Name: 1 - 2 Feelings and Illusions (sub: eng/rus) / 1 - 2 Чувства и иллюзии
Uploaded: 2023-01-06T15:26:25.000Z
Duration: 12 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In this segment of lecture one, I'm going to talk a little about

our feelings, our emotions, and I'm going to do that from two perspectives.

From the perspective of Buddhism, and then also from the perspective of evolution.

In other words, in the perspective of somebody who's trying

to figure out you know, why our feelings have certain properties.

to things we're going to cover in greater detail

later in the course, but I did want to give you a taste of them.

For one thing I wanted to give you a sense for kind of some of the

practical payoff for meditation, and also the sense

for some of the larger themes that lie ahead.

in Austria at a big conference on interfaith dialogue.

And there were people from all kinds of religions there, and

one of them was a Buddhist Nun named Yifa, YIFA, from Taiwan.

In fact she is a pretty prominent Buddhist Nun.

And I asked her if I could videotape her.

Because I knew I was going to be teaching this course.

And I thought I'd like to share some of her thoughts with you.

And I asked her how can meditation change the way you view your feelings.

>> When you act angry or, you know, you have a great emotion,

and you would grasp that feeling as real.

But when you are meditating or contemplate on those sensations,

the anger, fear, over anxiety and you will find

very interesting those things are not real, not concrete.

So it's to help you to see the nature of a fear, fear

or you know, anxiety or [UNKNOWN] all kinds of emotion.

meditative, look, from, kind of from inside.

And you make a analysis, kind of a, okay, this is a so called anger.

And you find, it's just like you watching movie.

The movie it's, its a kind of a, you know, picture by picture in motion.

But when you you know, take a, a one by one, a piece by piece.

it if you could just convince yourself that

some of your most troublesome, unpleasant feelings aren't

real and kind of liberate yourself from them?

Now that does lead to the question what does

it even mean to say that feelings are real?

You know, after all, isn't the definition of a feeling just this thing we

experience, so as long you're, as you're experiencing it, isn't it, isn't it real?

Well that's a good question, it's a challenging

question and in fact it's so challenging that

I think I'll dodge it, for just right now and promise to get back to it later.

What I would say for now is that, on the one hand it's not you know, found

in core Buddhist doctrine anywhere the assertion that

you know, feelings aren't real in so many words.

On the other hand, I think there are a lot of

Buddhist meditators who would know exactly what Yifa was talking about.

And it is part of Buddhist thought, quite explicitly, that

our feelings are not reliable guides to reality, in a sense.

And, and meditation is a, is a technique for among other things giving

yourself some critical distance from your feelings to avoid being misled by them.

Now one reason it matters whether feelings are

really reliable is that feelings can influence your perceptions

something that becomes more evident through meditation.

As you observe your mind, You can realize that this is happening

in a subtler way than you had, than you had previously thought.

And this kind of influence of feelings on perception and thought

is also something that psychologists have paid more attention to recently.

And, in fact, there's a, a very interesting experiment

about this that that I want to talk about now.

Is this a squirrel or is it an alligators head?

If it's a squirrel, you see the, that these as the

eyes and this is the tail and these as the paws.

If you think it's an alligators head emerging from the water, then these

are the eyes, this is the snout, and here are the menacing teeth, okay.

one of these things they make a snap judgement.

What's interesting is what researchers recently found about

how you can influence the snap judgements people make.

What the researchers did was they showed these three pictures

to people for one second and asked them what they saw.

But first they exposed these people to one of three different conditions.

Either they played kind of happy music Or they played no music.

Or they played scary music that sounded like this.

And then they asked them, what did you see here?

Now it turns out that the happy music didn't have much of

an effect one way or the other compared to just hearing no music.

see that the scary music had a pronounced effect.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

1 - 2 Feelings and Illusions (sub: eng/rus) / 1 - 2 Чувства и иллюзии

perspective

ultimately

anxiety

perception