The first time I picked up Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, I was in Bangkok at a friend’s apartment attempting to kill time while everyone got ready for dinner. I picked it up off the shelf, intrigued by the declarative title, and leafed through the first few pages with no expectations other than to avoid the alternative of sitting and doing nothing (those familiar with Buddhism, mindfulness, and related subjects may sense some irony here). Struck by the introductory reference to The Matrix, all I remember is taking a picture of the cover, intending to return to the book at a later time.
I’m not sure when I read it in full for the first time, but it was great. Brandon, if you ever read this, thanks for the great bookshelf (and weirdly good Italian food in Thailand). Wright is repetitive, but in a necessary sort of way: if you stay with the wordy sentences, he lays out some hard-to-write-about concepts in a wonderful manner. It’s more about mindfulness and meditation than Buddhist traditions or doctrines, but seeing things I had noticed during my own practice articulated on a page (and elaborated upon in a fun, insightful way) deepened my practice in ways I can’t quite put a finger on. At the very least, I’ve recognized how important spiritual nourishment/exploration is to all of us if we are to make the changes—individual, communal, and societal—that we know, in our hearts, are possible.
In the spirit of re-reading more things (it’s fun to notice how I view and digest them differently), I started Why Buddhism is True again this morning. Wow! This time around is going to be even better; half-knowing what to expect and being able to take time for what stands out (rather than my usual “look at me, I finished this book” mode) is already proving to be joyous. After finishing Chapter 3, titled “When Are Feelings Illusions?” I felt the urge to hand out copies of the chapter to everyone at the gym. This stuff (namely, the benefits to ourselves and others that can result from observing our thoughts and feelings from a non-judgmental vantage point) is important to at least ponder (and perhaps even try out)… and this guy took the time to try to explain why it’s important to understand and attempt—what a treasure! Anyway, I guess that’s what Substack is for. I recommend reading the chapter itself, but that costs money, so here are some notes I took + some quotes (non-bulleted) from the chapter that are hopefully less than 17 pages:
Do our feelings, if not observed and inspected to a certain degree, carry us away from the truth? Does meditation actually bring us closer to the truth? To find out, we need to figure out the deal with our feelings and whether they are “false” or “true.” We’ll get to that in a bit.
I definitely experience feelings. It’s very likely that others (humans, animals, perhaps even bacteria because why not) do, too.
Feelings likely first arose to teach organisms whether to approach things or avoid things. Find food = good for me = good feeling. Encounter danger/poisonous substance = bad for me = feeling of aversion. (Me = organism)
Feelings are designed to encode judgements about things in our environment. Typically these judgments are about whether these things are good or bad for the survival of the organism doing the feeling.
“True” feelings = judgment is accurate. If things they attract me to are actually good or things they lead me to avoid are bad, the feeling is “true.”
“False” feelings = judgment is inaccurate (I am led astray). Following the feeling leads to a bad outcome for me.
Example 1: Attraction to powdered doughnuts. This is a good feeling, but it usually has a bad outcome for our health. Why is this feeling good, then? Because way back in the day, the sweetest thing we could find was fruit, and fruit was rare. So the feeling of attraction to sweet things was “true”… but now, with nearly unlimited access to sugary everything, it’s “false.”
Example 2: Road rage. Way back in the day, it was “true” to feel anger when someone slighted me, because 1) I had to signal that there were consequences to exploiting you, and 2) I don’t want others in your circle to see you can be easily exploited. Now, I’ll never see the person who cut you off on the highway again. Driving 80 mph to teach them a lesson does not serve me well. The feeling of anger here is “false.”
The reason the feelings are “false” here is due to environmental mismatch. (i.e. the world is super different now but my genes aren’t)
So far, we’ve explored one way of seeing feelings:
if they feel good but lead us to do things that aren’t really good for us, they’re false feelings.
Thus, we should be careful about blindly obeying all of our feelings.
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Let’s now explore False Positives.
Wright gives a rattlesnake example. If I’m hiking and worried about rattlesnakes and the grass near me moved, I will feel very fearful that there is actually a rattlesnake there. Even if it’s a lizard, I might literally SEE it as a snake for a quick second. But there’s no snake. This feeling of fear (that caused a very real illusion) = False Positive.
False positives can be helpful from a survival lens because:
Though your brief conviction that you’ve seen a rattlesnake may be wrong nine-nine times out of a hundred, the conviction could be lifesaving the other one time.
