Why Buddhism Is True: The Science And Philosophy Of Meditation And Enlightenment Quotes
"You are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch—a prison for your mind."
"Our evolved brains empower us in many ways, and they often bless us with a basically accurate view of reality."
"Our brains are designed to, among other things, delude us."
"The old Rolling Stones lyric 'I can’t get no satisfaction' is, according to Buddhism, the human condition."
"Pleasures and pains must have been evolved as the subjective accompaniment of processes which are respectively beneficial or injurious to the organism."
"The cost of survival of the lineage may be a lifetime of discomfort."
"Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them."
"If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right."
"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."
"There is too much interdependence among the eight factors for such linear progress."
"To understand that 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."
"Becoming enlightened, in the Buddhist sense of the term, would entail wholly ridding yourself of the twin illusions from which people tend to suffer."
"However ironic it sounds, grappling with the sense in which you don’t exist is a step toward putting you—or at least 'you'—in charge."
"The routine business of mindfulness—observing the world inside you and outside you with inordinate care—can lead to profound realizations about the nature of things."
"We think we’re better than average at not being biased in thinking that we’re better than average."
"The closer we look at the mind, the more it seems to consist of a lot of different players, sometimes collaborating but sometimes fighting for control."
"The key to letting go of a chunk or two of my self was to separate the act of observation from the act of evaluation."
"Feelings don’t just bring specific, fleeting illusions; they can usher in a whole mind-set and so alter for some time a range of perceptions and proclivities, for better or worse."
"In human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns running the show."
"One way to change the show is to change the role feelings play in everyday life."
"Mindfulness meditation, the main vehicle of Vipassana, is a good way to study the human mind."
"The conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them."
"The more fine-grained your examination, the more complete your acceptance of the feeling, the more its negative energy drains away."
"Perception is an active, not a passive, process, a process of constantly building models of the world."
"If you don’t feed a stray cat, it quits coming to your door."
"Everything meaningful about the world is something we impose on it."
"Essentialism—the tendency to attribute inner essences to things—is a human universal."
"The first step toward seeing through these feelings is seeing them in the first place—becoming aware of how pervasively and subtly feelings influence our thought and behavior."
"This history is invisible and intangible, and in most cases there is no test that can ever distinguish the special object from one that looks the same. But still, it gives us pleasure, and the duplicate would leave us cold."
"There’s some virtue in—temporarily, at least—confining the analysis to objects that are really, really special."
"These 'experiments' suggest that to see special items as having special essences is to have special feelings about them."
"The not-so-subtle way is to just ask people what they think of things."
"We are designed to judge things and to encode those judgments in feelings."
"Attractive young male? Less attractive but kind-looking young male? Young male who is intriguingly attractive but looks like he may be insufferably egotistical?"
"So Zajonc seems to have been right; human beings are automatic evaluators."
"From natural selection’s point of view, the whole point of perception is to process information that has relevance to the organism’s Darwinian interests."
"And feelings infuse things with essence."
"If the story behind a tape measure is that it belonged to JFK, that implies a different feeling—and a different essence—than the story that the tape measure belongs to a plumber."
"There’s one other thing that essence seems to be intertwined with: stories."
"The fact that pleasure is shaped by our sense of essence, and thus by the stories we tell and the beliefs we hold, suggests to Bloom that our pleasures are, in a sense, more profound than we may realize."
"Sometimes I think there are two different ways that 'essence' can impede clear perception."
"But there’s no way of perceiving the world that doesn’t involve carving it conceptually into pieces."
"It’s not too surprising; disease is pretty horrible, and sunshine is pretty glorious."
"But there are also parts of the brain that play a role in pleasure and weren’t influenced by the wine’s price tag."
"So it stands to reason that we would possess specialized mental machinery for sizing people up and then assigning them an essence."
"That way we’ll see them as possessing the essence—good or bad—that it’s most in our interest to see them possessing."
"One minute you see a certain essence in something and you want to kill it, and the next minute the essence has vanished and you don’t want to kill it."
"But if things do merit further appraisal, the appraisal will ultimately be reflected in this woman’s feeling."
"But there is also what you could call the exterior not-self experience."
"Why would someone want to harm themself? In that sense, I don’t think there would be, because it’s like, why would you cut off your right hand?"
"It’s hard to reconstruct this experience, but I think this sense of revelation had been implicit in my tears. What I know for sure is that the tears were in part tears of gratitude, and that the sense of liberation was massive."
"I’m not much of a crier, but I started crying. I tried to do it quietly, but I did it fully."
"The more you focus on the objective fact—on the feeling itself and its instantiation in your body—the less unpleasantness you may feel."
"The main thing is to make net progress over time, inevitable backsliding notwithstanding."
"Thinking about enlightenment and liberation this way helps drive home how subtle the relationship between truth and freedom can be."
"If, during my morning meditation, I’m tuned in to those three components of my refrigerator’s hum, or for that matter if I’m observing my breath, or some feeling, with great clarity, it means my mind is calm—not just because if my mind weren’t calm, I couldn’t see these things so clearly, but also because getting absorbed in the clarity helps calm my mind."
"As much as I had resisted entreaties to quit beating myself up, as much as I had minimized the toll it took on me, the prospect of living without this self-torture now seemed powerfully appealing."
"I had reached a high spiritual plane, and I had found a technique—meditation—that could get me there again and again."
"Your meditation sessions don’t have to be all that long before it becomes obvious that stress reduction can be more interesting than it sounds."
"I think the salvation of the world can be secured via the cultivation of calm, clear minds and the wisdom they allow."
"I’m not saying I never again realized states of intense bliss when meditating. There have been times on retreat when I could precisely control the flow of bliss entering my being, opening up the spigot or, if I felt a need to pace myself, shutting it off for a minute or two before opening it back up."
"I don’t want to make this sound easy. Though incremental enlightenment and incremental liberation can gather momentum via mutual assistance, it’s not as if they’re automatically self-sustaining."
"I’m not sure what to call the revolution—maybe the Metacognitive Revolution, since it will involve stepping back and becoming more aware of how our minds work."