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Excellent article with an excellent author. There are several good points in there, but I’m going to respond to the stuff about obsession, near the end.

When he talks about our obsession with maintaining the self and then about his experiences of a greater self, he slips into claiming the one thing, the greater self, being better than the self defined by our bodies. However, he gives no evidence to why that not-self is greater. He’s talking about a peak experience. He gets it through meditation, but I’ve experienced it in neighborhood clean ups and football games. He says not experiencing this is denying reality, reality defined by Buddhism, again no evidence for what reality is or why these unusual peak experiences are real and sitting on my porch drinking coffee is not real.

In my opinion, it’s all real. He focuses on the Darwinian need to see ourselves as separate so we will want to pass on our genes. Our desires for food and sex are in line with that. He’s right that if we constantly let go of our sense of self and chanted together and felt at one with the universe, we would be less interested in raising children and building bridges. What he never seems to get is that is exactly why we don’t live that way.