Thread by @uncoverwithana

Some books change your entire perspective and give you a new leash on life.

There are several books that have done that for me, but none have had as profound of an impact as #WhyBuddhismIsTrue by @robertwrighter

Below are the 13 best lessons I learned from this book 👇🏼🧵

1. Natural selection did not design your mind to see the world clearly. It designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.

2. Natural selection (like the robot overlords from the matrix) engineered the delusions that control us and built them into our brains. Natural selection perpetrated the delusion in order to get us to adhere to its agenda - the agenda being to get genes into the next generation.

3. The things we perceive through our sense organs (i.e. smell, sound, sight, taste, touch) tend to come with feelings attached, however subtle the feelings.

4. These feelings can render judgment *so subtly* that we don’t realize that it’s the feelings that are rendering the judgment. We incorrectly think the judgment is objective.

5. We fall for the “Fundamental Attribution Error” which says that we attribute someone’s bad behavior to disposition (labeling them as bad), not to the situation. We locate the badness in them, not in environmental factors.

6. #MindfulnessMeditation is “cultivating an awareness of your feelings that fundamentally changes your relationship to them.”

7. If you interact with your feelings with the natural thirst for pleasant feelings and the natural aversion to unpleasant feelings you will continue to be controlled by the world around you.

8. if you observe those feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can in some measure escape the control; the causes that ordinarily shape your behavior can be defied, and you can get closer to #nirvana.

9. #Nirvana is the state of perfect happiness, complete peace, complete inner freedom, and full awakening and understanding.

10. Observing our feelings without attachment is the way to keep our modules from taking control of our consciousness.

11. Our Dharma is the **alignment** of metaphysical truth (the universal truth), moral truth (our personal truth) and happiness (acceptance of these truths).

12. #Buddhism has two schools of thought: The clarity of vision can lead to dampening of our feelings OR dampening of feelings may lead to clarity of vision.

13. I’ll end this thread with my favorite quote in the book by Rumi: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and fund all the barriers within yourself that you have built against love.”