So in early Buddhist teaching, the treatment of emotions was very rigidly dualistic.

There was good emotions and they were unskillful emotions.

Kusla emotions were things like joy, happiness,

suka, kindness, and goodwill, Meta, Compassion, Karuna, Tranquility, Passati.

And those were characteristics that were again and again and again reified as goals and states that would inevitably

arise if you practiced well and very much your spiritual journey would be measured in terms of how often you felt those esteemed emotional states.

On the other hand, if you experience fear, via, anger, coda, lust, raga, sadness, or grief,

soka, jealousy, ESA, an ill will by a pota.

Guess what?

You weren't doing very well.

In fact, you were failing.

And with these characteristics, unlike the positive emotions, so to overcome lust, which is raga, that's V-raga, and that's a state of very high acclaim.

So if you don't feel lust, if you don't feel anger, if you don't feel fear, you are in early Buddhism you are doing very, very well.

And so the goal was to make emotions subservants

and to create a sense of control over our emotional activations, a cool, dry, a kind of state where we experience either joy or calm all the time and that if we experience

the agitations of lust or fear or anger or sadness or grief, we are somehow doing something wrong.

Well, all this would possibly be tenable were not for the fact that 20 years ago a group of now famous acclaimed neuroscientists started reporting their research into what's known as

affect neuroscience.

AFFAC means your emotional state, the emotional state of the science.

Affect means your emotional state, the emotional state of the mind.

Now, the first famous book that came about around 20 years ago

was a book called The Kart's Error

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