More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
There’s a difference between thinking of the goal as strengthening the self-discipline muscle and thinking of the goal as weakening a module that has grown dominant.
Judson Brewer,
You just calmly (or as calmly as possible, under the circumstances) examine the feeling. What part of your body is the urge felt in? What is the texture of the urge? Is it sharp? Dull and heavy? 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.
RAIN.
But if you take the mindful approach, you say: Go ahead, think about smartphones. Close your eyes and imagine how it would feel to search for the latest review of the latest smartphone. Examine the feeling of wanting a cool new smartphone and wanting to search online for one. Then examine it some more. Examine it until it loses its power. Now get back to writing! Though we don’t generally think of nicotine
corroborated
extolling
our minds try to turn even the most ambiguous patterns into something that makes sense. We like to have a story about what things are and what they mean.
I don’t go out and bother the sound, it’s not going to bother me.”
To perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we’re naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence.
“So the idea is that everything meaningful about the world is something we impose on it?”
Deeply embedded in Buddhist thought is the intrinsic moral value of sentient life—not just the value of human beings but the value of all organisms that have subjective experience and so are capable of pain and pleasure, of suffering and not suffering. And this value in turn imparts value to other things, such as helping people, being kind to dogs, and so on. Moral meaning is, in that sense, inherent in life.
it is something we impose on reality, a story we tell about reality.
relic
stark
dialing down of the affective reaction to things is what leads to the experience of emptiness. Rodney had been trying to explain to me
dampening of feelings is the clarity of
that the stories we tell about things, and thus the beliefs we have about their history and their nature, shape our experience of them, and thus our sense of their essence.
That’s what the fundamental attribution error is: I attribute their behavior to disposition, not situation; I locate the badness in them, not in environmental factors.
dispositional, properties.
disposition.
the tendency to overestimate the role of disposition and underestimate the role of situation—isn’t quite as simple as psychologists originally thought. Sometimes we actually downplay the role of disposition and amplify the role of situation. There are two kinds of cases in which we tend to do this: (1) if an enemy or rival does something good, we’re inclined to attribute it to circumstance—he’s just giving money to the beggar to impress a woman who happens to be standing there; (2) if a close friend or ally
Out of all the occurrences going on in the environment, a person selects those that have some significance for him from his own egocentric position in the total matrix.”
“domain-specific psychological mechanisms.”
enthralling
And I think this was the key: breaking down the old essence-of-Larry allowed me to then conceive a new version of Larry that was closer to the truth.
Sufi
one virtue of mindfulness meditation is that experiencing your feelings with care and clarity, rather than following them reflexively and uncritically, lets you choose which ones to follow—like, say, joy, delight, and love.
connotations
The great American psychologist William James wrote, “Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw.” In that sense, he observed, “our immediate family is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone.”
Analytical Buddhism,
tanha, a word usually translated as “thirst” or “craving” and sometimes as “desire.” To put a finer point on it, the
arduous.
Buddhism Without Beliefs, has
tenor
You could say that enlightenment in the Buddhist sense has something in common with enlightenment in the Western scientific sense: it involves becoming more aware of what causes what.
vantage
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?
instilled
parochial
like: the view that carries none of my selfish biases, or yours, and that in a certain sense isn’t even a particularly human perspective, or the perspective of any other species.
Buddhist enlightenment is about transcending all these perspectives.
sentient
view from nowhere, point of view of the universe—the upshot is the same: our ordinary point of view, the one we’re naturally endowed with, is seriously misleading.
advent
presupposed
exaltation
unwarped,
digress.
intracranial
