Why Buddhism Is True
At the heart of Buddhism is a simple claim: The reason we suffer—and the reason we make other people suffer—is that we don’t see the world clearly. At the heart of Buddhist meditative practice is a radical promise: We can learn to see the world, including ourselves, more clearly and so gain a deep and morally valid happiness. This book is the culmination of a personal journey that began with Wright’s landmark book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal, and deepened as he immersed himself in meditative practice and conversed with some of the world’s most skilled meditators. The result is a story that is “provocative, informative and...deeply rewarding” (The New York Times Book Review), and as entertaining as it is illuminating. Written with the wit, clarity, and grace for which Wright is famous, Why Buddhism Is True lays the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age and shows how, in a time of technological distraction and social division, we can save ourselves from ourselves, both as individuals and as a species.
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- The karmic traditions developed this most completely and thoroughly. You don't need to buy into the supernatural claims to benefit from them.
A great starting point can be Shinzen Young's The Science of Enlightenment and/or Sam Harris's Waking Up.
After that, you might look into Why Buddhism is True or The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali or Mindfulness in Plain English.
The Healthy Gamer Youtube channel also has great videos going into this and how they tie into psychology.
David Chapman's https://meaningness.com/ is also pretty great.
- Perhaps to defuse the denigrative aspect of the term we should think of it as analogous to the 'lizard brain' as not a disease but something of an interior module we all have within us - on a day to day basis most people can generally introspect on the contributions of the lizard brain to our thoughts and feelings[1] , why not should we similarly introspect on the car brain and think on a similarly higher order level?
[1] Tangential reading: 'Why Buddhism is True' by Robert Wight:
- My first therapist was a poor fit, and when I decided to make a change, I specifically sought out a trauma-aware therapist who specialized in cases that involved complex childhood trauma. This made all the difference for me, but it's possible the factors in play are not the same.
I'm also pretty interested in the book mentioned above. I should also mention that the book "Why Buddhism is True" is a book that really opened my eyes to some aspects of human experience that just hadn't made any sense to me up to that point. This is not a religious book, but rather an examination of the philosophical claims of Buddhism and mapping those onto a modern understanding of evolutionary psychology. I had just started meditating when I read this, and reading it convinced me fully that I was on the right path.
I've come to believe that this meditation practice is the single most important habit in my life at this point. It's a foundation for thinking more clearly, and thinking more clearly tends to sort out a bunch of other problems automatically.
- First, comments saying you haven't hit rock bottom because it could be far worse are missing the point, and I don't think they're helpful. Rock bottom is relative to your experience up to this point. You could reach lower lows, and that would give you a new perspective from which to judge what is truly "bottom", but that's not your perspective now. If this feels like rock bottom, it's rock bottom.
I'm mid-rebuild, and I can confidently say that beyond finding a good therapist, I believe the #1 and #2 most important habits I added to my life are meditation/mindfulness (look up "Vipassana"), and Yoga (I'm just using the Yoga with Adriene YouTube channel [0] - she's got some great stuff).
There are lots of other things you can/probably should do, but when I made meditation a cornerstone habit, it made me realize I was frequently not feeling like part of my body. Adding Yoga started to really integrate my mind/body connection (a concept I couldn't even imagine before I started the practice), and these two habits make everything else I'm doing feel easier.
The bottom line is that you see things more clearly and stop identifying so directly with thoughts, and this in turn makes it far easier to modify other aspects of your life that need addressing. Those could be external factors (I was doing a bad job of keeping my apartment clean) or internal factors (I was also frequently telling myself stories about my experience that upon examination were untrue, or at least not the whole truth).
Everything else I'm doing stems from a cascade of events that started long ago:
- Abusive childhood
- Led to overly pouring myself into external things, anything but myself, mostly work (with great success)
- Led to problems in my relationship and lost a partner of 15 years
- Shortly after this, lost two family members, a dog, got in a car accident, someone broke into my apartment, etc. etc.
- Burned out, quit my job, went on sabbatical to figure things out.
