Olivia Glad
Honorable
On how natural selection is at odds with the Buddhist notion that pleasure is fleeting
This was in the Buddha's first sermon after his enlightenment is that a big source of our suffering is that we crave things, we want things, but then the gratification tends not to last. So we find ourselves in a state of almost perennial dissatisfaction. And, in fact, people may have heard that Buddhism says that life is full of suffering, and it's true that suffering is the translation of the word dukkha. It's a respectable translation, but a lot of people think that that word would be just as well translated as "unsatisfactoryness."
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mindfulness meditation is to not run away from feelings that you normally run away from. By "run away from" I mean you're averse to them. Like, if you feel anxiety or physical pain, you want it to go away. You want to do something that makes it go away. And the idea of mindfulness meditation is that you actually sit there — kind of observe the feeling, experience the feeling — and ironically, that can give you a kind of critical distance from it, a kind of detachment from it. So not running away from the pain or the emotional distress, or whatever, can, through meditative practice, disempower the pain or the distress.
This was in the Buddha's first sermon after his enlightenment is that a big source of our suffering is that we crave things, we want things, but then the gratification tends not to last. So we find ourselves in a state of almost perennial dissatisfaction. And, in fact, people may have heard that Buddhism says that life is full of suffering, and it's true that suffering is the translation of the word dukkha. It's a respectable translation, but a lot of people think that that word would be just as well translated as "unsatisfactoryness."
Article continues after sponsorship
mindfulness meditation is to not run away from feelings that you normally run away from. By "run away from" I mean you're averse to them. Like, if you feel anxiety or physical pain, you want it to go away. You want to do something that makes it go away. And the idea of mindfulness meditation is that you actually sit there — kind of observe the feeling, experience the feeling — and ironically, that can give you a kind of critical distance from it, a kind of detachment from it. So not running away from the pain or the emotional distress, or whatever, can, through meditative practice, disempower the pain or the distress.