Zen is for poets, Tibetan Buddhism is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.

You can best achieve success at meditation by not pursuing success, and achieving this success may mean caring less about success

Pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure.

By looking at things from the point of view of natural selection, we see why the illusion would be built into us, and we have more reason than ever to see that it is an illusion.

Natural selection didn’t 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.

The conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them.

What causes all the hatred?… human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it’s not a reflection of the ‘real us’; whereas they and theirs aren’t in the right and aren’t by nature good, and when they do the occasional good thing, it’s not a reflection of the ‘real them.’

Our entire notion of good and bad, our whole landscape of feelings—fear, lust, love, and the many other feelings, salient and subtle, that inform our everyday thoughts and perceptions—are products of the particular evolutionary history of our species.

Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns

In fact, one big lesson from Buddhism is to be suspicious of the intuition that your ordinary way of perceiving the world brings you the truth about it.

Why Buddhism is true: because we are animals created by natural selection.

we are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction

I consider tribalism the biggest problem of our time… it could undo millennia of movement toward global integration… just when technology has brought the prospect of a cohesive planetary community within reach.

Realizing you’re not king can be the first step toward getting some real power.

As enlightenment begins to dawn, reality, which had seemed all chopped up, turns out to possess an underlying continuity, a kind of infrastructure of interconnection.

The sense of beauty feels more like something the mind just naturally relaxes into when the preoccupation with self subsides.

To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.

Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which in indestructible be found in us.

We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.

Meditation is an invitation to notice when we reach our limit and to not get carried away by hope and fear... opening and relaxing with whatever arises, without picking and choosing.