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book I had written a few years earlier, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life.
One of the Buddha’s main messages was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly and leave us thirsting for more.
Reflect on the fact that our lust for doughnuts and other sweet things is a kind of illusion—that the lust implicitly promises more enduring pleasure than will result from succumbing to it, while blinding us to the letdown that may ensue.
consider this tribalism the biggest problem of our time. I think it could undo millennia of movement toward global integration, unravel the social web just when technology has brought the prospect of a cohesive planetary community within reach.
The inviting warmth of a campfire on a freezing night means that staying warm is better for us than freezing.
I had been experimenting with a modified version of the standard focus-on-your-breath technique. I was focusing on my breath during the inhale but on sounds during the exhale.
less time pointlessly resenting indignities inflicted on you;
A single bite of salad—chewed slowly, savored not just for flavor but for texture—could bring fifteen seconds of near bliss.
This discourse—the Buddha’s discourse on engagement—suggests an appealingly simple model: liberation consists of changing the relationship between your consciousness and the things you normally think of as its “contents”—your feelings, your thoughts, and so on.
“Look, if there’s part of you that isn’t under your control and therefore makes you suffer, then do yourself a favor and quit identifying with it!”
Think of yourself as having, in principle, the power to establish a different relationship with your feelings and thoughts and impulses and perceptions—the power to disengage from some of them; the power to, in a sense, disown them, to define the bounds of your self in a way that excludes them.
Still, at a minimum it seems fair to say that the role of our conscious selves in guiding behavior is not nearly as big as was long thought. And the reason this role was exaggerated is that the conscious mind feels so powerful; in other words, the conscious mind is naturally deluded about its own nature.
Now we’re in a position to go further and see that observing your mind in this unruly stage—trying to watch it as the default mode network rages on—can do more than suggest that the conscious “you” isn’t running the show; it can shed light on what is running the show, revealing a picture of the mind strikingly consistent with the modular model.
He seemed to be saying that 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.
the main point these meditation teachers are making is the same as the upshot of the modular-mind model: the conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them.
I mean see if you can detect some feeling that is linked to the thought that is distracting you.
And in both cases, we can, in principle, weaken the impulse by not fighting it, by letting it form and observing it carefully. This deprives the module that generated the impulse of the positive reinforcement that would give it more power next time around.
The key is to meet the abrasiveness head-on—to, in a sense, examine the abrasions. You pay attention to the discomfort the noises create. Where in your body does annoyance or even revulsion reside? What is the texture of the feeling? The more fine-grained your examination, the more complete your acceptance of the feeling, the more its negative energy drains away.
“So the idea is that everything meaningful about the world is something we impose on it?” She answered, “Exactly.”
Making real progress in mindfulness meditation almost inevitably means becoming more aware of the mechanics by which your feelings, if left to their own devices, shape your perceptions, thoughts, and behavior—and becoming more aware of the things in your environment that activate those feelings in the first place.
