A Human History of Emotion

and that’s mostly because of the dominance of English-language psychology journals.

According to these passages, God is deeply emotional.

one aspect of his story that is often overlooked is the fact that he successfully merged the way the Hebrews understood their feelings with the way the Greeks understood theirs.

Despite their superficial differences, there are many similarities between the ancient Greek and ancient Indian conceptions of emotion. Both see pleasure and pain as crucial. Both say that desire can be dangerous, and both believe that it must be controlled. Both suggest that thoughts and feelings are usually intertwined, as are actions and perceptions of the world. Of course, both these ancient views of emotion are quite different from the way we understand emotion today.

Avoiding sorrow by sticking to his path only seemed to cause more sorrow.

Is it possible to have control over your body, senses, feelings, thoughts, and consciousness?

After three days and nights under that tree, Gautama achieved that same childhood state of enlightenment: nirvana.

Artha is a desire for things; dharma is the desire to follow your path, regardless of things.

It contains, for example, advice on consolidating your power by predicting someone’s death just before that person is mysteriously executed—by you—thus proving that you can see into the future.

By the way, when I use the word desire, I also mean things that are found under that word in a thesaurus—need, want, appetite, longing, craving, yearning, wish, aspiring, hankering, and so on—partly because it stops me from unnecessarily overcomplicating things but mostly because people throughout history didn’t often differentiate between their desires and needs, either.