Quotes from Robert Wright

Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment.

Buying something ultimately comes down to feeling good about the purchase.

The desire to punish people who treat you unfairly or show you disrespect is deeply human. And admit it: though there's something unpleasant about being made angry, there's something pleasing about the feeling of anger itself—the feeling that you're rightfully enraged. The Buddha said anger has a "poisoned root and honeyed tip.

A sound by itself is a passive, not an active, thing, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. So to make it unpleasant, you have to go out and, in a sense, do something to it.

I consider this tribalism the biggest problem of our time. I think it could undo millennia of movement toward global integration, unravel the social web just when technology has brought the prospect of a cohesive planetary community within reach. Given that the world is still loaded with nuclear weapons and that biotechnology is opening a Pandora's box of new weaponry, you can imagine our tribalistic impulses ushering in a truly dark age.

Darwin once summed up natural selection in ten words: "[M]ultiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

liberation from the persistent desire for things to be different than they are.

We're designed by natural selection to get satisfaction out of finding the answers to questions.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a meditation teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, has said, "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.

So, yes, we need to reject the core evolutionary value of the specialness of self. Indeed, there's probably never been a time in human history when this rejection was more vital.

If this sounds unbearably paradoxical, maybe you should quit reading here, because this won't be the last time we find paradox in Buddhist practice or Buddhist teachings. Then again, there's paradoxical stuff in modern physics (an electron is both a particle and a wave), and modern physics works fine.

nothing contains all the ingredients of ongoing existence within itself; nothing is self-sufficient.

what we call the "self" is in such constant causal interaction with its environment, is so pervasively influenced by the world out there

So if the conscious mind isn't in control, what is in control?

if they believe that their fortunes are inversely correlated with the foreigners' fortunes, that the foreigners have to lose for them to win—then their theology will probably be less inclusive. Let's

Still, at a minimum it seems fair to say that the role of our conscious selves in guiding behavior is not nearly as big as was long thought. And the reason this role was exaggerated is that the conscious mind feels so powerful; in other words, the conscious mind is naturally deluded about its own nature.

Modern environments seem more likely than some previous environments to lead to this sort of malfunctioning. They permit, for example, a degree of social isolation that was unknown to our ancestors.

To call things in the past inexorable makes more things in the future inexorable. To tell people they're not to blame for past mistakes is to make future mistakes more likely. The truth is hardly guaranteed to set us free.

accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness.

In short, from natural selection's point of view, it's good for you to tell a coherent story about yourself, to depict yourself as a rational, self-aware actor. So whenever your actual motivations aren't accessible to the part of your brain that communicates with the world, it would make sense for that part of your brain to generate stories about your motivation.

Still, suppose—just as a thought experiment—that your goal wasn't living as long as possible but rather attaining the

One reasonable reaction to evolutionary psychology is a self-consciousness so acute, and a cynicism so deep, that ironic detachment from the whole human enterprise may provide the only relief.

clearest vision possible.

was beginning to observe the workings of what psychologists call the "default mode network." This is a network in the brain that, according to brain- scan studies, is active when we're doing nothing in particular—not talking to people, not focusing on our work or any other task, not playing a sport or reading a book or watching a movie. It is the network along which our mind wanders when it's wandering.