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.
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