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

by Robert Wright

no way to get lots of genes into the next generation! 3. The animal’s brain should focus more on (1), the fact that pleasure will accompany the reaching of a goal, than on (2), the fact that the pleasure will dissipate shortly thereafter. After all, if you focus on (1), you’ll pursue things like food and sex and social status with unalloyed gusto, whereas if you focus on (2), you could start feeling ambivalence. You might, for example, start asking what the point is of so fiercely pursuing pleasure if the pleasure will wear off shortly after you get it and leave you hungering for more. Before you know it, you’ll be full of ennui and wishing you’d majored in philosophy.

Addiction it seems like a zero sum gain and or game that creates a negative feedback loop that can be conditioned.

“Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.”

What he meant is that if you want to liberate yourself from the parts of the mind that keep you from realizing true happiness, you have to first become aware of them, which can be unpleasant.

This sort of readjustment of attention, by the way, is a perfectly fine thing to do. In mindfulness meditation as it’s typically taught, the point of focusing on your breath isn’t just to focus on your breath. It’s to stabilize your mind, to free it of its normal preoccupations so you can observe things that are happening in a clear, unhurried, less reactive way. And “things that are happening” emphatically includes things happening inside your mind. Feelings arise within you—sadness, anxiety, annoyance, relief, joy—and you try to experience them from a different vantage point than is usual, neither clinging to the good feelings nor running away from the bad ones, but rather just experiencing them straightforwardly and observing them. This altered perspective can be the beginning of a fundamental and enduring change in your relationship to your feelings; you can, if all goes well, cease to be their slave.

It was a very strange thing to have an unpleasant feeling cease to be unpleasant without really going away.

Was the initial unpleasantness in any sense an illusion? Certainly, by adopting another perspective, I made it disappear—and that’s something that’s often true of what we call illusions: shifting your perspective dispels them. But are there any additional grounds for thinking of it as an illusion?

Challenge negative patterns through awareness

Taking the red pill means asking basic questions about the relationship of the perceiver to the perceived and examining the underpinnings of our normal view of reality.

The matrix

How does delusion make us suffer? How does it make us make other people suffer?

A good question to ponder

Feelings play a very big role in shaping our perceptions and guiding us through life—bigger than most people realize. Are they reliable guides? That’s a question we’ll start to examine in the next chapter.

Part of behavioral theory and cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on emotions and redirecting our awareness to the intersection between feeling and our behaviors by redirecting thoughts once we are aware of even a piece of the puzzle.

Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment.

Probable

“If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right.”

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.

I agree

“We wouldn’t spend so much time worrying about what other people think of us if we realized how seldom they do.”

I am am too paranoid to think too much differently but hopefully

If you accept the idea that many of our most troublesome feelings are in one sense or another illusions, then meditation can be seen as, among other things, a process of dispelling illusions.