WhyBuddhismIsTrue

• Read it again, Really made a big impact on me the first time. This reading did not make as strong an impression.
• Book talks about some of the the extraordinary – radical – claims Buddhism makes that could revolutionize your view of yourself and the world.
• Dont try to use what you learn form Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are" The Dalai Lama

• Evolutionary Psychology is the study of how the brain was designed by natural selection to mislead us, even enslave us. Our brains are designed to get our genes into the next generation, not to give us a true view of reality. We are, metaphorically speaking, living in the Matrix.

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• One of the Buddha's main insights was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly, and we spend our time looking to gratify the next thing.
• Natural selection doesn't want us to be happy/content. It wants us to be productive. We are wired with a strong response to the anticipation of pleasure and but the actual pleasure itself is not very long lasting.
• If you want to liberate yourself from the parts of your mind that keep you from realizing true happiness, you first have to become aware of them (this can be unpleasant)
• To live mindfully is to be aware of whats happening here and now and to experience it in a clear, direct way, unclouded by mental obfuscations.
• The problems that meditation can help you overcome make it hard to meditate in the first place.
• The point of focusing on the breath is to settle the mind, free it from its normal preoccupations so you can observe what is happening in a clear, unhurried, less reactive way.
• The two fundamental Buddhist ideas – not-self and emptiness – imply the radical proposition: the world inside you and the world outside of you is in no way what it seems. This book is an exploration of these two ideas. And makes the claim that they both make a lot of sense. Failing to see this truth leads to a lot of suffering, meditation can help us see clearly.

• Feelings are used to shape our preconceptions but they are not reliable guides. They arose as proxies for evolutionary thinking, they are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment. We should consider them "true" if they encode accurate judgments, "false" if they tend to lead the organism astray. Feelings were designed by natural selection in a specific environment that was very different from that in which we live today. (No junk food, rush hour traffic etc.) Our feelings can become "false" in the modern environment, they used to serve us well, but now dont. The extent to which meditation frees us from this "false" feeling it is dispelling a harmful illusion

  Natural selection wants you to experience things as good or bad. However the less you judge things, the clearer you can see them.

• The "snake illusion" (thinking you see a snake instead of a tree branch on the ground) is not an environmental mismatch. It was designed by natural selection to be reliably false, better have many false positives than one false negative. This highlights the fact that Natural selection did not design our minds to see the world clearly.
• the cost of survival of the linage may be a lifetime of discomfort

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• As you get better at focusing on your breath you suppress activity of the default mode network.
• Mindfulness meditation is good training for recognizing your feelings as they arise in real life. This can allow you space to become less reactive. It can also make you more attuned to beauty.
• Meditation can also ultimately transform your view of what "out there" as well as whats "in here"
• Three marks of existence (Vipasana)
  • impermanence
  • The existence of Dukka
  • Not self"
• "To understand not-self you need to meditate" Ajahn Chah
• Liberation consists of changing the relationship between your consciousness and the things you normally think of as its contents (feeling, thoughts ect). Once you realize that these things are not you (not-self) you can evaluate them instead of automatically inhabit them.
• We tend to associate "our-self" with control and persistence through time. However on closer inspection we are not under much control, and have a less fixed identity that we thought.

• Why would natural selection delude us into thinking we are stable and in rational control? IF we are honestly deluded about it, it will be easier to convince other people that its true, and that has major advantages. So whenever your actual motivation are not accessible to the conscious part of the brain, it makes sense to make up stories about them (this has been born out by psychology research). The self is like the public relations organ of the brain.

  WhoWeAre

• The mind is "modular" and your behavior is an interplay among many modules competing for precedence. (Note makes sense to build a brain this way from evolution's POV, so it can be built up piece by piece.) "Thoughts think themselves". It seems to actually be feelings that determine which module "gets run". The feelings seem to be playing the role of the self-the-decider. This makes it plausible that losing attachment to feelings lessens the concept of self.

  Buddhist thought and modern psychology have converged on this point: there is no one self, no conscious CEO running the show. Rather there are a series of "selves" trying to seize control.

  Consciousness doesn't create thoughts, it receives them.

• Thoughts almost always have a feeling tone: positive or negative. If they didn't, they wouldn't have got your attention in the first place.
• Essences dont exist independent of human perception.

• To perceive "emptiness" is to see the raw data of something without constructing the theory of essence that we normally do. We give things labels as a short cut.

  There is no way of perceiving the world that doesn't involve carving it conceptually into pieces.

• We build stories on top of stories about the way things are. Meditation is a tool for examining our stories to separate truth from fiction.
• Lots of information impinges on the brain, and the brain decides (tells a story) about which of it is a part of "myself" and which is not. We then tend to take it for granted that these decision have deep metaphysical truth.

• Meditation is:

  • looking within and asking "Wait, are these things really an inherent part of me?"
  • looking at the outside world and asking "Wait, in what sense are these things not a part of me?"

  Buddhism

• It is in the space between feeling and craving that the battle for freedom is fought.
• Everything in your environment is priming your feelings to get you to act. Your are trapped to respond reflexively unless you can pay attention to your feelings.
• What we call the self is in such constant causal interaction with the environment that it begins to raise doubts about whether it really exists independently.
• Meditation allows you to see the causal influence of the environment on your feelings and your feelings on your actions. By seeing this we can rewire our behavior and reprogram our responses. For 2k years Buddhism has been studying how the human mind is programmed to react to its environment. Now, with Darwin, we finally understand what did the programming.
• Amazing that the same path to relieve suffering leads you also to a clearer view of metaphysical and moral reality.