Why Meditation May Be Our Best Survival Mechanism

We all know of, or have heard of, Moore's Law. It says that our computing power doubles every year. It’s often the core thesis in discussing how fast technological change is happening. From a practical and emotional sense, it's far faster than any of us can keep up. Faster even than digital natives can keep up with.

From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, which just like evolutionary biology, moves very slowly, the mismatch can be fatal.

What this conflict does is create a kind of cognitive dissonance between the way the world really is and how we, as human beings, weighted down by our evolutionary DNA, sees and experience the world.  In so doing, we each create our own brand of personal "fake news."

Joan Didion said “that we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” But if we found a better way, a more mindful way to tell ourselves those stories, perhaps we would live a better life. That’s part of the idea behind medication, particularly as described by Robert Wright in his new book Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.

My conversation with Robert Wright: