Modern psychology is largely about what macro things lead to a happy life, but actually high valence comes from the stopping of subtle nearly-invisible mental movements (like tanha). Psychology is pre it’s equivalent of germ theory. The field should look more like microbiology
This doesn’t mean macro and micro don’t interact of course. In the germ theory case, washing your hands (a macro behavior) reduces the rate of infection. But without germ theory, you don’t know why it’s doing that. The reason it works is it kills nearly-invisible tiny creatures
Similarly socializing, avoiding physical pain where you can, meditating and all the normal things psychologist suggest and such really do help lead to a better life. They lead to a reduction in the subtle attentional mechanisms that cause suffering
Both germ theory and micro-attentional understanding give you counterintuitive new tools. Even with perfect hygiene you’ll encounter billions of bacterium. Luckily we discovered anti-biopics which are a magical cure to nearly all bacterial infections and revolutionized medicine
Similarly, no matter your suffering-avoidance hygiene you’ll run into stress and suffering. Luckily bc we understand a necessary condition of suffering (tanha) and how to prevent it (equanimity & letting go) we have a cure, and in even the worst pain you can be happy and at peace
Today learning to avoid those micro-attentional movements takes decades of practice, even after your sensory clarity is good enough to see them. Seeing bacteria and killing them are two different types of thing
Luckily, neurotech and esp transcranial ultrasound are showing a lot of promise in inducing equanimity, causally lowers tanha and suffering. I think more people should be working on this, and I suspect more would if they realized suffering was one thing with specific causes
Today we invest all our resource into specific things we think cause suffering (eg specific diseases, stressors, etc) which is good and helpful but in a sense it’s all symptomatic. There’s only one demon (suffering) and we know how to kill it. If we work hard I think we’re close
appendix: I think the actual mechanism of valence is slightly more mathematically complicated, but tanha and dukkha are ~99% of the story so I think it’s reasonable to round them up to “the cause”. After we cure the 99% we can sort out those tiny other details later
there are also other intervention points in the causal mechanism of dukkha that you can interrupt the process than tanha. It’s just the one I prefer. You can knock out any causal link and it stops the process
as an idea of what lowering suffering 99% feels like, Shinzen Young talks about how he’d rather live a single day without fixation than an entire lifetime of normal levels of fixation. That’s a little stronger of a claim than his peers, but not much more. Happiness is logarithmic
antibiopics = antibiotics. Wish I could fix the various typos
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