Love Meets Wisdom a Christian Experience of Buddhism Book Review

I.

The Heed Illuminated is a guide to Buddhist meditation by Culadasa, aka John Yates, a Buddhist meditation teacher who is likewise a neuroscience PhD. At this indicate I would be more than impressed to meet a Buddhist meditation teacher who wasn't a neuroscience PhD. If I ever teach Buddhist meditation, this is going to exist my claw. "Come larn avant-garde meditation techniques with Scott Alexander, whose lack of a neuroscience PhD gives him a unique perspective that combines ancient wisdom with a lack of modern brain science." I call back the globe is ready for someone to step into this office. But Culadasa is non that person, and The Mind Illuminated is not that book.

Tradition divides meditation into 2 parts: concentration meditation, where yous sharpen and control your focus, versus insight meditation, where you investigate the nature of perception and reality. TMI follows a long tradition of focusing on concentration meditation, with the assumption that insight meditation will become safer and easier once you lot've mastered concentration, and mayhap partly take care of itself. Its course divides concentration meditation into 10 stages. Early stages contain basic tasks like setting up a practise, focusing on the breath, and overcoming distractability. Later stages are more interesting; the ninth stage is learning how to calm the intensity of your meditative joy; apparently without special techniques "overly intense joy" becomes a big problem.

I commonly hate meditation manuals, because they sound like give-and-take salad. "One attains joy by combining pleasance with happiness. Pleasure is a country of bliss which occurs when one concentrates focus on the agreement of awareness. Happiness is a land of joy that occurs when one focuses concentration on the awareness of understanding. By focusing awareness on bliss, y'all can increase the pleasure of agreement, which in turn causes concentration to be pleasant and joy to exist blissful, and helps you concentrate on understanding your awareness of happiness about the bliss of focus." At some indicate you kickoff thinking "Wait, were all the nouns in that paragraph synonyms for each other?"

Culadasa avoids this amend than most people. Whenever he introduces a term, he puts it in bolded italicized letters , and includes it in a glossary at the back. He tries to stick to multiple-give-and-take-phrases that assistance clarify the concept, like "bliss of concrete pliancy" or "meditative joy", instead of just calling 1 matter "joy" and the other thing "bliss" and hoping you lot retrieve which is which. He includes a section on what he means by distinguishing "awareness" from "attending", and admits that some of these are tough choices that do not necessarily cooperate with the spirit of the English. And his division of the fabric into stages helps ensure you're not reading a term until you lot're somewhere around the point of personally experiencing the quality beingness discussed.

This is characteristic of the level of care taken in this book, which despite its unfortunate acronym does a good job of presenting just the right amount of information. For case, when people say "meditate on the breath", I can only do this for a little while until I notice that the breath doesn't really exist as a specific object y'all can concentrate on. Actually there are just a bunch of asunder sensations changing at every moment. What do yous concentrate on? I had previously dismissed this as 1 of several reasons why obsessive-compulsive people shouldn't exercise meditation, but TMI describes exactly this issue, says that it is normal and correct to worry about information technology, and prescribes solutions: concentrate on the asunder sensations of the breath in whatever manner feels easiest for the first few stages, and once you lot've increased awareness to the signal where you can detect each subpart of the jiff individually, practice that.

II.

TMI also solves a whole slew of my obsessive questions and concerns with its "attending vs. awareness" dichotomy.

I had always been confused by instructions like "concentrate on the breath until y'all experience joy, then find the joy". Ordinarily what would happen was: I would concentrate on the breath, ask myself "am I feeling joy notwithstanding?", spend some time trying to figure this out, realize my attention had deviated from the breath, put my attention back on the breath, then feel bad because I wasn't checking to meet if I was feeling joy or not. How could I both have 100% of my attention on the breath, but also exist checking my joy? If I came up with the policy "bank check once per minute for joy, so go dorsum to the jiff", how would I avoid checking arbitrarily often whether it felt like a minute had gone by? This was another result I simply dismissed as "peradventure meditation is not for obsessive-compulsive people".

Merely TMI distinguishes between "attending" (sometimes "focused attention") every bit the one thing in the foreground of your brain, and awareness (sometimes "peripheral awareness") equally the potentially many things in the groundwork of your encephalon. Think of it working the same way as cardinal vs. peripheral vision. When given instructions like "concentrate on the breath until you feel joy, and so detect the joy", you should be focusing your entire attention on the jiff, but potentially noticing joy in your peripheral awareness. These instructions are no more contradictory than "await at this dot on the wall straight ahead, but observe if a domestic dog runs past".

