Tosh108

I don't think there's a big difference from what we do now. Right now we use our hands or speech combined with phone/glasses/watches/computer as tools to communicate with the internet/information. This technology would just cut out the middleman. It would create a lot of interesting opportunities and combined with VR would create extraordinary worlds.

Interesting to see that everyone here is so eager to assume that the article is right. The article might be right, but it's also just gossip.

You're right, if you don't give the emotion any energy it will not persist very long, simple but hard.

That's quiete a leap there. True, there were a lot of politics in Tibet, same for all the other buddhist countries. But to counter your point: anger is probably best surpressed if you want to easily dominate people.

Your sutra is from the theravada traditions. The vajrayana tradition is not recognized by the theravada tradition, the vajrayana does recognise the theravada sutra's, but in vajrayana there are a bit more tools for dealing with disturbing emotions. How that came to be is a discussion on it's own.

The method in your passage is recommended often as a last resort in these schools. So I'm not claiming you should let anger run it's free course, definitely not, better there are other ways of dealing with it.

There's a difference between discontent or frustration and hate & aversion. In buddhist view: hate and aversion will create enormously negative mindstates that will cause suffering to the person acting on this emotion. But the vajrayana schools (mainly tibet) also claim that there is clarity and energy in this emotion, and if it can be detached from ego it can be transformed to a positive "wisdom". I think this view encaptures the sentiment of both people here, anger can be positive, but also very negative.

My problem with this argument is there's an underlying assumption that the end of the day our basic core motive is selfish/egotistic, it might be so but many who use this assumption as a base of their arguments do not bother to prove it because believe that it is so.

What does believing in an emotion mean? Egotism is arguably no more real then altruism. If your "reward in the brain" statement is correct why is that egotism? If that reward system drives a father to kills himself for his child that's not very egotistic. Why in a biological system would the "self" be preferred above the larger picture? This is definitely not argued in evolutionary theory. In the end it's very much connected to our core motives for doing what we do, and surviving is not always on the top of that list.

The books by Frans de Waal about this topic are very interesting. He's a dutch ethologist, researching the social behaviour and emotions of animals, mainly primates I think.

Some of his quotes, source Wikipedia:

"To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us."

"In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that's why we like them so much, even though they're large carnivores."

It's interesting that we have such a hard time accepting the emotion of altruism both in humans and animals. The author of the articles states: "could just be revenge". Revenge is in many ways more senseless then altruism for evolutionary purposes (unless you directly attack killer whales that threaten you, but one could argue that that's a form of self-defence), but from our ego perspective it feels more intuitive, at least to the author. There are also comments in this thread that reflect this way of thinking.

Moved towards a similar approach. Now I finally have time to start a new project. Now the next step is: how to improve and structure the process of picking an idea. Any tips?

My screen is a bit too small and I can't see the complete picture. Makes me have to scroll back and forth to read the text and look at the image. For my screen I would have preferred gallery in this case.

Interesting. Derren Brown, English mentalist, describes in one of his books how he deliberately failes every now and then to make it more convincing there are pschycic abilities at play instead of a mechanic trick.

I agree. The idea of "wiring" of the brain is very old school. Would have been more interesting if the article (maybe the research did) asked how this wiring came to be: instinctive or nurture. Not a lot of our wiring is instinctive.

Further down the article there's an indirect reference:

“I would recommend that pregnant women and children eat organic fruits and vegetables and avoid using plastic containers and canned food, especially in the microwave, because containers are usually treated on the inside with substances and compounds that can leak into the tomato soup and may act as endocrine disruptors,” he said.