Defiled happiness and undefiled happiness. These are the two kinds of happiness.

The people with dyslexia proved significantly faster at recognizing the impossible figures.

Subjective feelings are a central feature of human life, yet their relative organization has remained elusive. We mapped the “human feeling space” for 100 core feelings ranging from cognitive and affective processes to somatic sensations; in the analysis, we combined basic dimension rating, similarity mapping, bodily sensation mapping, and neuroimaging meta-analysis.

Feelings formed five groups: positive emotions, negative emotions, cognitive processes, somatic states, and homeostatic states. Feeling space was best explained by emotionality, mental experience, and bodily sensation topographies.

Using complementary analyses, we show that representations of pain and orgasm are distinct in each culture. We also show that pain is represented with similar face movements across cultures, whereas orgasm shows differences. Our findings therefore inform understanding of the possible communicative role of facial expressions of pain and orgasm, and how culture could shape their representation.

But because consciousness is painful—soaked and steeped in pain and not steeped in pleasure—sentient beings do grow disillusioned with it. Being disillusioned, desire fades away. When desire fades away they are purified. This is a cause and reason for the purification of sentient beings.

Mahāli the Licchavi reports to the Buddha that the rival teacher Pūraṇa Kassapa asserts that there is no reason for beings to be either defiled or pure. The Buddha denies this, and goes on to explain how it happens.

Students who are well-trained in Mindfulness cope with dukkha in a very different fashion from the rest of us whose minds are still at the “drunken monkey” stage.

Dr. Ashby explores how human suffering (dukkha) is not merely an external condition but is compounded by our internal responses, such as clinging, aversion, and self‑identification. She argues that by understanding and transforming these reactions, one can see suffering clearly and move toward its cessation.

A total of 536 Hong Kong university students completed questionnaires measuring their experiences of compassion from others, self-compassion, resilience, psychological distress, flourishing, and meaning in life. Serial mediation analyses showed that compassion from others was associated positively with self-compassion, which was, in turn, linked to greater resilience and consequently lower levels of psychological distress and higher levels of flourishing and meaning in life.

Where our individual perception meets the external world: that point of focus is the juncture between inner and outer space. It’s where we and nature find union. It’s the home of the muse, of inspiration, even of what have been called ‘angels’ which the visionaries saw shining in that meeting place between the eye of the observer and the light of the observed.

An increase in the concentration of particulate matter (PM10) by 10 μg/m³ reduces the vote share of incumbent parties by two percentage points

if occasionally, due to a lapse of mindfulness, evil unwholesome memories and intentions connected with the fetters arise in him, slow might be the arising of his mindfulness, but then he quickly abandons them, dispels them, puts an end to them

The Buddha urges mendicants to be free of desire for the six senses, giving a series of vivid similes.

the evidence about the causal influences of identification on pain highlights a self-related factor of relevance in pain experiences that can be modulated by mindfulness.

A scientific attempt at investigating the Buddhist theory of pain which unfortunately suffers from several methodological flaws: foremost among them that the participants likely understood the point of the study and thus had an incentive to produce self-reports showing the desired correlations.

And, even worse, the paper used violin plots.

I have seen, bhikkhus, the hell named ‘Contact’s Sixfold Base.’

firm in texture,
brimming with natural juices.

he was still petting the puppy’s wet head,
and I cried like I’d never known …

a crow
Shook down on me…

Pigment presses out
you in
you
laurel
not yet in the wind

Here, take this palmful of raspberries…

Devoured in secret,
she was punished for eating it
but loved the bitter wave…

A poem attempting to explain what depression and self-harm feel like.

Inside me lived a small donkey…

A poem on the everyday labor of living and the inner strength we find to go on.

I keep
a beautiful garden, all abundance,
indiscriminate, pulling itself
from the stubborn earth: does it offend you

Take a picture and tell the world
what it means, only I wasn’t sure…

Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield,
In your eyes I have read
That to be enthroned is to be enslaved,
And to be understood is to be leveled down

we show that long-term memory is capable of storing a massive number of objects with details from the image. Participants viewed pictures of 2,500 objects over the course of 5.5 h. Afterward, they were shown pairs of images and indicated which of the two they had seen.

The previously viewed item could be paired with either an object from a novel category, an object of the same basic-level category, or the same object in a different state or pose. Performance in each of these conditions was remarkably high (92%, 88%, and 87%, respectively), suggesting that participants successfully maintained detailed representations of thousands of images.

to work perfectly.
To simulate pleasure perfectly. To not cry at dinner

gazing into coals,
I skydive and pass through
stages of youth

To strike the right balance of a benign enough violation without offending your audience requires some brains. Funny people are indeed smart

We want the clarification, we want the instruction, but we want it without the discomfort, but it doesn’t work that way. The discomfort is the source of the clarification and the instruction.

