Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

by Rick Hanson

positive well-being, psychological growth, and spiritual practice.

your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That. Although your true nature may be hidden momentarily by stress and worry, anger and unfulfilled longings, it still continues to exist.

#amen

I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness. —Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”

See yourself for who you are.

The wolf of love sees a vast horizon, with all beings included in the circle of “us.” That circle shrinks down for the wolf of hate, so that only the nation, or tribe, or friends and family—or, in the extreme, only the individual self—is held as “us,” surrounded by threatening masses of “them.”

Oh my, how this makes me think of current times.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each [person’s] life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm any hostility. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#amen

Resentment is when I take poison and wait for you to die.

#amen

As a person goes deeper into meditation, there appears to be both a spreading and a strengthening of gamma wave activity, which presumably underlies the experience of a growing spaciousness and stability of awareness.