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September 28 - October 5, 2021
Hostile actions by the enemy are attributed dispositionally, and thus provide further evidence of the enemy’s inherently aggressive, implacable character. Conciliatory actions are explained away as reactions to situational forces—as tactical maneuvers, responses to external pressure, or temporary adjustments to a position of weakness—and therefore require no revision of the original image.”
“There’s always some psychological mechanism doing something,” she said. “It’s creating our world, it’s creating our perception of the world. That’s why I wouldn’t say domain-specific mechanisms color our perceptions—I’d say they create our perceptions. There’s no way of perceiving the world that doesn’t involve carving it conceptually into pieces.”
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Scientists have found that by replacing the gut bacteria in shy, anxious mice with bacteria from gregarious mice, they can make the shy mice gregarious.
interior version of the experience. This consists of looking “within”—at your thoughts, your feelings—and asking, “Wait a second, in what sense are these things really inherently a part of me?”
exterior not-self experience. This consists of looking at the “outside” world—at things beyond your skin—and asking, “In what sense are these things not a part of me?”
tanha fuels not just attraction to alluring things but also aversion to off-putting things.
the first two poisons are the two sides of tanha: a craving for the pleasant, an aversion to the unpleasant. Well, if tanha is indeed tightly bound up with the sense of self, then it makes sense to see these two poisons as bound up with the third poison: delusion. After all, one of the most famous delusions in all of Buddhism is the illusion of self.
Consider the idea of not-self: what we call the “self” is in such constant causal interaction with its environment, is so pervasively influenced by the world out there, as to raise doubts about how firm the boundaries of the self—and, for that matter, the core of the self—really are.
you are not mindlessly labeling your feelings as bad or good, not fleeing from them or rushing to embrace them. So you can stay close to them yet not be lost in them; you can pay attention to what they actually feel like.
these genes will build into my brain the idea that taking care of this body is much more important than taking care of other bodies (except, perhaps, when those other bodies belong to close kin).
that feelings, viewed in the context of their evolutionary purpose, are implicit judgments about things in the environment, about whether they are good for the organism or bad for the organism, and about what behaviors (approach, avoid, scream, flatter) will be useful for the organism, given these judgments.
natural selection’s basic frame of reference: that you, this particular organism, are special; your interests are the most important interests, and therefore your particular perspective—the perspective that judges everything in relation to those interests—is the appropriate perspective for evaluating the goodness or badness of things in the world.
If having sex with armadillos had been the only way our ancestors could get their genes into the next generation, you and I would think armadillos are attractive—not just cute in an offbeat way, but deeply enticing.
You’d want to view reality with none of the feelings that evolved in our species or any other species as a way to get genes into the next generation.
The view from nowhere can—and, I’d argue, should—involve concern for the well-being of all people (and, if we’re going to be true to Buddhist teaching, and to fairly straightforward moral logic, concern for the well-being of all sentient beings†). The point is just that the concern would be evenly distributed; no one’s welfare is more important than anyone else’s.
1. Moments of truth.
2. Moments of more consequential truth.
3. The wisdom of clarity.
4. Moments of moral truth.
5. Timely interventions.
the problem of ethnic, religious, national, and ideological conflict that can feed on itself, creating a spiral of growing hatred that leads to true catastrophe.
Such minds can, for one thing, keep us from overreacting to threats and thus from feeding the vicious circles that intensify conflicts.
The question is whether I can get far enough down the path to conduct my ideological combat with these people wisely and truthfully, which in turn means viewing them more objectively and, in a sense, more generously than I’m naturally inclined to do. The answer is that I think meditation has, at a minimum, helped move me closer to this goal.
Once you see less in the way of essence in people—once your perception of them is less imbued with judgments about their badness or goodness—there is, you might think, a greatly lessened reason to feel anything at all about them, including compassion.
This model can help explain a common apprehension of advanced meditators: that “thoughts think themselves.” All told, what I call the “interior” version of the not-self experience—an experience that calls into question your “ownership” of your thoughts and feelings and calls into question the existence of the chief executive “you” that you normally think of as owning these things—draws validation both from experimental psychology and from prevailing ideas about how natural selection shaped the mind.