The tip of a pencil with a bit of graphite can hold within its pointed space all the potential words you can think of! I can produce a whole book with that pencil point! […] Right now I am just hyper-visualizing the tip, learning how to look; concentrated world of language on that tip.

Call it hyper-vision. Call it unrealistic. I follow the gypsy air.

All our two times two and definitions of photosynthesis, our political understanding and complaining cannot free us from the boundary of a dusty earth and so much brown of it.

Forget what the experts say about Autism; their knowledge is anything but solid. Autism flows: it doesn’t settle; it doesn’t shape.

How observant were you?

A short ad demonstrating how our brains filter and compress information.

We demonstrate that exertion of self-control for as little as 45 min can lead to an increased propensity for engaging in aggressive acts in the context of socially relevant choices, as measured by a set of economic games. Also, we show that such behavioral changes are associated with increased sleep-like (delta) activity within frontal brain areas related to decision-making and impulse control.

Perceiving is the process by which evanescent sensations are linked to environmental cause and made enduring and coherent through the assignment of meaning, utility, and value.

The brain is estimating how much confidence it has in certain predictions or certain bits of sensory information. This is known as Precision Weighting.

How Bayesian logic explains the brain: its extraordinary successes and surprising failures.

Saliva, sweat, semen and body odours are among the strongest disgust elicitors. This results in the intriguing question of how people succeed in having pleasurable sex at all.

Scientific evidence that subha and asubha perceptions are indeed antagonistic.

Experiment and have fun with it.

Rituals can be an artistic process, a meditation, a communal celebration, or a simple act of observation, according to Kate Southworth, a London-based artist whose works are rooted in ritual. “Rituals often have an intention,” Southworth said. “I think the framing of that intention to be as important as its enactment.”

The article explains that rituals—unlike productivity-driven routines—help people instill a sense of calm and sustain mindfulness by imbuing ordinary actions with intention and meaning. In this way, rituals can stabilize life and foster connection in an otherwise distracted, fast-paced world.

Homeownership, as it has evolved in the United States, often turns its beneficiaries against progress and change.

How economic incentives drive the political emotions of American homeowners.

how you experience life is a representation of what you believe about it. If you attack your core beliefs about yourself and your life, you can change your thoughts and feelings, which automatically changes your behavior.

Feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths, apparently because they lead to lower perceived risk and consequently less preparedness.

Reported emotional states occupy a complex, high-dimensional categorical space.

Their interactive map of the emotional space can be explored online here.

He’d accidentally gone into climate-rant mode instead of speaking as a dad.

The apocalyptic stakes of climate change cause one Seattle father to go over the edge along with the story of a technique Santa Fe uses to put its glooms to rest.

This episode was previously called, “The City That Never Sleeps.”

What does it do to a person to study delight? Or, as it emerges, to study joy every single day? What do you discover?

It’s the kind of story that displaces other stories, easily sweeps them aside, which is what happened with Dan…

Three stories about how people fill in what they don’t know about strangers.

Disturbing the remains of the Egyptian Pharaohs is known to incur a deadly curse…

Scientists now think they know why…

Aesthetic beauty is as much about how (and whether) you look as what you see. From the cork to the supernova, wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply: our willingness to do the work that awe requires.

John Green reviews these two related phenomena on a five-star scale.

We found that Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian than when they were from the same linguistic category. Moreover, this category advantage was eliminated by a verbal, but not a spatial, dual task.

These results demonstrate that (i) categories in language affect performance on simple perceptual color tasks and (ii) the effect of language is online (and can be disrupted by verbal interference).

Cetasika means literally: ‘belonging to the mind.’ There are fifty two different cetasikas which each have their own characteristic and function.

The various objects of mind according to the traditional Theravādan exegesis.

Western philosophers did not hand down a rich tradition of thinking about animal consciousness. But Eastern thinkers have long been haunted by its implications— especially the Jains…

Exercise is an effective treatment for depression, with walking or jogging, yoga, and strength training more effective than other exercises, particularly when intense. Yoga and strength training were well tolerated compared with other treatments. Exercise appeared equally effective for people with and without comorbidities and with different baseline levels of depression.

‘Fisherman’ is a term for Māra the Wicked. ‘Hook’ is a term for possessions, honor, and popularity.

