Uploaded September 2019 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Buddhist psychology helps us distinguish two critical aspects of feeling. The first and most essential quality is called the primary feeling. According to this perspective, every moment of our sense experience has a feeling tone. Like valence in chemistry, each sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, or thought will have either a pleasant, painful, or neutral quality. Modern neuroscience confirms that everything that registers in the brain is assigned some negative or positive valence.The primary feeling tone comes first. Then, born out of this simple feeling tone, there arises a whole array of secondary feelings, all the emotions we are familiar with, from joy and anger to fear and delight.

The stream of primary feelings is always with us, but we often have the mistaken notion that life is not supposed to be this way. We may believe that if we can act just right, then our stream of feelings will always be pleasant and there will be no pain, no loss. So when a painful experience arises we often try to get rid of it, and when a pleasant experience arises we try to grasp it. When a neutral experience arises we tend to ignore it. We’re always wanting the right (pleasant) feelings and trying to avoid the wrong (painful) ones. And when they are unpleasant we react endlessly, struggling to get it right.

As we become wiser we realize that fixing the flow of feelings doesn’t work. Primary feelings are simply feelings, and every day consists of thousands of pleasant, painful, and neutral moments. They are the stream of life. Wisdom knows what feelings are present without being lost in them.