Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

Nurturing your own development isn’t selfish. It’s actually a great gift to other people.

The remedy is not to suppress negative experiences; when they happen, they happen. Rather, it is to foster positive experiences—and in particular, to take them in so they become a permanent part of you.

All joy in this world comes from wanting others to be happy, and all suffering in this world comes from wanting only oneself to be happy. —Shantideva

Only we humans worry about the future, regret the past, and blame ourselves for the present.

It’s easy to be kind when others treat you well. The challenge is to preserve your loving-kindness when they treat you badly—to preserve goodwill in the face of ill will.

[I]f you can be with the pleasant without chasing after it, with the unpleasant without resisting it, and with the neutral without ignoring it - [...] that is an incredible [...] freedom.

Taking in the good is not about putting a happy shiny face on everything, nor is it about turning away from the hard things in life. It's about nourishing well-being, contentment, and peace inside that are refuges you can always come from and return to.

How about making a personal commitment never to go to sleep without having meditated that day, even if for just one minute?

Every time you take in the good, you build a little bit of neural structure. Doing this a few times a day—for months and even years—will gradually change your brain, and how you feel and act, in far-reaching ways.

Resentment is when I take poison and wait for you to die.

First darts are unpleasant to be sure. But then we add our reactions to them. These reactions are “second darts”—the ones we throw ourselves. Most of our suffering comes from second darts.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each [person’s] life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm any hostility. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It’s a remarkable fact that the people who have gone the very deepest into the mind—the sages and saints of every religious tradition—all say essentially the same thing: your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That.

It's impossible to change the past or the present: you can only accept all that as it is.

Stage one—you’re caught in a second-dart reaction and don’t even realize it: your partner forgets to bring milk home and you complain angrily without seeing that your reaction is over the top. Stage two—you realize you’ve been hijacked by greed or hatred (in the broadest sense), but cannot help yourself: internally you’re squirming, but you can’t stop grumbling bitterly about the milk. Stage three—some aspect of the reaction arises, but you don’t act it out: you feel irritated but remind yourself that your partner does a lot for you already and getting cranky will just make things worse. Stage four—the reaction doesn’t even come up, and sometimes you forget you ever had the issue: you understand that there’s no milk, and you calmly figure out what to do now with your partner. In education, these are known succinctly as unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. They’re useful

Whatever positive facts you find, bring a mindful awareness to them—open up to them and let them affect you. It’s like sitting down to a banquet: don’t just look at it—dig in!

Three Poisons: greed makes me rigid about how I want things to be, hatred gets me all bothered and angry, and delusion tricks me into taking the situation personally. Saddest

Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them. —Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche Some

To become happier, wiser, and more loving, sometimes you have to swim against ancient currents within your nervous system. For example, in some ways the three pillars of practice are unnatural: virtue restrains emotional reactions that worked well on the Serengeti, mindfulness decreases external vigilance, and wisdom cuts through beliefs that once helped us survive.

See the collateral damage—the suffering—that results when you cling to your desires and opinions or take things personally. Over the long haul, most of what we argue about with others really doesn’t matter that much.

Love and hate: they live and tumble together in every heart, like wolf cubs tussling in a cave. There is no killing the wolf of hate; the aversion in such an attempt would actually create what you’re trying to destroy. But you can watch that wolf carefully, keep it tethered, and limit its alarm, righteousness, grievances, resentments, contempt, and prejudice. Meanwhile, keep nourishing and encouraging the wolf of love.

It helps to remember that kindness is its own reward, that consequences often come to others without you needing to bring justice to them yourself, and that you can be assertive without falling into ill will.

bring to mind the feeling of being with someone who loves you, while calling up heartfelt emotions such as gratitude or fondness. Next, bring empathy to the difficulties of the other person. Opening to his (even subtle) suffering, let sympathy and goodwill naturally arise. (These steps flow together in actual practice.) Then, in your mind, offer explicit wishes, such as May you not suffer.

most of the shaping of your mind remains forever unconscious. This is called implicit memory, and it includes your expectations, models of relationships, emotional tendencies, and general outlook. Implicit memory establishes the interior landscape of your mind—what it feels like to be you—based on the slowly accumulating residues of lived experience. In

One way the self grows is by equating itself to things—by identifying with them. Unfortunately, when you identify with something, you make its fate your own—and yet, everything in this world ultimately ends. So be mindful of how you identify with positions, objects, and people.

If you can break the link between feeling tones and craving—if you can be with the pleasant without chasing after it, with the unpleasant without resisting it, and with the neutral without ignoring it—then you have cut the chain of suffering, at least for a time.

Equanimity is neither apathy nor indifference: you are warmly engaged with the world but not troubled by it. Through its nonreactivity, it creates a great space for compassion, loving-kindness, and joy at the good fortune of others.

Positive experiences can also be used to soothe, balance, and even replace negative ones. When two things are held in mind at the same time, they start to connect with each other. That’s one reason why talking about hard things with someone who’s supportive can be so healing: painful feelings and memories get infused with the comfort, encouragement, and closeness you experience with the other person.

It’s sometimes said that the greatest remaining scientific questions are: What caused the Big Bang? What is the grand unified theory that integrates quantum mechanics and general relativity? And what is the relationship between the mind and the brain, especially regarding conscious experience?

your fundamental nature is pure, conscious, peaceful, radiant, loving, and wise, and it is joined in mysterious ways with the ultimate underpinnings of reality, by whatever name we give That. Although your true nature may be hidden momentarily by stress and worry, anger and unfulfilled longings, it still continues to exist. Knowing this can be a great comfort.