Why Buddhism Is True

Anyway, regardless of when feelings first arose, there is a rough consensus among behavioral scientists on what the original function of good feelings and bad feelings was: to get organisms to approach things or avoid things that are, respectively, good for them or bad for them.

Buddhism offers an explicit diagnosis of the problem and a cure. And the cure, when it works, brings not just happiness but clarity of vision: the actual truth about things, or at least something way, way closer to that than our everyday view of them.

This is proof that self-inflation, though the norm in our species, isn’t an iron law. But note that both kinds of people were wrong; their particular personalities had steered them toward different kinds of illusions, but in both cases illusion is the operative word.

anatta,

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 the harmful ones, the reliable from the misleading. One thing all feelings have in common is that they were originally “designed” to convince you to follow them. They feel right and true almost by definition. They actively dis

Meanwhile, let’s review several senses in which feelings

Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive.

Vipassana is an ancient word that denotes clear vision and is usually translated as “insight.”

To put this in more scientific-sounding terminology: I was beginning to observe the workings of what psychologists call the “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 s

This is a reminder that 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.