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

by Robert Wright

The Dalai Lama has said, “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.”

“nonattachment”). This is something that can happen again and again via meditation: accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness.

This question takes us into depths of Buddhist philosophy that aren’t often plumbed in popular accounts of meditation.

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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.

Does this Buddhist perspective, with its seemingly topsy-turvy conception of what’s real and what’s not,

That’s the question I’ll take up in the next chapter—and, indeed, in much of the rest of this book.

I was following it for only short stretches