The book urges meditators to avoid a state of hyperfocus in which they are so intent on the jiff that they would not discover the firm falling down effectually them. It says this is a trap that will not build the proper habits of heed to continue to higher stages and exercise insight meditation afterwards. It recommends instead a class of practice in which meditators, while keeping their attention on the breath, are constantly monitoring both for external events like barking dogs or the house falling, and for internal events like feeling hungry or having thoughts. This final one sort of makes me desire to scream: how tin I monitor whether or not I am having thoughts without thinking virtually information technology, in which case the answer is always 'aye'? But this is exactly the kind of paradox that the attending/awareness dichotomy is supposed to overcome. You lot can keep attending on the jiff, find a thought arising in the periphery of your awareness, and gently note it and button it away, all without shifting attention.

Culadasa is very excited about this:

One groovy example of [a new perspective] is the stardom I brand in this book between attending and sensation. Despite hundreds of thousands of meditators practicing over millennia, information technology has never earlier been clearly conceptualized that the ordinary mind has two singled-out ways of "knowing", even though these dissimilar ways of knowing have then much to exercise with achieving the goals of meditation. All the same, cognitive psychology and neuroscience take recently shown that there are two distinctly different kinds of knowing that involve completely different parts of the brain. This is a finding that deeply informs new ways of practicing meditation and interpreting our meditation experiences, from beginner to adept. This is merely 1 case, but the signal should exist obvious: meditation can guide and inform neuroscience, and neuroscience can do the same for meditation.

I would usually be pretty reluctant to advise that hundreds of thousands of meditators practicing over millennia had all just missed something actually important. And I accept to admit that in the 2 or three test meditations I have done since reading this, I have had as much trouble as ever with these issues, and don't notice an attending/sensation distinction that becomes obvious at present that I have the terms I need to understand it. Just realistically maybe something like this has to be true for most discussion about meditation to make sense at all.

3.

TMI gives its model of how the mind works in vi interludes distributed amidst the chapters on meditation communication.

It begins with a startling claim that mental fourth dimension is granular, and simply one item tin can be in consciousness per granule-moment. The seven principal types of items that can occupy a moment of consciousness are sight, sound, smell, sense of taste, touch, thought, and a "binding moment" that combines aspects of the previous six. Each moment of consciousness is completely static. The only reason things seem to move or thoughts seem to period is because the moments of consciousness are moving from moment to moment faster than you can detect, like a movie which flips from withal frame to notwithstanding frame so quickly that it gets perceived as continuous action. Culadasa too compares information technology to a "string of beads", with each bead being a particular kind of moment (sight, sound, etc).

In that location are never two things in consciousness at the same fourth dimension. If you lot think there are, that'due south either considering your consciousness is switching back and forth from thing to thing so speedily that you can't follow it, or considering your consciousness is perceiving a "binding moment" that presents a single aspect including both of those things. For example, if you see a true cat, and you hear a meow, you might feel a "binding moment" in which yous call back you hear the cat meowing, although really what has happened is SIGHT:Cat — Audio:MEOW — BINDING:(Cat, MEOW).

This sounds to me like it completely reverses the point fabricated in the attention/awareness dichotomy, where you lot tin be attentive to ane matter just aware of many others at the same time. Afterwards all, if consciousness tin only contain one thing at a time, what room is there for peripheral awareness? Culadasa states that each individual moment is either a moment of attending, or a moment of awareness. Moments of awareness can contain many things:

For example, say you're sitting on a cabin deck in the mountains, gazing out at the view. Each moment of visual awareness volition include a variety of objects — mountains, trees, birds, and sky—all at the same time. Auditory moments of awareness will include all the diverse sounds that brand up the audible background — birdsong, air current in the trees, a babbling beck, and so forth—again, all at the same time. On the other hand, moments of visual attention might be restricted just to the bird you're watching on a nearby branch. Auditory attention might include only the sounds the birds are making. Even when your attention is divided amongst several things at once—peradventure you're knitting or whittling a piece of wood while you sit—moments of attention are still limited to a small number of objects. Finally, binding moments of attention and binding moments of awareness take the content from the preceding sensory moments and combine them into a whole: "Sitting on the deck, looking out at the mountain, while carving a piece of wood."

