Why Buddhism Is True

So that’s one way to define true and false as they apply to feelings: if they feel good but lead us to do things that aren’t really good for us, then they’re false feelings.

Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment. Typically these judgments are about whether these things are good or bad for the survival of the organism doing the feeling (though sometimes they’re about whether these things are good or bad for close kin—notably offspring—since close kin share so many of our genes).

feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we’d often be better off.

Feelings just are. If we feel them, then they’re feelings—real feelings, not imagined feelings.

Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.

In mindfulness meditation as it’s typically taught, the point of focusing on your breath isn’t just to focus on your breath. It’s to stabilize your mind, to free it of its normal preoccupations so you can observe things that are happening in a clear, unhurried, less reactive way.

you can best achieve success at meditation by not pursuing success, and achieving this success may mean caring less about success, at least as success is conventionally defined.

“Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.”

pleasure is fleeting, and, yes, this leaves us recurrently dissatisfied. And the reason is that pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure.