Western psychology aligns with Buddhist teachings from "summary" of Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright
Many aspects of the human mind that Buddhist meditation was designed to address are the same aspects of the human mind that evolutionary psychology has helped us understand. As we saw in previous chapters, natural selection designed us to pursue certain things - food, sex, status - that would have enhanced the survival and reproduction of our genes in the ancestral environment. Our minds were designed not for happiness, but for survival and reproduction. Consequently, we are constantly driven to seek things that we think will make us happy - money, power, status, love - but which in the end don't bring the lasting satisfaction we crave. This is where Buddhist meditation comes in. By systematically observing the workings of our mind, we can come to see these deep-seated impulses for what they are: strategies that evolution has programmed into us in order to get its way. This doesn't mean that we should abandon all desires and live as ascetics. Rather, it means that by understanding the true nature of our desires, we can begin to relate to them in a healthier, more balanc...
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