Now, allow's consider the 2nd deviation: the caste of mental processing in moments of awareness versus moments of attention. Individual moments of sensation provide information virtually a lot of things at once, but the data has only been minimally processed. The result is our familiar feel of peripheral awareness of many things in the background. However, these moments of awareness do include some elementary interpretations of sense data. Yous may exist aware that the sounds you hear are from "traffic," or that the things in the groundwork of your visual field are "copse." These simple concepts assist evaluate and categorize all that information, contributing to our understanding of the present context. Although these preliminary interpretations don't unremarkably lead to any kind of activeness, some part of this data is often referred to attention for more than analysis. Other times— say, when the sound of traffic suddenly includes screeching tires — the information in peripheral awareness tin trigger an automatic action, thought, or emotion, any of which can and so become an object of attending.

This notwithstanding seems strained, simply I grudgingly admit it kind of works.

TMI builds on this idea to create the "mind-organization model", its explanation for what consciousness is and why nosotros have it. In this model, there are many "subminds". The book is a fiddling vague on how many in that location are or what level of complication we're supposed to be imagining here, and whether they stand for just the few most salient divisions (eg "the visual system") or are more numerous and abstract (eg "the part of your brain that likes to play computer games"), but I get the impression it's closer to the latter. These subminds ordinarily do their own thing, but sometimes have alien agendas.

Consciousness is a neutral basis shared past all subminds:

Hither's the picture presented and then far: every sub-mind belongs either to the unconscious sensory or unconscious discriminating mind. Each sub-mind performs its ain specialized task independently of others, and all at the same time. Each tin project content into consciousness, as well as initiate deportment. Obviously, there'south enormous potential for conflict and inefficiency, if not total chaos. This is where consciousness fits into the picture: the conscious heed provides an "interface" that allows these unconscious sub-minds to communicate with each other and work together cooperatively. With all these unconscious sub-minds working independently and at the same time, the potential for conflict is enormous. The conscious heed is what allows them to work together cooperatively.

The witting listen acts every bit a universal recipient of information. It can receive information from each and every split, unconscious sub-heed. In fact, all witting experience is simply an ongoing stream of moments of consciousness whose content has been projected into the witting mind past unconscious sub¬minds. Then, when information enters consciousness, it becomes immediately bachelor to all the other sub-minds. Therefore, the conscious mind besides serves as a universal source of data. Because the conscious mind is both a universal recipient and a universal source of data, all the unconscious sub-minds can interact with each other through the conscious heed.

Every bit a helpful image, picture show the whole mind-system as a kind of corporation. It is made upwards of different departments and their employees, each with singled-out roles and responsibilities. These are the unconscious sub-minds. At the top of the corporate structure is the "boardroom," or conscious listen. The diligent employees working in their separate departments produce reports, which get sent to the boardroom to be discussed farther and perhaps acted on. In other words, the unconscious sub-minds send information upwardly into the conscious listen. The witting mind is but a passive "space" where all the other minds can meet. In this "boardroom of the mind" metaphor, the conscious mind is where important activities of the listen-system get brought up, discussed, and decided on. Ane, and only one, sub-mind tin can present its information at a time, and that'due south what creates single moments of consciousness. The object of consciousness during that moment becomes part of the current agenda, and is fabricated simultaneously bachelor to all the other sub-minds for further processing. In subsequent moments, they project the results of their further processing into consciousness, creating a give-and-take that leads to conclusions and decisions.

If this sounds familiar, it'southward because equally far as I can tell it's a rebranding of Bernard Baars' global workspace theory of consciousness. I similar global workspace theory and have always considered information technology the most plausible solution to the easy problems of consciousness. I'one thousand a little flake concerned that Culadasa never mentions global workspace theory in the book, and that I've never heard of any connection betwixt global workspace theory and Buddhism before. Not really sure what to make of this.

TMI continues:

Just because data projected into consciousness becomes available to every sub-heed of the listen-system, that doesn't mean they all receive it. It's similar a radio prove: the bear witness is being circulate, simply not everyone is tuning in to listen.

Meditation increases the degree to which individual subminds are tuned in to consciousness. Since the book will afterward say this is all a metaphor, I think a ameliorate style of framing this might be "increase the bandwidth of the connections between the individual subminds". When someone says meditators are "more witting" or take "college awareness" than non-meditators, they mean that more sub-minds are tuned in to consciousness more closely at any given time.

