nonattachment. Which is a nice note to end on, since not being attached to things was the Buddha’s all-purpose prescription for what ails us.
We tend to assign adjectives to nouns, whether consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly.
The word error refers to the fact that these attributions are often wrong, that we tend to underestimate the role of situation and overestimate the role of disposition. In other words, we’re biased in favor of essence.
fundamental attribution error
mirror-touch synesthesia
This has been the point of much of this book. The human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it. It is designed, in a certain sense, to be controlled by that input. And a key cog in the machinery of control is the feelings that arise in response to the input. If you interact with those feelings via tanha—via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings—you will continue to be controlled by the world around you. But if you observe those
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I don’t know exactly what it would be like to have the full-on not-self experience, but I’ve got a feeling that my sense of specialness, of unique privilege, would approach the vanishing point. And if that sense of specialness is indeed false—an illusion implanted in us by natural selection—then, exactly to the extent that it did approach the vanishing point, I would be approaching the truth.
If full-on enlightenment means you quit making value judgments of any kind and quit pushing for change, then count me out.
