Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism, and the Next Generation of Enlightenment

My tastes, preferences, styles, and self-identifications all are cultural constructions. So, too, every notion that you have, about politics, justice, identity, music, love, whatever, is a meme, constituted outside of “you” and replicated in sophisticated ways.

As Joe further pointed out, “We’re navigating five different worlds at once: Traditional Buddhism, traditional Western Buddhism, secular mindfulness, hardcore empiricist neuroscientists, and neuroscientists who are into Buddhism,” each of whom may have different worldviews and operating assumptions.

aporia.

More broadly, here are some of the things mindfulness has been shown to do: • Cut the relapse rate in half for patients suffering from depression7 • Reduce loneliness among elderly people8 • Quadruple the speed of healing from psoriasis9 • Improve overall immune function10 • Lower the rate of relapse among recovering addicts11 • Improve attention,

the Buddha was not a Buddhist. On the contrary, according to the Pali Canon, he requested that his image not be depicted, he worried that he might be worshiped as a god, he allowed people to continue to practice their existing religious rites, and he remained agnostic on such fundamental questions about the creation of the world and what happens af

Those things that have to get done—don’t really have to get done. The dream that you have, which your

Doidge discusses is how the overuse of pornography rewires the brain’s pleasure centers, causing it to need ever-more-exotic visual stimuli to generate the responses associated with arousal.24 As the saying goes (possibly coined by Doidge himself), neurons that fire together, wire together—for better or for worse.

Enlightenment does not have to do with being a nice person; it’s about intuitively knowing all things to be totally conditioned and transitory and thus unclingable.

life will be meaningless if you don’t achieve—let it go, too.