topics: |  brain | philosophy | happiness

Wisdom is now so cheap and abundant that it floods over us from calendar
pages, tea bags, bottle caps, and mass e-mail messages forwarded by
well-meaning friends. We are in a way like residents of Jorge Luis Borges’s
Library of Babel — an infinite library whose books contain every possible
string of letters and, therefore, somewhere an explanation of why the library
exists and how to use it. But Borges's librarians suspect that they will
never find that book amid the miles of nonsense. p.ix

the world's three great zones of classical thought

[writes down all claims of psychology from ]
  - India (the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the sayings of the Buddha...),
  - China (the Analects of Confucius, the Tao te Ching, Meng Tzu ...),
  - the cultures of the Mediterranean (the Old and New Testaments, the Greek
	and Roman philosophers, the Koran).

[coherent ideas recurring across cultures may be the "Great ideas"] that
would fit together, build upon each other, and tell a story about how human
beings can find happiness and meaning in life. 10

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: the field for helping people find happiness and meaning
in life [Keyes and Haidt, 2003]

foundational truths about the mind

* The mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Like a rider on the
  back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only
  limited control of what the elephant does.

 “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” [Hamlet]

  Buddha: “Our life is the creation of our mind.”

Two truths:
* Golden Rule: RECIPROCITY is the most important tool for getting along with
  people, and I'll show you how you can use it to solve problems in your own
  life and avoid being exploited by those who use reciprocity against you.

* we are all, by nature, hypocrites, and this is why it is hard to
  follow the golden rule.

  Recent psychological research has uncovered the mental mechanisms that make
  us so good at seeing the slightest speck in our neighbor's eye, and so bad
  at seeing the log in our own.

happiness hypotheses

1. happiness comes from getting what you want
       [research shows such happiness to be short-lived]  (see also Daniel
	 Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness)

2. Happiness comes from within and cannot be obtained by making the world conform to
   your desires
   	[more promising]
  	[Buddha in India and Stoics in Greece : break emotional attachments to
  	people and events, cultivate an attitude of acceptance. ]

  but research shows that there are external conditions that can make you
  lastingly happier, such as relatedness - the bonds we form, and need to
  form, with others. (the role of "love")]

- "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger" - a dangerous oversimplification.
  trauma can damage you for life

- "virtue is its own reward" - oversimplification

Meaning of life

I begin with the culturally widespread idea that there is a vertical,
spiritual dimension of human existence. Whether it is called nobility,
virtue, or divinity, and whether or not God exists, people simply do perceive
sacred-ness, holiness, or some ineffable goodness in others, and in
nature. I'll present my own research on the moral emotions of disgust,
elevation, and awe to explain how this vertical dimension works, and why the
dimension is so important for understanding religious fundamentalism, the
political culture war, and the human quest for meaning.

Ten great ideas

Each chapter is an attempt to savor one idea that has been discovered by
several of the world's civilizations...

1. The divided self

    For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit
    desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to
    prevent you from doing what you want. — St. Paul, Galatians 5:171


[The first time JH rode a horse (in a group with a forest ranger)] We were
riding along a path on a steep hillside, two by two, and my horse was on the
outside, walking about three feet from the edge. Then the path turned sharply
to the left, and my horse was heading straight for the edge. I froze. I knew
I had to steer left, but there was another horse to my left and I didn't want
to crash into it. I might have called out for help, or screamed, “Look out!”;
but some part of me preferred the risk of going over the edge to the
certainty of looking stupid. So I just froze. I did nothing at all during the
critical five seconds in which my horse and the horse to my left calmly
turned to the left by themselves.

As my panic subsided, I laughed at my ridiculous fear. The horse knew
exactly what she was doing. ... I had gotten it all so wrong
because I had spent the previous ten years driving cars, not horses. Cars go
over edges unless you tell them not to.

Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new or complex
things in relation to things we already know. [Lakoff and Johnson, 1980] p.2

Buddha: compares the mind to an wild elephant tamed by the mahout.
		[Dhammapada, verse 326]

Meditation

Even before Buddha, the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu had said that the road
to wisdom runs through calm inaction, desireless waiting. 37

Aaron Beck: founded "cognitive therapy" - attempts to train patients to
	consciously fight the distorted thought processes as they emeerge.
	initially scorned by Freudians, but emerged as one of the most
	effective treatments for depression, anxiety, etc. p. 37