The process by which money value has displaced other languages of value is one of the enormous trends over the last 200 years…

During the second World War, radar created unprecedented opportunities for defense. Nevertheless, no matter how good your radar is, if the person looking at the radar screen isn’t paying attention you’re totally screwed. So an intense set of classified experiments took place to assess this new problem: how long could people pay attention to screens and what could you do to optimize their ability to keep paying attention to screens for long periods of time. […] We see the legacy of that work to this day in the way we think about attention.

From The Twelve Theses on Attention: ‘Sanctuaries for true attention already exist. They are among us now but they are endangered and many are in hiding: operating in self-sustaining, inclusive, generous, and fugitive forms.’

Acute tissue injury activates an ensemble of interdependent nervous, endocrine, and immune processes that operate in concert and comprise a supersystem. Some chronic pain conditions result from supersystem dysregulation. Individuals vary and are vulnerable to dysregulation due to the unique interactions of genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors and past experiences that characterize each person.

Mendicants, there are these three sources that give rise to deeds. What three? Greed, hate, and delusion are sources that give rise to deeds.

… but if you were to move your hand slowly over a fly it would perceive your hand much like we would perceive grass growing or ice melting or paint drying: it would be too slow to be visible. So here is a good life hack if you ever want to catch a fly with your bare hands: take your time.

Sixteen patients underwent functional MRI while reacting to negative self-beliefs and while regulating negative emotions using 2 types of attention deployment emotion regulation: breath-focused attention (MBSR) and distraction-focused attention (counting backwards).

Compared with baseline, MBSR completers showed improvement in anxiety and depression symptoms and self-esteem. During the breath-focused attention task (but not the distraction-focused attention task), they also showed (a) decreased negative emotion experience, (b) reduced amygdala activity, and (c) increased activity in brain regions implicated in attentional deployment. MBSR training in patients with SAD may reduce emotional reactivity while enhancing emotion regulation.

Then happiness became an egg that broke…

A poem on how children focus us on the present moment.

Then at that time many moths rushing and falling down into those oil lamps, were coming to grief, were coming to ruin.

Like moths to the flame, living beings are draw to appearances at their own peril.

First, whereas Westerners represent each of the six basic emotions with a distinct set of facial movements common to the group, Easterners do not. Second, Easterners represent emotional intensity with distinctive dynamic eye activity. By refuting the long-standing universality hypothesis, our data highlight the powerful influence of culture on shaping basic behaviors once considered biologically hardwired.

People are more likely to engage in mood-increasing activities (e.g., sports) when they felt bad, and to engage in useful but mood-decreasing activities (e.g., housework) when they felt good. These findings clarify how hedonic considerations shape human behavior. They may explain how humans overcome the allure of short-term gains in happiness to maximize long-term welfare.

Mechanisms that detect and respond to threats are not the same as those that give rise to conscious fear.

Without the pressure of a life cut short, Keith Haring’s art might never have been as deep as it was. Yet that would have been a good trade.

On recognizing that “the nobility of suffering has always been a coping mechanism.”

Why am I afraid of that pleasure that has nothing to do with sensual pleasures and unwholesome states?

The Buddha responds to a follower of another religion with a long account of the various austerities he practiced before awakening, detailing the astonishing lengths he took to learn the truth of the body and feelings.

Here we report data supporting the broader claim that shame is a basic part of human biology.

We conducted an experiment among 899 participants in 15 small-scale communities scattered around the world. Despite widely varying languages, cultures, and subsistence modes, shame in each community closely tracked the devaluation of local audiences (mean r = +0.84). The fact that the same pattern is encountered in such mutually remote communities suggests that shame’s match to audience devaluation is a design feature crafted by selection and not a product of cultural contact or convergent cultural evolution.

See also this group’s similar article on pride.

Administration of testosterone caused increased punishment of the other player but also increased reward of larger offers.

This increased generosity in the absence of provocation indicates that testosterone can also cause prosocial behaviors that are appropriate for increasing status. These findings are in-consistent with a simple relationship between testosterone and aggression and provide causal evidence for a more complex role for testosterone in driving status-enhancing behaviors in males.

A moth will never know what a zebra finch hears in its song, a zebra finch will never feel the electric buzz of a black ghost knifefish, a knifefish will never see through the eyes of a mantis shrimp, a mantis shrimp will never smell the way a dog can, and a dog will never understand what it is to be a bat. We will never fully do any of these things either, but we are the only animal that can try.

Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion—one that every animal shares.

Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.

He should not conceive [I am] the all, should not conceive [I am] in all, should not conceive [I come] from the all, should not conceive, ‘All is mine.’

