A review by inquiry_from_an_anti_library
Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment by Robert Wright

adventurous emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

3.0

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.