This accomplishes what Culadasa calls "unification of mind"; with more bandwidth, the subminds are able to resolve their conflicting priorities and act more like a unmarried unit. This can get-go out sort of ugly; there can be good reasons why some heavily repressed and traumatized subminds aren't normally invited to the table, and the cosmos of new links between them and the global workspace feels from the within like scary unconscious fabric welling upward into the psyche. Just this is part of the "negotiation" information technology takes for these subminds to unify; with enough meditation, the system will assimilate their insights and they volition join the Borg similar anybody else.

This isn't enlightenment. Enlightenment is something else. TMI calls information technology a "cessation event":

A abeyance result is where unconscious sub-minds remain tuned in and receptive to the contents of consciousness, while at the same fourth dimension, none of them project any content into consciousness. Then,consciousness ceases — completely. During that period, at the level of consciousness at that place is a complete abeyance of mental fabrications of any kind — of the illusory, heed-generated world that otherwise dominates every witting moment. This, of form, also entails a consummate cessation of peckish, intention, and suffering. The merely data that tuned in sub-minds receive during this event is the fact of a full absence.

What makes this the virtually powerful of all Insight experiences is what happens in the last few moments of consciousness leading upwards to the cessation. First, an object arises in consciousness that would commonly produce craving. Information technology can be almost anything. Nevertheless, what happens next is quite unusual: the mind doesn't respond with the habitual craving and clinging. Rather, it fully understands the object from the perspective of Insight: as a mental construct, completely "empty" of whatsoever real substance, impermanent, and a cause of suffering. This profound realization leads to the next and concluding moment of consummate equanimity, in which the shared intention of all the unified sub-minds is to not respond. Because null is projected into consciousness, the cessation event arises. With cessation, the tuned-in sub-minds simultaneously realize that everything appearing in consciousness is simply the production of their own activity. In other words, they realize that the input they're accustomed to receiving is simply a result of their own fabricating activities.

I usually hate theories that explicate the brain based on subminds. They seem as well easy, in the way anthropomorphizing is ever besides piece of cake. Want to run marathons, but spend your fourth dimension drinking beer instead? Simply model yourself every bit having a marathon-running submind and a beer-drinking submind, and they're fighting, and the beer-drinking submind is winning. Practice this plenty times and you'll never figure out annihilation about hyperbolic discounting or reinforcement learning or any of the very important principles that govern what the brain actually does and which do not look similar piffling people fighting inside of you. Your solutions will ever look similar some weird form of therapy based on starting a dialogue with the beer-drinking submind and convincing it that beer isn't so good afterwards all, which never works, and you'll never get around to taking Adderall, which for some reason will cause all the little men inside your caput to alter their opinions to any you lot wanted in the first identify.

For whatever reason, TMI'southward mind-system model doesn't bother me every bit much. Mayhap information technology'due south because he's not trying to invent yet another new historic period psychotherapy to help fight procrastination. Mayhap because information technology'south in the context of global workspace theory, which I already like. Or mayhap information technology's because the idea of modules and processes without enough bandwidth to connect to the global workspace sounds less anthropomorphic than fiddling people who make you drink beer because they like beer.

IV.

This is a very optimistic book.

Buddhism started out with Theravada teachers proverb information technology would accept millions of lifetimes to reach enlightenment. And so the Mahayana and Vajrayana schools started saying mayhap you lot could reach enlightenment in ane lifetime, if you did everything right and worked very difficult. Recently I've been reading works past modern teachers like Daniel Ingram and Vinay Gupta, who compare the corporeality of work involved in enlightenment to the amount of work in an Medico or PhD – maybe five years? But Culadasa states that "for householders who do properly, it's possible to master the Ten Stages inside a few months or years", calculation in a footnote:

The Dalai Lama has said "If one knows the nature, order, and distinctions of the levels explained higher up without mistake and cultivates calm abiding, i tin hands generate faultless meditative stabilization in near a year." When I showtime began pedagogy, I also believed that with diligent do near people should be able to master all 10 Stages in less than a year. I accept since learned that this is not realistic in terms of most people, and making such a flat pronouncement can be discouraging for those who have been practicing much longer without attaining that mastery.

