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A batch of the best highlights from what Christian's read, .
Rituals give form to the essential transitions of life. They are forms of closure. Without them, we slip through. Thus, we age without growing old, or we remain infantile consumers who never become adults.
The Disappearance of Rituals
Byung-Chul Han and Daniel Steuer
Gelada baboons, for example, might be able to keep their fur clean with only 30 minutes of social grooming every day, but instead they spend 120 minutes. (This seems similar to a human showering four times a day.) Only politics explains why the geladas spend those additional, seemingly unnecessary 90 minutes.
The Elephant in the Brain
Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson
Yet the most momentous interaction, I think, began in the mid-nineteenth century, with the theory of natural selection. For more than two millennia, Buddhism had been studying how the human mind is programmed to react to its environment, how exactly the “conditioning” works. Now, with Darwin’s theory, we understood what had done the programming. And over the ensuing century and a half, as Darwinian theory matured and evidence accumulated, we got a clearer and clearer idea of the details of that programming. I think all of this puts us in a position to approach nirvana from a whole new angle, to mount a new kind of argument in defense of the basic validity of Buddhist enlightenment. That is the subject of the next chapter.
Why Buddhism Is True
Robert Wright
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