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

Pain in your tooth can hurt you only if you own the tooth in the first place. Ownership of serious pain is optional. The Buddha believed that the less you judge things, including the contents of your mind, the more clearly you’ll see them, and the less deluded you’ll be.

Five aggregates constitute a person and their experiences. The physical body -form, basic feelings, perceptions, mental formations, consciousness or awareness. If they are not under our control, then how can we think of them as part of the self?

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.

Much of the point of Buddhism is to confront suffering rather than evade it. Then you can undermine it.

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.