Includes bibliographical references.

Taking the red pill -- Paradoxes of meditation -- When are feelings illusions? -- Bliss, ecstasy, and other reasons to meditate -- The alleged nonexistence of your self -- The confirmed nonexistence of your self -- The mental modules that run your life -- How thoughts think themselves -- "Self" control -- Encounters with the formless -- The upside of emptiness -- A weedless world -- Like, wow, everything is one (at most) -- Is enlightenment enlightenment? -- So remind me why I should meditate?

"A journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness. Robert Wright explained in The Moral Animal how evolution shaped the human brain. The mind is designed to often delude us, he argues, about ourselves and about the world. It is designed to make happiness hard to sustain. But if we know our minds are rigged for anxiety, depression, anger, and greed, what do we do? Wright locates the answer in Buddhism, which figured out thousands of years ago what scientists are only discovering now. Buddhism holds that human suffering is a result of not seeing the world clearly - and proposes that seeing the world more clearly, through meditation, will make us better, happier people. Wright shows how and why meditation can serve as the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age. The book combines evolutionary psychology with cutting-edge neuroscience to defend the radical claims at the heart of Buddhist philosophy. With bracing honesty and fierce wisdom, it will persuade you not just that Buddhism is true - which is to say, a way out of our delusion - but that it can ultimately save us from ourselves, as individuals and as a species. Robert Wright is the author of The Evolution of God, Nonzero, The Moral Animal and Three Scientists and their Gods. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton University, where he also created the popular Princeton University online course Buddhism and Modern Psychology."--Provided by publisher.