This book review was written by Eugene Kernes
“Hence another paradox of meditation: the problems that meditation can help you overcome often make it hard to meditate in the first place. Yes, meditation may help you lengthen your attention span, dampen your rage, and view your fellow human beings less judgmentally. Unfortunately, a short attention span, a hot temper, and a penchant for harsh judgement may slow your progress along the meditative path.” – Robert Wright, Chapter 2: Paradoxes of Meditation, Page 23
“Our assumption that people give much thought to us one way or the other is often an illusion, as is our unspoken sense that it matters what pretty much everyone we see thinks of us. But these intuitions were less often illusory in the environment of our evolution, and that’s one reason they’re so persistent today.” – Robert Wright, Chapter 3: When Are Feelings Illusions?, Page 39
Is This An Overview?
Psychologists have come to various same conclusions as the
core ideas from Buddhism. The mind is
evolutionarily designed to mislead, to delude.
Which are not necessarily negative attributes as they have enabled
survival. Buddhism and psychology have
similar conclusion about feelings.
Feelings can guide people to do what is right, and avoid wrong behavior,
but in various circumstances such as feelings out of a specific context, can
misguide behavior. They can provide
false-positive reactions, making people commit behavior without an appropriate
stimulus. Many feelings which enabled
appropriate decisions within the evolutionary history of humans, have become
inappropriate within contemporary society.
Buddhism and psychology have similar conclusion about
pleasure. Benefits of pleasure are
illusory, as the brain overstates how much happiness will be received. Pleasure evaporates quickly which leaves
people desiring for more. The
anticipated benefits are purposely misled by biochemical reactions to make
people more evolutionarily productive.
Buddhism and psychology have similar conclusion about what
defines the self. The self is usually
associated with control and persistence over time, but people do not have full
control over their bodies or minds.
Humans do not have the ability to rapidly change themselves which would
be required of one’s control of the self.
Attachments and other harmful divisions between people occur when
thinking of the self. Divisions that
lead to an escalation of conflicts.
Alternatively, as everyone affects each other, everything is
interdependent and interconnected. Which
means that harming another is in effect harming oneself.
Part of Buddhism is meditation, mindfulness meditation. The benefits of meditation have been
corroborated by psychologists.
Mindfulness training can enable people to be governed less by misleading
or unproductive feelings, to reduce the effects of illusions created by the
self. Meditation helps the individual
notice when the mind wanders, to reduce the effect of the mind wandering. Meditation can help with attention, rage
reduction, and reduce harsh judgment of others.
The problem is that those who need meditation for these aspects, are
also going to have the hardest time meditating.
How Else Can The Mind Mislead Humans?
People want to be perceived as and present themselves as
beneficial and effective. Which is the beneffectance
effect. They perceive themselves as
being better than average, giving themselves more credit within group
collaboration than other team members.
People do not recall memories with perfect recollection, but omit inconvenient
facts and exaggerate convenient ones. People
are prone to the fundamental attribution error, in which there is a
misattribution of the effects of the situation and someone’s behavior.
Caveats?
Various parts of the book contain
memoir explanations. The memoir
experiences can sometimes further enable an understanding, but can also be
distracting. As the author notes, there
are various paradoxes in Buddhism, as in physics. Some of these paradoxes are created by a
language barrier. There are tacit
experiences, experiences that cannot be explained with fidelity using
language. The author sometimes uses the
more original, more formal language to describe ideas, and then describes the
experiences with more contemporary language.
Contemporary language that can make the ideas more readily understood,
but which are not present throughout the book.
