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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.”
feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we’d often be better off.
the virtue of subjecting your feelings to investigation—inspecting them to see which ones deserve obedience and which ones don’t, and trying to free yourself from the grip of the ones that don’t.
staying in the present, though an inherent part of mindfulness meditation, isn’t the point of the exercise. It is the means to an end, not the end itself.
“You’re real. But you’re not really real.”
If you followed the Buddha’s guidance and abandoned the massive chunks of psychological landscape you’ve always thought of as belonging to you, you would undergo a breathtaking shift in what it means to be a human.
the whole question I’m raising is whether my skin is really as significant a boundary as we instinctively assume—whether it really makes sense to think of everything on the inside as me and everything on the outside as other.
the more interdependence and interconnection there is, the closer you are to oneness?
maybe some Abrahamic mystics—Christians, Jews, Muslims—who during contemplative practice feel a union with the divine are having somewhat the same experience as the Hindus and Buddhists, and interpreting it in a way that is closer to the Hindu than the Buddhist perspective.
basic view of religious beliefs is that the ultimate question isn’t their specific content, but rather: What kind of person do the beliefs make you? How do they lead you to behave?
if you let go of a particular desire, then you have disowned it, so that part of your self disappears.
the dharma is at once the truth about the way things are and the truth about how it makes sense to behave in light of the way things are.