There’s a key difference between the rattlesnake and the doughnut:
Way back in the day, the feeling of attraction to sweetness would have been “true” but now it’s “false.” The feeling was designed one way and now that design isn’t great for me.
With the rattlesnake, in BOTH cases (way back and now), the feeling of fear would produce a false perception. And in BOTH cases, the snake usually isn’t there. The feeling was designed one way and now the design serves the same purpose: create a literal illusion so that the ONE time there’s a snake, I survive. In the long run, this could be good for me! BUT:
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.
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Here’s where False Positives get messy:
I just talked to Bob and I’m not sure if I pissed him off or not. I feel concerned. This concern is similar to the rattlesnake fear because
just like the snake not actually being there, Bob might not be pissed at all. Thinking snake is there and thinking Bob is pissed = illusion.
both feelings, even though they create actual illusions, are advantageously designed. As mentioned earlier, the fear will save my life the one time the snake is there. In the case with Bob, I should feel concerned: way back when, staying on good terms with your sphere of people was extremely important.
BUT: way back when, I would see Bob 20 minutes later and could gauge whether he’s pissed or not, and if he is I can hash it out. In today’s world, it might be a LOT harder to actually figure out if Bob’s pissed or not (distance, mode of communication, etc). Thus, my concern lasts a lot longer and I might get unnecessarily stressed for weeks on end.
So, in a lot of cases, the feeling we get (and the illusion it causes) is perfectly natural, BUT our modern environment makes it so that the feeling gets intensified or drawn out in ways that definitely do not help a 2022 human.
Another example:
It’s natural for us to feel self-conscious. Way back when, how our sphere of people viewed us mattered greatly. It DID matter what they thought: having no friends in that environment wasn’t great for survival. They also saw us ALL the time and knew us very well, so one single action likely would not change their opinion of us drastically.
Today, ALL THE TIME, we meet people who know nothing/very little about us. “Make a good first impression!” Here, our feeling of self-consciousneess does not serve us as well: we may feel embarassed about something we said to someone on a plane hours or days after it happened. We will never see them again and it doesn’t matter what they think — our unpleasant feeling is a false positive.
Wright sums this up well:
Our assumption that people give much thought to us one way or the other is often an illusion, as is our unspoken sense that it matters what pretty much everyone we see thinks of us. But these intuitions were less often illusory in the environment of our evolution, and that’s one reason they’re so persistent today.
Basically, some feelings and the illusions they created used to serve us well but now they don’t (at least most of the time). In 2022, these feelings (for example, rampant social anxieties) are often unproductive may negatively affect our ability to see the world around us with clarity.
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Is there anything we can do about this? Wright is glad you asked!
He suggests that mindfulness meditation—taking note of our feelings, observing them from a neutral/detached vantage point, and allowing them to simply be there (rather than dominate our thoughts and actions)—can be a great way to dispel the illusions that troublesome feelings cause and move forward in ways that better serve us and those around us.
He gives a great summary at the end of the chapter. For the TL;DR folks:
Our feelings weren’t designed to depict reality accurately even in our natural environment. (Think rattlesnake example). This class of illusions, “natural” illusions, helps explain a lot of distortions in our apprehension of the world, especially the social world.
The fact that we’re not living in a “natural” environment makes our feelings even less reliable guides to reality. (Think road rage and doughnut example). These feelings were once “true” at least in the pragmatic sense of guiding the organism toward behaviors that were in some sense good for it. But now they’re likely to mislead.
Underlying it all is the happiness delusion. As the Buddha emphasized, our ongoing attempts to feel betteer tend to involve an overestimation of how long “better” is going to last.
Some, maybe most of our feelings serve us reasonably well… my attraction to apples, my aversion to grasping knife blades—all to the good. Still, I hope you can see the virtue of subjecting your feelings to investigation—inspecting them to see which ones deserve obedience and which ones don’t, and trying to free yourself from thee grip of the ones that don’t
Re-reading this chapter served as a good reminder for why I should strive to be as consistent as possible in sitting for a few minutes everyday and taking stock of my thoughts and feelings without judging them. Yes, I want to avoid road rage, but I also want to be able to lean into the feelings that do serve me as deeply and meaningfully as possible. I’m excited to dive back into the book and I hope these notes can serve as an on-ramp to others that are thinking about hitting the cushion more often.