Top Summary

The human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it. It is designed, in a certain sense, to be controlled by that input. And a key cog in the machinery of control is the feelings that arise in response to the input.

If you interact with those feelings via tanha — via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings — you will continue to be controlled by the world around you.

But if you observe those feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can in some measure escape the control; the causes that ordinarily shape your behavior can be defied, and you can get closer to the unconditioned.

A List of Buddhist Truths

  • Human beings often fail to see the world clearly, and this can lead them to suffer and to make others suffer.
  • Humans tend to anticipate more in the way of enduring satisfaction from the attainment of goals than will in fact transpire.
  • Dukkha is a relentlessly recurring part of life as life is ordinarily lived.
  • The source of dukkha identified in the Four Noble Truths — tanha, translated as “thirst” or “craving” or “desire” — makes sense against the backdrop of evolution.
  • The two basic feelings that sponsor dukkha — the two sides of tanha, a clinging attraction to things and an aversion to things — needn’t enslave us as they tend to do.
  • Our intuitive conception of the “self” is misleading at best.
  • The more expansive and more common interpretation of the Buddha’s second discourse — as saying that the “self” simply doesn’t exist — is rendered in various ways in various Buddhist texts.
  • What I call the “exterior” version of the not-self experience — a sense that the bounds surrounding the self have dissolved and were in some sense illusory to begin with — is not empirically and theoretically corroborated in the same sense that, I argue, the “interior” version of the not-self experience is corroborated.
  • Leaving aside the metaphysical validity of our ordinary sense of self, and of alternatives to that ordinary sense of self, there is the question of moral validity.
  • The intuition that objects and beings we perceive have “essences” is, as the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness holds, an illusion.
  • The preceding point about essences and essentialism is one illustration of the broader proposition that not seeing the world clearly can lead not just to our own suffering but to bad conduct in the sense of making others suffer needlessly. Or, to put a more positive spin on it: Seeing the world more clearly can make you not just happier but more moral.
  • Many Buddhist teachings, including several of those listed here, could be lumped under the rubric of “awareness of conditioning,” where “conditioning” means, roughly speaking, causes.

Main Takeaways

Effect of Natural Selection on Humans

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. This is what we often call “the hedonic treadmill.” 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.

Feelings Can Be Misleading

Feelings can be misleading in many ways:

  • Our feelings weren’t designed to depict reality accurately even in our “natural” environment. Feelings were designed to get the genes of our hunter-gatherer ancestors into the next generation.
  • The fact that we’re not living in a “natural” environment makes our feelings even less reliable guides to reality. The modern environment can take various kinds of feelings that served our ancestors in this Darwinian sense and render them counterproductive in the same sense — they may actually lower a person’s life expectancy.
  • Underlying it all is the happiness delusion.

Your CEO Is Missing In Action

“You” aren’t the president, the central executive, the prime minister. The dynamics of the mind are well captured by a modular model. In this view, if you built a robot whose brain worked like the human brain, and then asked computer scientists to describe its workings, they’d say that its brain consists of lots of partly overlapping modules within modules, and the robot’s circumstances determine which modules are, for the moment, running the show. These computer scientists would have trouble pointing to a part of the robot’s programming and saying, “This part is the robot itself.”

The closest thing to a self would be the algorithm that determines which circumstances put which modules in charge. And that algorithm can’t be what we mean by the “conscious self” in humans — the CEO self — because humans don’t consciously decide to go into romantic mode or fearful mode. This idea — that modules are triggered by feelings — sheds new light on the connections between two fundamental parts of Buddhism: the idea of non-attachment to feelings and the idea of not-self.

Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns running the show — and, in a sense, seizing control of the show. If the way they seize control of the show is through feelings, it stands to reason that one way to change the show is to change the role feelings play in everyday life. I’m not aware of a better way to do that than mindfulness meditation.

How Thoughts Think Themselves

Thoughts involve the past and future, not the present; the one thing you’re not doing while having these thoughts is paying attention to what’s actually going on in the real world at this moment. Second, all of these thoughts involve you. Third, most of these thoughts involve other people.

Feelings are, among other things, your brain’s way of labeling the importance of thoughts, and importance (in natural selection’s somewhat crude sense of the term) determines which thoughts enter consciousness. This hypothesis — that feelings are, among other things, the mind’s way of assigning priority labels to thoughts.

Mindfulness Meditation

What’s fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings is the general dynamic of being powerfully drawn to sensory pleasure that winds up being fleeting at best. One of the Buddha’s main messages was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly and leave us thirsting for more.

If you accept the idea that many of our most troublesome feelings are in one sense or another illusions, then meditation can be seen as, among other things, a process of dispelling illusions. Viewing your feelings mindfully while on a meditation cushion can make you better at viewing them mindfully in everyday life, which means your life will be less governed by misleading or unproductive feelings.

The main point these meditation teachers are making is the same as the upshot of the modular-mind model: the conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them.