Obviously everyone's story is different, and not everything I've described will be relevant to you, but my broader recovery path has involved:
1) Finding a good therapist. As others have said, if you feel stuck, look for someone new. But don't expect therapy to be a quick fix, depending on the nature of what you're dealing with.
2) Physical activity. Getting my body moving (beyond just Yoga) has had a hugely positive impact. I convinced myself that I can go for a 10 minute walk no matter what, and eventually that turned into 3-4 mile walks every day or two. If you can do cardio, great, but don't feel like you have to go join a gym and sweat every day to get the benefits of moving your legs.
3) Getting out in nature. I never saw myself as an outdoors person. Then I went on a road trip, and visited various national parks. There's a certain kind of perspective you gain if you take in the grandeur of nature mindfully. I ended up extending my road trip and roving for over a month.
4) Realized I had to stop assuming any one thing is "the cure". Getting out in nature was healing and wonderful. For a short time, I thought "this is what I need to do with my life", before I later realized that this would be just as unbalanced as the no-nature version of existence. Mindfulness is what helped me move beyond all-or-nothing thinking. It's not that I believed this kind of thinking was a good way to be, but I just wouldn't realize I was even thinking that way.
5) Realizing that I need to fundamentally change my relationship with myself. I realized that I had lived my life as if I was orbiting around it with work and relationships at the core. Building a strong morning routine that is for no one but me, and rebuilding my life around that, has given me the feeling for the first time in my life that it is me at the center. I didn't realize how stark the difference was until work and my relationship with my ex were no longer the dominant factors in my life.
I had kind of shrugged off the importance of core habits and routine as something for other people. But I've learned that there is pleasure in the path of improvement itself, and when I started to embrace that, things started to truly change for the first time.
Some books / apps / resources that have been really helpful for me:
- Sam Harris: Waking Up [1] (book) sent me on a consciousness rabbit hole, and this turned into a really beneficial exploration and now I use the Waking Up app to practice the mindfulness techniques described in the book. There are other books/apps, but seek out mindfulness, not just some form of concentration meditation.
- Robert Wright: Why Buddhism is True [2] (book) is first and foremost not a religious book, but a book that explores evolutionary psychology and how our growing understanding of the human brain maps cleanly onto some aspects of Buddhist philosophy. If you're curious about meditation, but don't know what you'll get, this book tries to give you a glimpse of that. The 2nd half of the book honestly kind of peters out a bit, but
Resources:
- [0] https://www.youtube.com/@yogawithadriene
- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_Up:_A_Guide_to_Spiritua...
- I don’t believe it’s a bad thing at all, it just is.
And glimpsing centerlessness for yourself sounds disconcerting, but instead seems paradoxically comforting when it happens.
For me personally, it brought with it a deep sense of peace and wonder about my existence and coexistence with a world full of similarly centerless beings.
To your point about wiring, I think absolutely yes. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, many aspects of conscious experience ensure we stay alive and procreate, but are not necessarily pleasant and seem to be increasingly incompatible with modern life.
Robert Wright’s book “Why Buddhism is True” explores this at length and is a really interesting read. It’s not a book about religious truth, but one that maps a modern understanding of evolutionary psychology onto the insights of Buddhist philosophy and how such philosophy can be incredibly helpful when dealing with the implications of living in a body that did not evolve to survive the conditions to which it is currently subject.
- - Sapiens by Yuval Harari
- Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter
- Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday, Resnick, Walker
- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (changed my outlook, attitude)
- Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Nielsen, Chuang
- Meditation by Aurelius
- (some other deep, high quality novels)
- Books by Steven Strogatz
- Classical Indian Philosophy by Ganeri
- Not a book, but Andrew Ng's old ML MOOC, also LeCun's MOOC.
- nand2tetris, SICP
__________
Meditation and mindfulness have fundamentally changed my level of effectiveness. They have made me smarter, and fixed some serious problems I had. Regular practice is essential. These books were great:
- The Mind Illuminated by Culadasa
- Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratna
- The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron
- Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright
- What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula
__________
There are many books from many fields that has made me less dumb. I cannot list all of them.
You too, should pursue directions of your interest and genuinely enjoy what you do. Enlightenment is choice-of-books invariant.
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