Evolution uses sensations of pleasant or unpleasant (vedanā), which arise in response to our experience, to enforce our unconscious programming, our underlying tendencies. This is a key mechanism of what Gotama would call kamma. Behaviors are reinforced, or not. Escaping this conditioned reacting is the major skill we need to become liberated. The evolutionary origins of how we experience the world are important to understand; something is not good simply because it is “natural”; evolution is a process, not an agent with either good or bad intent. It is simply part of the way things are. As traditional religions have lost their power to sustain belief in the supernatural, a tendency has arisen to find something else—science, material goods, technology—to fill this gap, to replace “the sacred,” as a way of dealing with the fear at the center of the human condition. Both our suffering & our salvation are more ordinary—if not simpler, in practice—than we like to admit.