Being stirred by craving is painful, so the Realized One lives unstirred, not identifying with any aspect of sense experience.

What is the cause, sir, what is the reason why some sentient beings aren’t fully extinguished in the present life?

If a mendicant approves, welcomes, and keeps clinging to them, their consciousness relies on that and grasps it. A mendicant with grasping does not become extinguished.

The eye is yours, Evil One, forms are yours, eye-contact and its base of consciousness are yours; but, Evil One, where there is no eye, no forms, no eye-contact and its base of consciousness—there is no place for you there

While the mendicants are listening to the teachings, Māra takes the form of a farmer looking for lost oxen.

Pride is a highly pleasant emotion; this internal reward can incentivize people to undertake and persevere at costly but socially valued courses of action. Pride has a full-body display featuring an erect and expanded posture and gaze directed at the audience and thus it appears to generate common knowledge about the individual’s enhanced value. This display conveys achievement and dominance, is produced by congenitally blind individuals, and is recognized by young children and by adults across cultures.

Pride is a universal system that is part of our species’ cooperative biology.

See also this research group’s related article on shame.

… sexuality in its various manifestations is among the urges that are not intrinsically directed at specific objects and activities. Objects and activities come to play a role [only] because the mind has the tendency of keeping a record of objects and activities rather than of the states which are the real causes of satisfaction.

An admirable attempt to square Western psychological theories (especially those of Freud) with the Buddha’s experience of jhāna. The two essays in this volume provide novel psychological models which neuroscientists and meditators alike will find provocative as they grapple with the implications of this incredible state of consciousness.

… because Cura first fashioned the being, let her possess it as long as it lives.

This existential insecurity is the kind that comes from being dependent on others for survival; from being vulnerable to physical and psychological illness or wounding; and, of course, from being mortal. It’s the insecurity of randomness and risk, of a future that is impossible to control or to know. It is a kind of insecurity we can never wholly escape or armour ourselves against, try as we might to mitigate potential harms.

Yet however unknowable the future may be, there is no doubt our fortunes will remain interlinked. Risks proliferate, time passes, and things fall apart. But even amid the rubble, we can always reimagine, repair, and rebuild. Accepting our fundamental insecurity—the gift we all share—is the first step toward escaping our fear-filled burrows and ensuring our collective freedom, safety, and well-being.

But because it is known by me, seen, found, realised, contacted by wisdom thus: ‘Here, when someone feels a certain kind of pleasant feeling, unwholesome states increase in him and wholesome states diminish,’ that I therefore say: ‘Abandon such a kind of pleasant feeling.’

The Buddha admonishes a group of monks who refused to give up eating in the afternoon with a unique teaching on the stages of the path.

There is a way of undertaking dhammas that is pleasant now and ripens in the future as pain. There is a way of undertaking dhammas that is painful now and ripens in the future as pain. There is a way of undertaking dhammas that is painful now and ripens in the future as pleasure. There is a way of undertaking dhammas that is pleasant now and ripens in the future as pleasure.

The Buddha explains how taking up different practices can have different results. The memorable simile of the creeper shows how insidious temptations can be.

When a bhikkhu dwells thus, he overwhelms forms; forms do not overwhelm him. He overwhelms sounds; sounds do not overwhelm him…

The Buddha is invited to teach in a new hall in Kapilavatthu. Late at night, after teaching the Sakyans, the Buddha invites Moggallāna to teach the monks, so he explains how to conquer Māra.

In five experiments, participants (n = 701) were shown two silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expressions. They were asked to color the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing or decreasing while viewing each stimulus. Different emotions were consistently associated with statistically separable bodily sensation maps across experiments. These maps were concordant across West European and East Asian samples.

Perception of these emotion-triggered bodily changes may play a key role in generating consciously felt emotions.

With the present book I return to the Pāli version of the Satipaṭṭhāna-sutta. My exploration is entirely dedicated to the actual practice of satipaṭṭhāna, informed by the previously gathered details and overall picture as it emerges from a study of relevant material in the early discourses.

Building on his early work, Bhikkhu Analayo details a mindfulness practise that incorporates all aspects of Buddhist psychology.

Ah poetry,
god of molting turkeys, save
my brother from the truck

Is the eye the fetter of forms or are forms the fetter of the eye?

Kāmabhū asks Ānanda about the senses.

… even trifling forms that enter into range of the eye obsess the mind, not to speak of those that are prominent. For what reason? Because lust still exists

Like a tree that yields sap when cut, so long as desire is present it can be activated by the senses.

