There are two senses in which feelings can be false. First, many feelings do not serve our interests, although they might have made sense in our ancestral environment. Take road rage, for instance.
[Y]ou can see why natural selection would have made righteous rage attractive: in a small hunter-gatherer village, if someone took advantage of you -- stole your food, stole your mate, or just generally treated you like dirt -- you needed to teach him a lesson. After all, if he learns he can get away with abusing you, he may do it again and again. Worse still, others in your social universe will see that you can be thus exploited, so they may start treating you badly. In such an intimate, unchanging social environment, it would be worth your while to get so angry over exploitation that you would confront your exploiter and be willing to come to blows.
On the modern highway, on the other hand, the "disrespectful driver you feel like punishing is someone you'll never see again, and so are all the drivers who might witness any revenge you wreak." So there's no benefit from road rage. And there's a huge cost: "I'd guess that chasing somebody in a car at eighty miles per hour is more likely to get you killed than was starting a fistfight in a hunter-gatherer society."
Second, feelings can be false when "they come with actual, explicit beliefs about things in the environment." For instance, if you hear a rustle in the weeds, you might feel fear and jump out of the way. Although 99 percent of the time, this feeling is unfounded, as there's not a snake, that fear will save your life the other 1 percent of the time.
To say that some of our feelings are false is to say that the Buddha was right and that at least some of our perceived reality is illusory. The Buddha was also right to teach that meditation allows us to become aware that these feelings are false and to be liberated from them. Wright gives the example of waking up in the middle of the night, anxious about a talk he had to give the next day. He writes:
I decided to sit up in my bed and meditate. I focused on my breathing for a while, but I also focused on the anxiety itself: the tight feeling in my gut. I tried to look at it, as I'd been taught to do at my meditation retreat, nonjudgmentally. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing, and there was no reason to run away from it. It was just a feeling, so I sat there feeling and watching it. I can't say that the feeling felt great, but the more I accepted it, observing it nonjudgmentally, the less unpleasant it got...
The anxiety [started to seem] like something removed from me, something I was just looking at, in my mind's eye, the way I might look at an abstract sculpture in a museum. It looked like a kind of thick, knotted rope of tightness, occupying the part of my abdomen where anxiety is felt, but it didn't feel like tightness anymore. My anxiety, which felt painful only minutes earlier, now felt neither good nor bad. And not long after it attained this neutral status, it dissolved entirely.
It's usually necessary to cultivate concentration before cultivating mindfulness.
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Psychologists now understand that "the conscious self is not some all-powerful executive authority." In fact, "[t]he closer we look at the mind, the more it seems to consist of a lot of different players, players that sometimes collaborate but sometimes fight for control, with victory going to the one that is in some sense the strongest." We think we're in control, but studies show that this is not the case. Benjamin Libet et al., for instance, "monitored the brains of subjects while they 'chose' to initiate an action. The researchers concluded that the brain was initializing the action before the person became aware of 'deciding' to initiate it."
Evolutionary psychology argues that "your mind is composed of lots of specialized modules -- modules for sizing up situations and reacting to them -- and it's the interplay among these modules that shapes your behavior. And much of this interplay happens without conscious awareness on your part." Possible modules include ones for self-protection, mate attraction, mate retention, affiliation (making and keeping friends), kin care, social status, and disease avoidance.
Researchers showed one group of subjects clips from a horror movie and another group clips from a romantic movie. The subjects were then shown one of two ads for an art museum; the pitch line for the first ad was "Visited by over a Million People Each Year," while the pitch line for the second ad was "Stand Out from the Crowd." People who'd watched clips from the horror movie were likely to visit the museum when viewing the first ad, while people who watched the romantic movie were more likely to visit the museum when viewing the second ad. Researchers concluded that the movie watched determined which module controlled one's reaction to the ad -- the horror movie putting your "self-protection" module in charge, the romantic movie putting your "mate-acquisition" module in charge.
All of this lends credence to the Buddha's claim that there is no self.
When your mind wanders, the different modules are competing for your attention, wresting control from one another. Observing feelings without attachment is the way you keep modules from seizing control of your consciousness.
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Self-Control. Don't fight your temptations. Don't push the urge out of your mind. Instead, practice mindfulness. RAIN. Recognize the feeling, Accept the feeling, Investigate the feeling and its relationship to your body, Nonidentification (or Nonattachment). Mindfulness training for smoking cessation: results from a randomized controlled trial.
Mindfulness meditation can be thought of as "depriving modules of the positive reinforcement that has given them power. Because often when you mindfully observe feelings, you're keeping the module that generated them from getting some sort of reward. If you observe a feeling of hatred for someone, and just keep observing the feeling, then the feeling won't do what it might otherwise do -- like, say, get you to imagine taking revenge for whatever this person has done to earn your hatred."
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Buddhism talks about emptiness, meaning that although external reality seems "so solid and so structured, so full of things with a distinct and tangible identity, there is less than meets the eye. This world of apparent forms is in some sense, as the Samadhiraja Sutra has it, a 'mirage, a cloud castle, a dream, an apparition.'" Wright argues that this idea is not as crazy as it seems, as we "tend to attach positive and negative associations to just about every kind of thing there is." He gives the example of a man who placed extraordinary emotional value on a tape measure that had been owned by John F. Kennedy and paid $48,000 for it. Wright points out that if someone told the man that there'd been a mistake, and the tape measure actually didn't belong to JFK, then he would no doubt have different feelings about it and in fact look at it differently.
Wrights quotes psychologist Robert Zajonc, who wrote, "There are probably very few perceptions and cognitions in everyday life that do not have a significant affective component, that aren't hot, or in the very least tepid. And perhaps all perceptions contain some affect. We do not just see a 'house': we see 'a handsome house,' 'an ugly house,' or 'a pretentious house.'" Zajonc continues: And the same goes for a sunset, a lightning flash, a flower, a dimple, a hangnail, a cockroach, the taste of quinine, Saumur, the color of earth in Umbria, the sound of traffic on 42nd Stree, and equally for the sound of a 1000-Hz tone and the sight of the letter Q." Wright references a study by Melissa Ferguson and another by Roger Giner-Sorolla and others which corroborate Zajonc's thesis.
Wright notes that mediation is a way to see objects more clearly, that is to same, as emptier or containing less essense. "Feelings infuse things with essence. The dampened sense of essence some meditators feel has a lot to do with dampened feelings."
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