This fascination began, I believe, when I was a freshman in college; a required class was "The History of Ideas", which explained that history is not made from 'fact', it's made from people who interpret facts and therefore do some type of action due to this interpretation. (Example: WWI was not simply about a monarch being killed by a bullet. It's about how his people interpreted the killing, and why they wanted to fight back). Different interpretations may bring about different actions which bring different results.
In a nutshell, this means that life is subjective... if you understand this, you are halfway to peace. This was a revelation to me, and I think I became a closet anthropologist on the spot.
Of course, I can make so many different connections to spiritual life, how our pasts affect us (our "baggage", some might say), how mainstream education affects us, and also peer pressure. But I'll leave this to a different story.
Right now, I'm more interested in a story from the Boston Globe about how having emotions affects how we make decisions. It seems that if people have altered emotions from injury or brain chemistry, they often make risky decisions:
"In 2004, Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene used brain imaging to demonstrate that our emotions play an essential role in ordinary moral decision-making. Whenever we contemplate hurting someone else, our brain automatically generates a negative emotion. This visceral signal discourages violence. Greene's data builds on evidence suggesting that psychopaths suffer from a severe emotional disorder -- that they can't think properly because they can't feel properly. "This lack of emotion is what causes the dangerous behavior," said James Blair, a cognitive psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health."This is fascinating because of one important reason: emotions are our feedback loop. Buddhism and other compassionate spiritual traditions use compassion to "put yourself in someone else's shoes" to understand even a modicum of what the other person is feeling.
How does this relate to "The History of Ideas"? History is made of actions, which is made from decisions - which were based on ideas. Ideas are inspired by feelings - or even lack of feelings. I daresay that the world most renown mass-murderers (Pol Pot, Hitler, etc) may have had 'ideas' about why they created mass genocide - but before their ideas, they certainly had a lack of compassionate emotions which would allow them to feel the pain of death for millions of people.
The next time you have a thought about an action - ask your feelings what they are telling you. They may be telling you to make a new, better thought.