So fine, only absurd people tin can get mastery in less than a twelvemonth. Notwithstanding, this is a dramatic promise. Merely so why are at that place then many cultures where monks report their entire lives in monasteries? Monks accept big advantages over the sort of "householder" meditators Culadasa is talking about – they tin can meditate every waking hour, they take access to the best teachers. Surely they should all become enlightened inside a few months? I have read some piece of work on the idea of "multiple paths" and "endless dharma gates" which propose that what is normally called enlightenment is only the first and nearly obvious step on an endless process of personal exploration. Merely when I read about historical Buddhism civilization, information technology notwithstanding seems similar a bulk of monks at whatever given time are unenlightened, including those who have been at the monastery many years.

Possibly all of this Western rationality and efficiency really is that slap-up, and past cut out the crust mod people can get enlightenment much faster than the ancients could? Is this true in whatsoever other field? I get the impression that modern schoolchildren notwithstanding primary subjects similar geometry or Latin at virtually the same age that the medievals would, though I could be wrong about this. Maybe Culadasa was right when he claimed his book includes of import distinctions that hundreds of thousands of meditators working for thousands of years have missed. Maybe the past was just stupid and anybody moderately competent tin can make gild-of-magnitude improvements. I don't know. It seems like a pretty big claim, though.

(or maybe this is overcomplicating things. It'southward not necessarily contradictory to say that a talented person, practicing an hr a twenty-four hours, could become from "zip math" to "able to solve calculus problems" in a twelvemonth, just also that the average pupil has been studying math for ten years and can't solve calculus problems.)

TMI as well feels optimistic in comparison to another meditation volume I reviewed, Mastering the Cadre Teachings of the Buddha. Its author, Daniel Ingram, counts himself as part of the aforementioned "pragmatic dharma" motion as Culadasa, and the two of them have occasionally cooperated on various things and taught together. Simply Ingram stresses that meditation and enlightenment do not provide many of the worldly gains their advocates hope, and in many cases tin can make things worse. He warns of what he chosen "the Night Nighttime", a tendency for people midway along the path of meditation to shatter their psyches and fall into states of profound low and agitation.

Culadasa has a rosier view of both points. He believes that the "unification of mind" produced by meditation will have its common-sense issue of reducing internal conflict and improving "willpower"; it volition as well "overcome all harmful emotions and beliefs", leaving you with few things to worry most except the looming specter of excessive joy.

Every bit for the Night Night, he doesn't similar the term, and only gives it 1 sentence in the main text of the book plus 2 pages in an appendix. The two pages reassure us that plenty exercise in concentration meditation serves every bit a condom:

One of the greatadvantages of samatha [concentration meditation] is that it makes information technology easier to confront the Insights into impermanence, emptiness, the pervasive nature of suffering, and the insubstantiality of the Self that produce Awakening. Without samatha, these challenging Insights accept the potential to send a practitioner spiraling into a "dark night of the soul".

Since the whole book is about samatha meditation, and treats everything else every bit something that happens naturally while you're doing samatha, this makes it audio pretty minimal; just do what you would exist doing anyhow and you'll be fine. This is a big departure from Ingram, who thinks that explaining the risk of the Dark Night and how to become through information technology is one of the most important jobs of a meditation instructor. Culadasa endorses this difference:

Have I seen in my students anything remotely resembling a "night night" as divers above? Absolutely not. Nor can I call back ever having seen the sorts of farthermost experiences of the dukkha nanas that are appearing then frequently in these online discussions.

There seems to be something of a consensus in the relevant community that Culadasa's type of practice, which is chosen "moisture" (ie includes concentration and jhanas) may be less likely to produce these kinds of issues than the so-chosen "dry insight" that Ingram discusses, and that if you're doing everything correct possibly you shouldn't worry almost it. Shinzen Young is another meditation teacher who moves in the aforementioned circles equally Ingram and Culadasa. I found his perspective on this the most informative:

Historically information technology is not a term from the Buddhist meditative tradition but rather from the Roman Catholic meditative tradition. (Of course, there's nix wrong with using Christian terms for Buddhist experiences just…). Ane must clearly ascertain what 1 means by a "Dark Night" within the context of Buddhist experience.

Information technology is certainly the case that almost everyone who gets anywhere with meditation will pass through periods of negative emotion, confusion, disorientation, and heightened sensitivity to internal and external arisings. It is also not uncommon that at some point, within some domain of feel, for some elapsing of fourth dimension, things may get worse before they go better. The same matter can happen in psychotherapy and other growth modalities. For the great majority of people, the nature, intensity, and duration of these kinds of challenges is quite manageable. I would non refer to these types of experiences every bit "Night Dark."

