I recently finished reading Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment by Robert Wright and enjoyed it very much.
I appreciated how Wright connected ancient Buddhist concepts to modern psychology. His deconstruction of complex topics like essence and nothingness are well done and allow Western readers to connect to them easier. I would highly recommend this book if you are curious about meditation and the overall approach to mindfulness.
I’m trying something new, and sharing my highlighted passages from the book.
1. Taking the Red Pill
Page 8
Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.
Page 12
To live mindfully is to pay attention to, to be “mindful of” what’s
happening in the here and now and to experience it in a clear, direct
way, unclouded by various mental obfuscations. Stop and smell the
roses.
Page 14
Buddhism offers an explicit diagnosis of the problem and a cure. And
the cure, when it works, brings not just happiness but clarity of
vision: the actual truth about things, or at least something way, way
closer to that than our everyday view of them.
2. Paradoxes of Meditation
Page 18
Technologies of distraction have made attention deficits more common.
And there’s something about the modern environment — something
technological or cultural or political or all of the above — that
seems conducive to harsh judgment and ready rage.
Page 21
This is something that can happen again and again via meditation:
accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a
critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the
unpleasantness.
3. When Are Feelings Illusions?
Page 29
Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our
environment.
Page 33
This is a reminder that natural selection didn’t design your mind to
see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and
beliefs that would help take care of your genes.
Page 40
cognitive-behavioral therapy is very much in the spirit of mindfulness
meditation. Both in some sense question the validity of feelings. It’s
just that with cognitive-behavioral therapy, the questioning is more
literal.
4. Bliss, Ecstasy, and More Important Reasons to Meditate
Page 57
Noticing that your mind is wandering doesn’t seem like a very profound
insight; and in fact it isn’t one, notwithstanding my teacher’s kind
insistence on giving it a standing ovation. But it’s not without
significance. What I was saying in that session with my teacher was
that I — that is, my “self,” the thing I had thought was in control
— don’t readily control the most fundamental aspect of my mental
life: what I’m thinking about.
5. The Alleged Nonexistence of Your Self
Page 62
But, he notes, our bodies do lead to affliction, and we can’t
magically change that by saying “May my form be thus.” So form — the
stuff the human body is made of — isn’t really under our control.
Therefore, says the Buddha, it must be the case that “form is
not-self.” We are not our bodies.
Page 63
So two of the properties commonly associated with a self—control and
persistence through time — are found to be absent, not evident in
any of the five components that seem to constitute human beings.
Page 71
But once I followed that logic — quit seeing these things I couldn’t
control as part of my self — I was liberated from them and, in a
certain sense, back in control. Or maybe it would be better to put it
this way: my lack of control over them ceased to be a problem.
7. The Mental Modules That Run Your Life
Page 96
Feelings aren’t just little parts of the thing you had thought of as
the self; they are closer to its core; they are doing what you had
thought “you” were doing: calling the shots.
Page 103
Feelings don’t just bring specific, fleeting illusions; they can usher
in a whole mind-set and so alter for some time a range of perceptions
and proclivities, for better or worse.
Page 104
If the way they seize control of the show is through feelings, it
stands to reason that one way to change the show is to change the role
feelings play in everyday life.
8. How Thoughts Think Themselves
Page 105
Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for
psychologists.
Page 111
thoughts, which we normally think of as emanating from the conscious
self, are actually directed toward what we think of as the conscious
self, after which we embrace the thoughts as belonging to that self.
Page 115
And I don’t mean just focus on whatever thought is distracting you —
I mean see if you can detect some feeling that is linked to the
thought that is distracting you.
9. “Self” Control
Page 135
The more you do that, the less the urge seems a part of you; you’ve
exploited the basic irony of mindfulness meditation: getting close
enough to feelings to take a good look at them winds up giving you a
kind of critical distance from them. Their grip on you loosens; if it
loosens enough, they’re no longer a part of you.
Page 135
RAIN. First you Recognize the feeling. Then you Accept the feeling
(rather than try to drive it away). Then you Investigate the feeling
and its relationship to your body. Finally, the N stands for
Nonidentification, or, equivalently, Nonattachment.
