The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works by Shinzen Young. 

3/5 rating. 264 pages.

Book #50 of 2020. Read July 31, 2020.

This book talks about meditation in not only the Buddhist context but how it has been used in most world religions, the common experiences of practitioners (along with the deeper states that have only been experienced by only a few), and finally what positive impacts this practice can have on your everyday life.

Having been meditating off and on for over a year, I found this book useful in how to deepen my practice. So why meditate? As Shinzen says:

“Because meditation elevates your base level of concentration power and because concentration power facilitates all human endeavors, the question ‘what’s meditation good for?’ has a simple answer: meditation is good for everything. It will allow you to be more present in your interactions with other people. It will allow you to understand yourself better. And it will allow you to pursue a spiritual path more effectively. It will allow you to reduce the suffering you experience when you go through physical or emotional pain. It will allow you to increase the fulfillment you derive from physical or emotional pleasure. It can help you make positive behavior changes and live more ethically.”

This sounds like possibly overselling meditation, but “The ultimate goal of meditation is to achieve happiness independent of conditions.” While it won’t fix everything in your life, the concentration and equanimity that is honed by meditating will certainly make your life better outside of meditation if you focus and let it.

I think this book is probably best for current meditators and not as an introduction to someone new – I might start with Wherever You Go, There You Are, if you’re looking for a basic, but amazing introduction! While the second half of this book gets a little monotonous and out there, the first half is worth a read for meditators.

Quotes:

“Five decades ago, some very kind people in Japan slipped me the secret: you can dramatically extend life – not by multiplying the number of your years, but by expanding the fullness of your moments.”

“Ordinary experience, when greeted with concentration, clarity, and equanimity catalyzes a process of insight and purification which culminates in the ability to have complete experiences whenever you want.”

“When we look carefully, we discover that the sense of self is not a particle that never changes, but rather a flow, a wave of thought and feeling that can increase and decrease and is therefore not permanent. Because it is a fluctuating wave, not a solid particle, the Buddha described it as anatta. An means ‘not,’ and atta means ‘self as thing.’ It’s not so much that we don’t have a self, rather it’s that the self we do have is not a thing. It is an impermanent, fluctuating activity, a process not a particle, a verb not a noun.”

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