From one of America's greatest minds, a journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness.

Robert Wright famously explained in The Moral Animal how evolution shaped the human brain. The mind is designed to often delude us, he argued, about ourselves and about the world. And 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.

In Why Buddhism is True, Wright leads readers on a journey through psychology, philosophy, and a great many silent retreats to show how and why meditation can serve as the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age. At once excitingly ambitious and wittily accessible, this is the first book to combine 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..

Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, Robert Wright, Simon & Schuster, Paperback, 321 pages, $18.99

Robert Wright is the New York Times bestselling author of The Evolution of God (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Nonzero, The Moral Animal, Three Scientists and their Gods (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Why Buddhism Is True. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the widely respected Bloggingheads.tv and has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Time, Slate, and The New Republic. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton University, where he also created the popular online course "Buddhism and Modern Psychology."

CONTENTS: Why Buddhism Is True
	A Note to Readers	xiii
1.	Taking the Red Pill	1
2.	Paradoxes of Meditation	15
3.	When Are Feeling Illusions?	27
4.	Bliss, ecstasy, and More Important Reasons to Meditate	44
5.	The Alleged Nonexistence of Your Self	58
6.	Your CEO Is MIA	75
7.	The Mental Modules That Run Your Life	91
8.	How Thoughts Think Themselves	105
9.	"Self" Control	121
10.	Encounters with the Formless	142
11.	The Upside of Emptiness	153
12.	A Weedless World	172
13.	Like, Wow, Everything Is One (at Most)	193
14.	Nirvana in a Nutshell	215
15.	Is Enlightenment Enlightening?	225
16.	Meditation and the Unseen Order	246
	Appendix: A List of Buddhist Truths	269
	A Note on Terminology	277
	Acknowledgments	279
	Notes	283
	Bibliography	303
	Index	313