I would reserve the term for a somewhat rarer phenomenon. This phenomenon, within the Buddhist tradition, is sometimes referred to every bit "falling into the Pit of the Void." Information technology entails an authentic and irreversible insight into Emptiness and No Self. What makes it problematic is that the person interprets information technology as a bad trip. Instead of being empowering and fulfilling, the way Buddhist literature claims it will exist, it turns into the opposite. In a sense, information technology's Enlightenment'due south Evil Twin. This is serious merely still manageable through intensive, perhaps daily, guidance under a competent teacher. In some cases it takes months or even years to fully metabolize, but in my feel the results are almost e'er highly positive. For details, see The Five Ways manual pages 97-98.

This whole Nighttime Night discussion reminds me of a certain Zen Koan. Although the storyline of this koan is obviously contrived, it does comprise a deep bulletin. Here's how the koan goes: A monk is walking on a precipitous path and slips just is able to grab onto a branch by his teeth. A person standing beneath, recognizing the monk every bit an enlightened master, asks him to describe Enlightenment. What should the monk do? As a teacher, he's duty bound to speak, merely as shortly as he speaks, the consequences will be dire. It sounds similar a lose/lose situation. If you were the monk, what would yous do? That's the koan.

If nosotros don't describe the possibility of Dark Night, then nosotros leave people without a context should information technology occur. On the other hand, if nosotros do discuss it, people become scared and assume information technology's going to happen to them, even if nosotros point out (equally I only did), that it's relatively infrequent. And then the have-home message is:

ane. Don't worry, information technology'due south probably not going to happen to you.
2. Even if it does, that'south not necessarily a problem.

It may crave input from a teacher and time merely once it'south integrated, you'll be a very, very happy camper.

I think it would be a good thing if people lighten up effectually this result. This may help (meet attached cartoon).

From this I assemble that Culadasa is closer to the mainstream on this issue (likewise, that enlightenment does not assistance the mind overcome a propensity to dad jokes).

At that place's a lot of drama over this issue, and if you lot want you can find a agglomeration of actually enlightened and compassionate pot-shots that the different teachers are taking at each other over their respective positions. The but insight I tin can add to this comes from my medical experience, where I detect a very similar phenomenon in how many side effects people accord certain drugs. For example, although some people will say SSRI discontinuation syndrome is toxic and scary and omnipresent and a good reason never to utilize SSRIs at all, my feel in five years of taking dozens of people on and off various SSRIs is that I've never seen information technology happen beyond an occasional mild headache if the drugs are tapered properly. I know there are studies that disagree with my experience, simply that is definitely my feel. Part of is is probably a divergence in what kind of expectations (in yourself or your patients/students). Another office is probably a difference in what your patients/students communicate to you. A third part is probably actual differences in the way you prescribe or teach. All of these combined can exist pretty powerful.

But the biggest difference I detect is that a "serious" side effect is the one you lot (or ane of your patients) has had, a "minor" side effect is i that you haven't. If a certain drug works great for 95% of people, but causes a month of constant vomiting for 5%, and so a doctor who's used it a few times and ever gotten the great results will recollect of information technology equally great (plus a rare side effect that doesn't cause lasting harm) and a patient who has been vomiting constantly for a month volition think of it as an evil poison which should never have been fabricated legal (even though most people get lucky and don't take any problems).

Shinzen says that meditation tin definitely cause something terrible called "falling into the Pit of the Void", but that it usually doesn't happen, and that with daily guidance y'all volition get meliorate later on a few months or years, then basically it's not a big problem. My guess is that the person who has been trapped in some kind of weird bad trip for several months thinks of it as a very big problem, and wants everybody to warn about it all the fourth dimension. All of this closely matches the way I've seen doctors and patients talk almost medication side effects. I'm not sure at that place's a difference here except the difficult-to-navigate starting time-person departure of "did information technology happen to me?"

But overall Culadasa's optimism seems justified here. Perhaps information technology'south the only approach to this topic that seems justified. Imagine if there was something you could do an hour a day for a yr or ii, which would win you more willpower and a release from all suffering, with less side furnishings than the average SSRI? Why aren't we all doing it?

For more information, y'all can also check out Culadasa'southward website and the The Listen Illuminated subreddit.

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Source: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/11/28/book-review-the-mind-illuminated/

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