Page 143
As you ponder these words—formlessness and emptiness—two other
words may come to mind: crazy and depressing.
Page 144
There is a pretty uncontroversial sense in which, when we apprehend
the world out there, we’re not really apprehending the world out there
but rather are “constructing” it.
11. The Upside of Emptiness
Page 166
But you could look at it the other way around. Given that our
experience of a bottle of wine can be influenced by slapping a fake
label on it, you might say that, actually, there is a superficiality
to our pleasure, and that a deeper pleasure would come if we could
somehow taste the wine itself, unencumbered by beliefs about it that
may or may not be true. That is closer to the Buddhist view of the
matter.
Page 169
And maybe this helps explain how Weber could say that “emptiness” is
actually “full”: sometimes not seeing essence lets you get drawn into
the richness of things.
12. A Weedless World
Page 176
For example, it’s common to think of criminals and clergy as being two
fundamentally different kinds of people. But Ross and fellow
psychologist Richard Nisbett have suggested that we rethink this
intuition. As they put it: “Clerics and criminals rarely face an
identical or equivalent set of situational challenges. Rather, they
place themselves, and are placed by others, in situations that differ
precisely in ways that induce clergy to look, act, feel, and think
rather consistently like clergy and that induce criminals to look,
act, feel, and think like criminals.”
Page 185
There is a meditative technique specifically designed to blur this
line. It is called loving-kindness meditation, or, to use the ancient
Pali word for loving-kindness, metta meditation.
14. Nirvana in a Nutshell
Page 219
These two senses of liberation are reflected in the Buddhist idea that
there are two kinds of nirvana. As soon as you are liberated in the
here and now, you enter a nirvana you can enjoy for the rest of your
life. Then, after death — which will be your final death, now that
you’re liberated from the cycle of rebirth — a second kind of
nirvana will apply.
15. Is Enlightenment Enlightening?
Page 232
The experience of emptiness, like the experience of not-self, defies
and denies natural selection’s nonsensical assertion that each of us
is more important than the rest of us.
Page 232
Emptiness, you may recall, is, roughly speaking, the idea that things
don’t have essence. And the perception of essence seems to revolve,
however subtly, around feelings; the essence of anything is shaped by
the feeling it evokes. It is when things don’t evoke much in the way
of feelings—when our normal affective reaction to things is
subdued—that we see these things as “empty” or “formless.”
Page 236
What happens to essence when we let go of our particular
perspective—the perspective that the feelings that shape the
perceived essences of things were designed to serve?
I think the answer is that essence disappears.
Page 238
That’s the thing about feelings, a thing that is particularly true
when we talk about their role in shaping essence: they can render
judgment so subtly that we don’t realize that it’s the feelings that
are rendering the judgment; we think the judgment is objective.
16. Meditation and the Unseen Order
Page 252
And here is an interesting feature of a calm mind: if some issue in my
life bubbles up, I’m likely to conceive of it with uncharacteristic
wisdom.
Page 254
It isn’t just that you feel a little more relaxed by the end of a
meditation session; it’s that you observe your anxiety, or your fear,
or your hatred, or whatever, so mindfully that for a moment you see it
as not being part of you.
Page 264
In case all this sounds too abstractly philosophical, let me try to
put it in more practical form, as the answer to this oft-asked
question: Will meditation make me happier? And, if so, how much
happier?
Well, in my case—and, as you will recall, I’m a particularly hard
case—the answer is yes, it’s made me a little happier. That’s good,
because I’m in favor of happiness, especially my own. At the same
time, the argument I’d make to people about why they should meditate
is less about the quantity of happiness than about the quality of the
happiness. The happiness I now have involves, on balance, a truer view
of the world than the happiness I had before. And a boost in happiness
that rests on truth, I would argue, is better than a boost in
happiness that doesn’t—not just because things that rest on truth
have a more secure footing than things that don’t, but because, as it
happens, acting in accordance with this truth means behaving better
toward your fellow beings.
Page 264
This is a happiness that is based on a multifaceted clarity—on a
truer view of the world, a truer view of other people, a truer view of
yourself, and, I believe, a closer approximation to moral truth. It is
this fortunate convergence of happiness, truth, and goodness that is
embedded in the word dharma
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