Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

by Robert Wright

Once I place these people on the other side of a critical ideological boundary, I can have trouble thinking generous and sympathetic thoughts about them.

a core paradox of Buddhist meditation practice: accepting that your self isn’t in control, and may in some sense not even exist, can put your self—or something like it—in control. This time-discounting experiment

two fundamental parts of Buddhism: the idea of nonattachment to feelings and the idea of not-self.

There’s an acronym used to describe this technique: 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. Which is a nice note to end on, since not being attached to things was the Buddha’s all-purpose prescription for what ails us.

Don’t get hung up on whether something called a “self” exists. Just use the parts of the not-self doctrine that are useful, in particular the idea that none of your feelings—the urge for cigarettes, the urge to research smartphones, the urge to hate—is intrinsically a part of you.

You can observe these feelings for what they are: things that some module is trying to give force to. The more you observe them this way—observe them mindfully—the less force they will have, and the less a part of “you” they will be.

Mindfulness meditation is, among other things, an attempt to give the calm passions more power and give the violent passions less power.

He wrote that if we fail to empower the calm passions—if we let the violent passions carry the day—we will miss “the relish in the common occurrences of life.”

realization: “The sound is just the sound.