Quotes from Robert Wright

Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them." What he meant is that if you want to liberate yourself from the parts of the mind that keep you from realizing true happiness, you have to first become aware of them, which can be unpleasant.

being in closer-than-usual contact with the actual workings of your mind can lead you to confront issues with a new and perhaps unsettling honesty.

When people feel like fighting, they are pretty good at coming

When Christians faced oppression at the hands of Roman imperialists, they did what Jews had done when they faced oppression at the hands of Babylonian imperialists: dreamed of vengeance and enshrined the dream in theology.

If I let go of that feeling and cease to identify with it—in other words, take a step toward the interior version of the not-self experience—I'm rejecting natural selection's insistence that I consider myself special. Take that, natural selection!

It's true that Darwin didn't live the optimally utilitarian life. No one ever has. Still, as he prepared to die, he could rightly have reflected on a life decently and compassionately lived, a string of duties faithfully discharged, a painful, if only partial, struggle against the currents of selfishness whose source he was the first man to see. It wasn't a perfect life; but human beings are capable of worse.

They simply find themselves constantly in touch with all the evidence supporting their position, and often having to be reminded of all the evidence against it. Darwin wrote in his autobiography of a habit he called a "golden rule": to immediately write down any observation that seemed inconsistent with his theories

In the new view, human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse. The title of this book is not wholly without irony.

As more and more societies are reevaluated in the unflattering light of Darwinian anthropology, it becomes doubtful that any truly egalitarian human society has ever existed.

We are not blank slates, as some behaviorists once imagined. We are organisms whose more egregious tendencies can be greatly, if arduously, subdued. And a primary reason for this tenuous optimism is the abject flexibility with which status is sought. We will do almost anything for respect, including not act like animals.

Quizá la mejor manera de decirlo sea que la iluminación y la liberación se refuerzan mutuamente: cuantas más cosas que nos liberan del sufrimiento hacemos, más clara es nuestra visión, y cuanto más clara sea nuestra visión, más fácil nos resultará hacer las cosas que nos conducen a la liberación del sufrimiento, lo cual, a su vez, nos permitirá tener aún más claridad de visión, y así sucesivamente.

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.

Mindfulness meditation, the main vehicle of Vipassana, is a good way to study the human mind. At least, it's a good way to study one human's mind: yours. You sit down, let the mental dust settle, and then watch your mind work.

So too with the case of the snoring yogi in the previous chapter. As long as I identified with my dislike of him, I was obeying natural selection's instructions to consider myself special (certainly more special than a guy who wants to catch up on his sleep when I'm trying to meditate!).

I would be approaching the truth.

And don't feel like you're committing a felony-level violation of Buddhist dogma just because you think of yourself as being a self.

Religion is a feature of cultural evolution that, among other things, addresses anxieties created by cultural evolution; it helps keep social change safe from itself.

I don't have a hostile disposition toward humankind per se. In fact, I feel quite warmly toward humankind. It's individual humans I have trouble with. I'm prone to a certain skepticism about people's motives and character, and this critical appraisal can harden into enduringly harsh judgment.

Bhikkhu Bodhi

Todos los organismos, incluidos los seres humanos, han sido diseñados por la selección natural para reaccionar a su entorno en modos que conduzcan a una «mejora» (según los criterios de la propia selección natural) de las cosas, lo cual significa que, en mayor o menor medida, casi siempre estamos escudriñando el horizonte en busca de cosas que nos hagan infelices, que nos incomoden o que no nos satisfagan

The only underprivileged citizens who should favor monogamy are men. It is what gives them access to a supply of women that would otherwise drift up the social scale.

Ambiguity, selective retention, and misleading paraphrasal combine to give believers great influence on the meaning of their religion. But, for raw semantic power, none of these tools rivals the deft deployment of metaphor and allegory. In a single stroke, this can obliterate a text's literal meaning and replace it with something radically different.

Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.

that the stories we tell about things, and thus the beliefs we have about their history and their nature, shape our experience of them, and thus our sense of their essence.