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.

Feelings just are. If we feel them, then they’re feelings—real feelings, not imagined feelings.

feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we’d often be better off.

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.

Still, saying that it works isn’t the same as saying that it’s intellectually valid. Just because being less reactive to some of your feelings makes you happier doesn’t mean it brings a truer apprehension of the world. Maybe this less reactive stance is like a narcotic: it dulls the pain by insulating you from the real-world feedback that your feel

ultimately, natural selection cares about only one thing (or, I should say, “cares”—in quotes—about only one thing, since natural selection is just a blind process, not a conscious designer). And that one thing is getting genes into the next generation. Genetically based traits that in the past contributed to genetic proliferation have flourished,

So that’s one way to define true and false as they apply to feelings: if they feel good but lead us to do things that aren’t really good for us, then they’re false feelings.

There’s something to be said for this point of view. In fact, one of the take-home lessons of Buddhist philosophy is that feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we’d often be better off.

The old Rolling Stones lyric “I can’t get no satisfaction” is, according to Buddhism, the human condition.