In this fine addition to my reading on meditation, Wright describes his experiences at the same place I am doing a 4 day silent meditation retreat next month—the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, MA. He even had the same instructor that I will have. The result for him is a deep investigation of how Vipissana meditation can lead to some level of enlightenment and liberation, to an understanding of the unity of the world and the benefits of adopting a non-self focused outlook. He spends a lot of time exploring how modern psychology’s concept of modules that compete for consciousness based on Darwinian natural selection pressure to optimize ME and compete to get my genes into the next generation, but the real value of the book is his personal exploration of how one can achieve some level of control over the object/sense/feeling/perception sequence that we are hard wired to use to compete and how to modify that process to enable one to accept our situation and even love the other. His goal is pretty basic: spend less time reacting and having his buttons pushed and more time managing those feelings to achieve what I in the past have jokingly referred to as ‘inner peace.’ This is a good book for those skeptical about meditation.