Essay Questions

Summarize Wright’s ideology regarding Buddhism.

Wright writes, “Buddhism offers an explicit diagnosis of the problem and a cure. And the cure, when it works, brings not just happiness but clarity of vision: the actual truth about things, or at least something way, way closer to that than our everyday view of them. Some people who have taken up meditation in recent years have done so for essentially therapeutic reasons. They practice mindfulness-based stress reduction or focus on some specific personal problem.”

Buddhist practices such as meditation results in spiritually beneficial experiences that enable individuals to change their perception of the world. Through mindful meditation, individuals experience tranquillity and reduce stress because meditation permits them to contemplate particular problems that could be troubling them. Accordingly, following Buddhist practices can contribute to outright happiness and contentment.

How does meditation contribute to mental wellness?

Wright expounds, “In mindful meditation as it’s typically taught, the point of focusing on your breath isn’t just to focus on your breath. It’s to stabilize your mind, to free of its normal preoccupations so you can observe things that are happening in a clear, unhurried, less reactive way. And “things that are happening” emphatically includes things happening inside your mind. Feelings arise with you-sadness, anxiety, annoyance, relief, joy-and you try to experience them from a different vantage point than is usual, neither clinging to the good feelings nor running away from the bad ones, but rather just experiencing them straightforwardly and observing them.”

Meditation transforms how one mentally relates to his or her feelings. Once the mind is settled on meditation, it evaluates and dissects all the feelings lucidly. Meditation gives one the opportunity of assessing his or her feelings from a vantage position that results in the determination of the positive and adverse feelings, and reconciling them. After the observation and discerning of the feelings, one becomes empowered to control them. An avid meditator would not be enslaved by his or her feelings because mediation provides the empowerment that permits individuals to rise above their feelings.

Besides, meditation permits an individual to map out their feelings. Once the adverse feelings have been determined, taming them becomes stress-free. Adverse feelings cannot weigh down on an individual who has discovered them and intends to overcome them. Therefore, meditation can be valuable to individuals weathering antagonistic feelings that are denying them peace of mind.

Summarize the implication of “False Positives.”

Wright expounds, “This is an illusion in a literal sense: you actually believe there is something there that isn’t there, in fact, you actually “see” it. These kinds of misperceptions are known as “false positives”; from natural selection’s point of view, they’re a feature, not a bug.” "False Positives" result in the distortion of reality resulting in the perceptions of illusions. Natural selection contributes to the occurrence of 'false positives'; thus, they should not be deemed abnormal occurrences.