Reviews
A foundational & magisterial text; I would recommend this to all those who seek the benefits of meditation but who perhaps struggle with the metaphysical aspects, those curious about the mind and its myriad design quirks and cognitive distortions, and those open to finding parallels between science and philosophy (*ahem* Hofstadter *ahem* Gödel Escher Bach). Enjoyable, integrative, smile-inducing, not preachy, commendable in its goals and execution. Five stars.
Picked up the book from a recommendation by the author of "A guide to good life". The book is heavy on why human bodies and minds are unsuitable for today's environments and how Buddhist practices could help overcome our internal desires. Not so much about Buddhism. Had wrong expectations picking up the book.
This book wasn’t an easy read. It gets very philosophical, and even though I took notes there were many passages I had to read several times to make sense of them. In the end, I believe it does connect very well some aspects of secular Buddhism with western meditation. I bet this is one of those books where some concepts don’t struck in you until some time after, and even if that doesn’t happen I enjoyed the learnings that I take with me.
Not as good as his other books mainly because he is still new to awakening.
Excellently written, with the significant backing of evidence and reasoning for the assertions the author makes in the book. The author goes to great lengths to discount any bias he may have and provide an objective argument for the benefits of the more naturalistic parts of Buddhism. Highly recommend.
Informative, thoroughly researched, and great explanation of how humans are wired, and why mindfulness meditation & Buddhist concepts can help. Not 100% secular, as it goes into discussing Buddhist beliefs, but the author takes the stance of a skeptic researcher who will only grant value to a belief if it's reasonably backed by science and/or of strong value to humans. This book surprised me as to how well-researched it was and, more surprisingly, how entertaining it was for such a potentially dry topic. I'd definitely read it again.
The book is good at saying that mindfulness is good, and both Buddhist practices and modern science have ways to demonstrate or conceptualize all the benefits of it. You should meditate. So should I. Does that shows that Buddhism is true? No. Does it matter? After mindfully pondering that question, I decided that it doesn't make any difference to my life and I was tired of reading this book. I liked the book, but found myself tired and didn't read the last ~10% of the book or so.
It’s not about what the title say it is, but at the same time that’s the conclusion one arrives. Great practical book about “secular” Buddhism and evolutionary theory. Recommend to anyone wanting to start to get into Mindfulness Meditation.
I appreciated how Wright connected ancient Buddhist concepts to modern psychology. His deconstruction of complex topics like essence and nothingness are well done and allow Western readers to connect to them easier. I would highly recommend this book if you are curious about meditation and the overall approach to mindfulness. https://www.thingelstad.com/2018/02/25/book-why-buddhism.html
Highlights
If the way they seize control of the show is through feelings, it stands to reason that one way to change the show is to change the role feelings play in everyday life.
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.
Feelings aren’t just little parts of the thing you had thought of as the self; they are closer to its core; they are doing what you had thought “you” were doing: calling the shots.
But once I followed that logic — quit seeing these things I couldn’t control as part of my self — I was liberated from them and, in a certain sense, back in control. Or maybe it would be better to put it this way: my lack of control over them ceased to be a problem.
So two of the properties commonly associated with a self—control and persistence through time — are found to be absent, not evident in any of the five components that seem to constitute human beings.
But, he notes, our bodies do lead to affliction, and we can’t magically change that by saying “May my form be thus.” So form — the stuff the human body is made of — isn’t really under our control. Therefore, says the Buddha, it must be the case that “form is not-self.” We are not our bodies.
Noticing that your mind is wandering doesn’t seem like a very profound insight; and in fact it isn’t one, notwithstanding my teacher’s kind insistence on giving it a standing ovation. But it’s not without significance. What I was saying in that session with my teacher was that I — that is, my “self,” the thing I had thought was in control — don’t readily control the most fundamental aspect of my mental life: what I’m thinking about.
cognitive-behavioral therapy is very much in the spirit of mindfulness meditation. Both in some sense question the validity of feelings. It’s just that with cognitive-behavioral therapy, the questioning is more literal.
This is a reminder that 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.
Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment.
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.
Technologies of distraction have made attention deficits more common. And there’s something about the modern environment — something technological or cultural or political or all of the above — that seems conducive to harsh judgment and ready rage.
Buddhism offers an explicit diagnosis of the problem and a cure. And the cure, when it works, brings not just happiness but clarity of vision: the actual truth about things, or at least something way, way closer to that than our everyday view of them.
To live mindfully is to pay attention to, to be “mindful of” what’s happening in the here and now and to experience it in a clear, direct way, unclouded by various mental obfuscations. Stop and smell the roses.
Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.