How can we make our way toward a happy ending in a universe in which even the cheerful, sunny souls can so easily see human suffering in all its varieties from the unavoidable to the preventable? There are many that already have the answer, in the form of either a deeply felt religious faith or a protective insulation against sorrow of any kind. But what about the others, those who have neither resource? The honest answer is, of course, that I do not know, and that it would be presumptuous to offer a prescription for the happy endings of anyone else's life. But I can offer a word about my own view. One path toward the happy ending I wish for comes from combining some features of Spinoza's contemplation with a more active stance aimed at the world around us. This path includes a life of the spirit that seeks understanding with enthusiasm and some sort of discipline as a source of joy—where understanding is derived from scientific knowledge, aesthetic experience or both. 

The practice of this life also assumes a combative attitude based on the belief that part of humanity's tragic condition can be alleviated, and that doing something about the human predicament is our responsibility. One benefit of scientific progress is the means to plan intelligent actions that can assuage suffering. Science can be combined with the best of  a humanist tradition to permit a new approach to human affairs and lead to human flourishing. 

To clarify this view let me begin by explaining what I mean by a life of the spirit. A friend of mine who follows the developments of biology with keen interest and is an equally avid seeker of the spiritual in life often asks me if the spirit can be defined and located in neurobiological terms. "What is the spirit?" "Where is it?" How can I answer? I must confess I do not favor the attempt to neurologize religious experiences, especially when the attempts take the form of identifying a brain center for God or justifying God and religion by finding their correlates in brain scans. 

Yet, spiritual experiences, religious or otherwise, are mental processes. They are biological processes of the highest level of complexity. They occur in the brain of a given organism in certain circumstances and there is no reason why we should shy away from describing those processes in neurobiological terms provided we are aware of the limitations of the exercise. So, here are the answers to my friend's questions. First, I assimilate the notion of spiritual to an intense experience of harmony, to the sense that the organism is functioning with the greatest possible perfection. The experience unfolds in association with the desire to act toward others with kindness and generosity. Thus to have a spiritual experience is to hold sustained feelings of a particular kind dominated by some variant of joy, however serene. 

The center of mass of the feelings I call spiritual is located at an intersection of experiences: Sheer beauty is one. The other is anticipation of actions conducted in "a temper of peace" and with "a preponderance of loving affections" (the quotations are James's but the concepts are Spinozian). The e experiences can reverberate and become self-sustaining for brief periods of time. Conceived in this manner, the spiritual is an index of the organizing scheme behind a life that is well-balanced, well-tempered, and well-intended. 

One might venture that perhaps the spiritual is a partial revelation of the ongoing impulse behind life in some state of perfection. If feelings, as I suggested earlier in the book, testify to the state of the life process, spiritual feelings dig beneath that testimony, deeper into the substance of living. They form the basis for an intuition of the life process.' 

Second, spiritual experiences are humanly nourishing. I believe that Spinoza was entirely on the mark in his view that joy and its variants lead to greater functional perfection. The current scientific knowledge regarding joy supports the notion that it should be actively sought because it does contribute to flourishing; likewise, that sorrow and related affects should be avoided because they are unhealthy. This entails the observance of a certain range of social norms—the recent evidence, presented in Chapter Four, that cooperative human behavior engages pleasure/reward systems in the brain supports this wisdom. Violation of social norms causes guilt or shame or grief, all of which are variants of unhealthy sorrow. Third, we have the power to evoke spiritual experiences. Prayer and rituals, in the context of a religious narrative, are meant to produce spiritual experiences but there are other sources. It is often said that the secularity and crass commercialism of our age have made the spiritual all the more difficult to attain, as if the means to induce the spiritual were missing or becoming scarce. I believe this is not entirely true. We live surrounded by stimuli capable of evoking spirituality, although their saliency and effectiveness are diminished by the clutter of our environments and a lack of systematic frameworks within which their action can be effective. The contemplation of nature, the reflection on scientific discovery, and the experience of great art can be, in the appropriate context, effective emotionally competent stimuli behind the spiritual. Thin k o f how listening to Bach, Mozart, Schubert, or Mahler can take us there, almost easily. This is an opportunity to generate positive emotions where negative emotions would otherwise 

It is clear, however, that the sort of spiritual experiences to which I a m alluding are not equivalent to a religion. They lack the framework, as a result of which they also lack the sweep and the grandeur that attracts so many human beings to organized religion. Ceremonial rites and shared assembly do create ranges of spiritual experience different from those of the private variety. Let us now turn to the delicate issue of "locating" the spiritual in the human organism. I do not believe that there is a brain center for spirituality in the good old phrenological tradition. But we can provide an account of how the process of arriving at a spiritual state may be carried out neurobiologically. Since the spiritual is a particular kind of feeling state, I see it as depending, neurally speaking, on the structures and operations outlined in Chapter Three , and especially on the network of somato-sensing brain regions. The spiritual is a particular state of the organism, a delicate combination of certain body configurations and certain mental configurations. Sustaining such states depends on a wealth of thoughts about the condition of the self and the condition of other selves, about past and future, about both concrete and abstract conceptions of our nature. By connecting spiritual experiences to the neurobiology of feelings, my purpose is not to reduce the sublime to the mechanic and by so doing reduce its dignity. The purpose is to suggest that the sublimity of the spiritual is embodied in the sublimity of biology and that we can begin to understand the process in biological terms. 

