So now, we're going to talk about feelings. And I know we've talked a lot about feelings already, but feelings are very important and, and not just for the obvious reason but also because one of the main things this course is about is whether the Buddhists' prescription helps us see the world more clearly. And one of the main parts of the Buddhist prescription is this idea of viewing the world mindfully and that can change your relationship to your feelings. You know, there can be feelings that used to govern you and they no longer will in the, in the same way. There are feelings that maybe used to mediate your interaction with reality in a way that they no longer will. So, if we're going to find out whether this changed relationship to your feelings actually helps you see the world more clearly, well, it would help to know what was the relationship between these feelings and reality to begin with. Were the feelings themselves reliable guides to reality in some sense? Were they trustworthy? Does it make sense to say that some were true and some were false. These are the kinds of questions that we're going to grapple with now. And we're going to pay particular attention to two feelings. Feelings that I think it's safe to say we're all familiar with. One is anxiety and one is rage. Now the Buddha talked a lot about what he called feeling tone or hedonic tone. The idea was just that. There are pleasant feelings, there are unpleasant feelings and there are what he called neutral feelings. Now the Buddha was not talking about emotions. In fact, in the Buddha's teaching there's no word that translates as emotions. He did talk about individual emotions like fear. But he did not address, emotions as a category generically. He was just talking about, kind of, raw feeling. The basic ingredients of feeling. It can be positive or negative. Pleasant or unpleasant. But certainly that does pertain to emotions, because after all emotions contain those ingredients. And in fact, most emotions are overwhelmingly either positive, like joy, or negative like fear or anxiety. Some emotions maybe are kind of complicated mixtures of positive and negative, but in any event these feeling tones are essential ingredients in our emotions. Now one question the Buddha didn't ask, and really couldn't ask, given when he lived, is what is the evolutionary function of feelings? Why are there positive and negative, pleasant and unpleasant feeling tones? Somebody who did address that question was a biologist, a biologist named George Romanes who was writing a couple of decades after Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. And here's what he said. Pleasure and pain must have been evolved as the subjective accompaniment of processes which are respectively beneficial or injurious to the organism and so evolved for the purpose or to the end that the organism should seek the one and shun the other. Well, that, that makes sense that, that these basic feelings are fundamentally about approach and avoidance or at least were about that in the first instance when they arose. It's certainly consistent with human experience, right? If, if there's something you want to avoid like a rattlesnake that's giving you a bad feeling, this feeling of aversion, if there's something you approach, like food, it gives you this good feeling, feeling of attraction, and we assume that in our primate relatives there are probably these kinds of feelings that are also correlated with approach and avoidance. And for that matter, this may go all the way down to very, very simple organisms. It may be that these water fleas, when they gravitate toward the blue light that shines down from above in this video, actually feel attracted to it. And who knows, when the blue light turns off, maybe they feel let down. In any event, what seems pretty clear is that feelings are about motivating behavior. In the case of humans, they may motivate behavior in a very direct way, so if your hand winds up in an open flame, you're going to feel the pain, retract it very rapidly. Sometimes feelings influence human behavior in a much more indirect way. So you might think of someone you don't like. And you start thinking about all the things that they've done wrong. You have this litany of grievances against them. And that may have no immediate impact on your behavior. But then down the road, when you're talking to someone about them, you, you've got your arsenal ready. You can say all these nasty things about them, and undermine their status. And that seems to be one thing the human mind tends to do. But one way or another directly or indirectly, feelings, they kind of reach out and grab us, they influence our thoughts, they influence our behavior, we feel their impact. Now maybe this is what Yifa the Buddhist nun meant. When she said, well, I can tell now, when I meditate, the feelings aren't real. After all in mindfullness meditation, you know, the feelings don't reach out and grab you in the same way. They, if, if after reflecting on them, you make the decision not to let them reach out and grab you then they don't have the impact. They may not feel substantial and, and weighty, the way they normally do. So maybe she just meant that suddenly these feelings just kind of feel ethereal, they have no impact. She could also have meant though, that, that the feelings, in some sense, are not true. And that raises the question of what does it mean to say that feelings are true or false? And it could be various things. One way to look at that question is from this very Darwinian perspective that we're in the middle of now. You know, if, indeed, the, the purpose of feelings is to steer the organism away from things that are bad for the organism. And to steer towards things that are good for it. Then you might say that feelings are judgments about things in the environment. About whether good or bad for the organism. And judgments about behavior. What behavior is appropriate in light whether these things are good or bad for you. I mean, remember, probably when feelings arose, it was in organisms that weren't smart enough to think, well, this is good for me, I should approach it. This is bad for me, I should avoid it. So feelings are kind of the encoding of actual judgments about the environment, about behavior, and judgments can be true or false. So, that's one way we, we could look at the truth or falsehood of feelings. Now you might say, well wait a second, how often are feelings going to be false. I mean after all isn't natural selection very good at doing its job? Aren't our feelings going to pretty reliably steer us towards things that are good for us? At least by natural selection's lights, and steer us away from things that are bad for us. Well, natural selection is good at what it does but it's also true that sometimes the environment changes so that organisms wind up in the environment that natural selection did not design them for and humans are a good example. Look around you does this seem like a hunter gatherer village to you? No. We're looking in a we're, we're living in a radically transformed environment that's nothing like the environment we were designed for, and that can influence whether feelings are in this sense true or false. In other