Tara Oliver’s Reviews > Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment > Status Update

According to Buddha the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality and it produces harmful thoughts of “me” and “mine”, selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism and problems. It is the source of all troubles.

Vipassana’s purpose is to gain insight into the true nature of reality. Three marks of existence: impermanence, dukkha- suffering, unsatisfactoriness, not-self. Seeing the first two with such high resolution that you deeply appreciate their pervasiveness.

Mastering some concentration is what liberates you from the default mode network and stops the mental chatter that normally preoccupies you.

Feelings were “designed” to convince you to follow them. They feel right and true almost by definition. They actively discourage you from viewing them objectively.

Neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems. Both of our natural views of them are deeply misleading and failing to see these worlds clearly leads to a lot of suffering. Meditation helps us see them more clearly.

If many of our unpleasant feelings are in some sense illusions, we can use meditation to dispel them or weaken their grip on us. Study a feeling. Sit down, close your eyes and study it. Accept its presence and observe how it makes you feel. The careful observation and acceptance makes it less unpleasant.

“But that sensation is down there in my jaw and that’s not where I am. I’m up here in my head. I was no longer identifying with the feeling; I was viewing it objectively. It didn’t really go away it just ceased feeling unpleasant.”

Buddhism offers an explicit diagnosis of the problem and a cure. We are living in the matrix. Meditation can help you see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, it “wants” us to be 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.