As for the results of the process, there is no need and no value to explaining them: The experience of the spiritual amply suffices. Accounting for the physiological process behind the spiritual does not explain the mystery of the life process to which that particular feeling is connected. It reveals the connection to the mystery but not the mystery itself. Spinoza and those thinkers whose ideas have Spinozian elements make feelings come full circle, from life in progress, which is where they originate, to the sources of life, toward which they point. I said the life of the spirit needs the complement of a combative stance. 

What does this mean? Seen in objective terms nature is neither cruel nor benign, but our practical view can be justifiably subjective and personal. O n that view modern biology is now revealing that nature is even more cruel and indifferent than we previously thought. While humans are equal opportunity victims of nature's casual, unpremeditated evil, we are not obliged to accept it without response. We can try to find means to counteract the seeming cruelty and indifference. Nature lacks a plan for human flourishing, but nature's humans are allowed to devise such a plan. A combative stance, more so perhaps than the noble illusion of Spinoza's blessedness, seems to hold the promise that we shall never feel alone as long as our concern is the well-being of others. And this is where I can answer the question posed at the beginning of the chapter: Knowing about emotion, feeling, and their workings does matter to how we live. At the personal level, this is quite certain. Within the next two decades, perhaps sooner, the neurobiology of emotion and feelings will allow biomedical science to develop effective treatments for pain and depression grounded on a sweeping understanding of how genes are expressed in particular brain regions and how these regions cooperate to make us emote and feel. The new treatments will aim at correcting specific impairments of a normal process rather than merely attacking symptoms in a general way. Combined with psychological interventions, the novel therapies will revolutionize mental health. 

The treatments available today will appear by then as gross and archaic as surgery without anesthesia appears to us now. At the level o f society the new knowledge is relevant as well. T h e relation between homeostasis and the governance of social and personal life discussed earlier should be helpful here. Some of the regulatory devices available to human s have been perfected through millions of years of biological evolution, as is the case of the appetites and emotions. Others have existed for just a few thousand years, as with the codified systems of justice and sociopolitical organization. Some are as good as they will ever get, set in genomic stone, not immutable to be sure, but as firm as biology can be. Some are a work in progress, a cauldron of tentative procedures aimed at the betterment of human affairs, but nowhere near the stability necessary to a harmonious life balance for all. And therein lies our opportunity to intervene and improve the human lot. I am not suggesting that we attempt to manage social affairs with the same efficiency with which our brain maintains the basics of life. It probably cannot be done. Our goals should be more realistic. Besides, the repeated failures of such past and present attempts make us justifiably prone to cynicism. In fact, the temptation to recoil from any concerted effort to manage human affairs and to announce the end of the future is a comprehensible attitude. But nothing can guarantee defeat more certainly than retreating into isolated self-preservation. Much as it may sound naive and Utopian , especially after reading the morning paper or watching the evening news, there simply is no alternative to believing we can make a difference. 

There are some grounds for holding that belief. For example, the managing of specific problems such as drug addiction and violence will have a greater chance of success if informed by a new scientific understanding of the human mind, including the very knowledge of life regulation that emerges from the science of emotion and feeling. The same is likely to apply to a broad range of social policies. No doubt the failure of past social engineering experiments is due, in some part, to the sheer folly of the plans or the corruption of their execution. But the failure also may have been due to the misconceptions of the human mind that informed the attempts. Among other negative consequences, the misconceptions resulted in a demand for human sacrifices that most humans find difficult or impossible to achieve; in an ignorant disregard for the aspects of biological regulation that are now becoming scientifically transparent and that Spinoza intuited in the conatus; and in a blindness to the dark side of social emotions that finds expression in tribalism, racism, tyranny, and religious fanaticism. But that is the past. Now we are forewarned, and entitled to a new beginning. I believe the new knowledge may change the human playing field. And this is why, all things considered, in the middle of much sorrow and some joy, we can have hope, an affect for which Spinoza, in all his bravery, did not have as much regard as we common mortals must. He defined it as follows: "Hope is nothing else but an inconstant joy, arising from the image of something future or past, whose outcome to some extent we doubt.