Thinking, ‘I will free both hands,’ he seizes it with his foot; he gets caught there.

The parable of the foolish monkey who gets trapped in tar when it ventures outside its ancestral territory. And what is a mendicant’s ancestral territory? The four kinds of mindfulness meditation.

I became profoundly dispassionate
towards all sensual pleasures.
Seeing fear in identity,
I longed for renunciation.

Mendicants, ‘danger’ is a term for sensual pleasures…

The Buddha explains how addiction to sensual pleasures is perilous.

Why do we feel this and what can we do about it?

i have so much hope for the future

i hope everyone gets everything they deserve

Mendicants, there are these five kinds of emotional barrenness. What five? …

And how is an individual like an inscription in rock?

Their design ideas were radically different but the reaction was the same: people hated it.

On the importance of autonomy and power in interior design.

Loves  How I  love  you…

Staying in your comfort zone isn’t always the best option.

The incredible stories of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies and Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert and why diversity is better than it feels.

For the exciting part two, see Frankenstein versus the Volcano.

… hurt and harm are not the same. You can have damage to your body without accompanying pain. You can have pain without accompanying tissue damage. […] what we know about chronic pain is that the brain does become more sensitive over time, and it misinterprets these danger messages as amplified when they don’t need to be.

You read the road as if it’s encrypted with what a father should say on a drive like this.

Sometimes the verbs
Aren’t important

all those bodies in Departures
are naked under clothes and scarred

In Vietnam, the decision for young women to ordain as Mahayana Buddhist nuns is navigated through careful interpretations of feeling. Nuns state their decisions to “go forth” (đi tu) in youth were precipitated by feelings of peace and comfort in monasteries even before they understood Buddhist teachings. Such feelings are interpreted as indicators of past-life karmic bonds, which create “predestined affinities” in this life (nhân duyên).

… what is the good life? What does that mean? Can it be experienced? And how do we go about building that?

A wide ranging conversation on embodied philosophy.

… if someone were to say: ‘[Sensual pleasure] is the highest pleasure and joy that can be experienced,’ I would not concede that. And why not? Because there is another kind of pleasure which surpasses that

The Buddha resolves a disagreement on the number of kinds of feelings that he taught, pointing out that different ways of teaching are appropriate in different contexts, and should not be a cause for arguments. He goes on to explain the importance of pleasure in developing meditation.

… emotions are not biologically hardwired into our brains but are constructed by our minds

Onions are fallible, only
pretending to be infinite…

Here I am, holding one more
mirror. This time smoke…

What people enjoy about smoking is the mindfulness: taking a moment out of the day to step outside and breath.

And even the alertness of nicotine itself is mostly caused by turning off the Default Mode Network: the same as in meditation.

To contend seriously with the problem, you first have to let it in. And when I say “let it in” I mean “drag it towards you, press it down and sit with it.” Sit with it past the point of discomfort and pain and dispair until you can observe it without blinking, until its weight is just another thing about about you. In a way, “letting in” is too passive. What I’m talking about is fitting a hyperobject into your heart without it breaking.

A conversation about hope and despair as the effects of climate change bear down upon us.

But what if samādhi was a relief?

My tastebuds had been longing for something, and I couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

A short celebration of the humble clove.

What kind of creatures are we? And how should we relate to each-other?

Matt joins his friend Sam to talk about an article he wrote on depression and politics.

… consciousness exists dependent on duality

Consciousness arises from the dyad of the interior sense organ with its corresponding exterior sense stimulus. Both are conditioned, impermanent, and falling apart.

What others say is happiness
the noble ones say is suffering.
What others say is suffering
the noble ones know as happiness.

… consciousness exists dependent on duality

… what now is feeling?

A mendicant asks the Buddha to explain how feelings relate to the four noble truths.

… even an arahant can be “vexed”

… exactly what are we talking about when we’re talking about “our feelings”

Sometimes I get a little bit Genghis Khan

I have no head to hang in grief
But there’s no hope for me
I’ve been set free
There’s no breeze
No ship on my sea

Phil Elverum explains how his unusual recording technique led to this one-of-a-kind break-up song.

[an] investigation into the notion of citta and the related concepts cetas and cetanā

You don’t care for someone because you love them, you love them because you care

A far-reaching conversation about childhood.

If a bhikkhu seeks delight in [the senses], welcomes them, and remains holding to them, he is called a bhikkhu who has swallowed Mara’s hook. He has met with calamity and disaster, and the Evil One can do with him as he wishes.

Sense pleasures are like a baited hook.