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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.
natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.
“The cost of survival of the lineage may be a lifetime of discomfort.”
Isn’t much of the point of Buddhism to confront suffering rather than evade it, and by confronting it, by looking at it unflinchingly, undermine it?
Over the history of our evolutionary lineage, thinking has played a larger and larger role in action, but the thinking has always had both its beginning and its end in feelings.
“Reason alone,” Hume argued, “can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.”
Nothing “can oppose or retard the impulse of passion but a contrary impulse.”
self-discipline is like a muscle. If you use it, it gets stronger,
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.
Over time, after the urge has blossomed again and again without bringing gratification, the urge ceases and desists.
The thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi is said to have written, “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.”
And at that point I really did notice the wrath; I looked right at it. And after only a few seconds of clear observation, it completely dissolved. It was as if my attention was a killer laser beam and this feeling of wrath was an enemy spaceship. Zap! Gone.
nirvana, described it as “a state of perfect happiness, complete peace, complete inner freedom, and full awakening and understanding.”
The sense of beauty feels more like something the mind just naturally relaxes into when the preoccupation with self subsides.
Maybe when you see the world more clearly, more truthfully, you enjoy not only a measure of liberation but also a more direct and continuous perception of the world’s actual beauty.