words, whether they are or are not accurate judgements about things in our environment and about how we should react to them. We already earlier alluded to one example of this, powdered sugar donuts. I, I noted that powdered sugar donuts are really not great for me. Raises the question, why am I attracted to them? Well because in the environment that humans evolved in, sweet things were generally good for you. Fruits. There wasn't junk food. So this sweet tooth that made a lot of sense in that environment, can, in this environment, lead us to do things that aren't so great for us. Another good example is rage. If you ask an evolutionary psychologist, well what, what is the story with rage? What is rage for? They'll probably say something like this. In the environment of our evolution, in a hunter gatherer village It was very important that you sent the message, that you were not to be exploited or taken advantage of. That if people tried to steal your mate or steal your food or whatever, or disrespect you, there would be a price to be paid. So, it was actually worth getting in a fight with people over these things. And that wasn't just to send a message to the person who had exploited you, that they shouldn't do that again, but remember, in a hunter gatherer village your whole social universe is there, it's the audience. Everyone you're going to be dealing with on a regular basis from here on out is watching what happens when someone tries to take advantage of you, so it's all the more reason that it's worthwhile from the, the point of view of your long term interests to, fight somebody over your honor or, or over respect. Even if that incurs some damage to you, as long as they pay a price too. Now let's look at rage in the modern environment. Let's take an example like road rage. Okay now, let's just ponder the, the absurdity of it by Darwinian lights. Okay, you know, you're sitting there, the person the rage is directed toward is someone you're never going to see again, so there's no value in sending a message to them. Everyone who's watching this, the other drivers, they're also someone you're never going to see again. So there's no point whatsoever in pursuing this rage. And there's considerable danger. Because after all you are in a moving vehicle. And yet people succumb to this rage. So this is a good example of a case where changed environment takes a feeling that maybe at one point could be described as a reliable guide trustworthy, in some sense true, embodying true judgments and, and suddenly it just doesn't make any sense at all. One final example, and in a way more complicated example is anxiety. Let's take public speaking, okay? Now anyone who's done it has probably felt at least a little anxiety. A lot of people have felt a lot. And sometimes it's crippling anxiety. Now the anxiety itself, you could argue, makes sense, and, and was, in some sense, designed by natural selection to surface in such cases. At least it is true that, you know, what people think of us matters, and mattered during evolution because our social status, and how many friends we had was correlated with our chances of getting our genes into the next generation. So it makes sense that you would be anxious about impressing people. But what's not natural is to suddenly find yourself speaking to dozens or hundreds of people that you've never met before. That's not something we were designed to do. So while the anxiety could be productive in getting you to prepare well it could also go way overboard. So if you have trouble sleeping the night before or if you stand up to speak and suddenly just can't find the words, that's an example of, of anxiety being counterproductive and, and the feeling is no longer being a reliable guide to how you should act. And again, that's because the environment has changed since human evolution. Now, we had already seen some senses in which feelings can mislead us as we have seen, feelings can make us see a snake that's not really there. Fear can do that. And feelings can kind of mislead us in the pursuit of happiness. They can make us think pleasure is going to last longer than it lasts. But in those cases you, you could at least say that the feelings were functioning as designed by natural selection. Doing the job they were supposed to do. Because whether or not they led to happiness, they were at least kind of taking care of the organism, getting it to err on the side of caution when there's a threat, keeping it motivated and working. But, in the case of rage and anxiety in the modern environment, we're seeing cases where the feelings aren't even working well from the point of view of natural selection. They're, they're, they're not reliable guides to reality even in that kind of minimal sense. And they're, they're in that sense, in a certain sense not, not truthful. They do not reflect accurate judgements about what it makes sense to do in response to things in the environment. Now some people would say that this is all the more reason to be mindful. If feelings can't be trusted as accurate, then it makes sense to evaluate feelings mindfully, objectively, and decide which ones you're going to let get traction. Decide which ones you're going to engage with. In other words to, to view feelings with discernment. And, and this is a lot of what in Buddhism is referred to as wisdom. Understanding which feelings it makes sense to engage in and which feelings it doesn't. Now I want to emphasize the way we've defined the truth and falsehood of feelings here is just one of many operational definitions you could kind of trot out. It's not the only way of looking at feelings. So for example, you might say in the case of road rage, well, but wait a second. Was it at least true, that this person had committed some transgression. So in that sense your rage was warranted. You, you can ask that question. And in a way when you ask it, you're veering into questions of moral truth. And I kind of think that maybe moral truth could be what Yifa had in mind when she said sometimes feelings seem not real. She may have, may have meant they're, they're not real in the sense that they don't align with moral truth, feelings like anger and hatred. In any event, moral truth is something we're going to be paying more and more attention to as the course goes on. Certainly at the end when we talk about enlightenment when we ask, what is Buddhist enlightenment and does it deserve that term, does it align a person's mind with truth? Not only in the sense of an objectively clear vision of reality, but also in the sense of moral truth. And we're going to start edging into questions of moral truth even in the next lecture when we're going to look at the Buddhist claim that the self, you know, this thing inside me that I think of as running the show, that the self is in some sense an illusion. As strange as that sounds, we're going to see that there's a fair amount of evidence in psychology to support the idea that the self is in some sense illusory. And that has really pretty radical implications, potentially, for how we live our lives, how we view our feelings, which feelings we choose to let govern us and which we don't and also the question of how we align ourselves with moral truth. [BLANK_AUDIO]
