Buddhism as Empirical Psychology of Mind

Engage Buddhism as a 2,500-year-old empirical investigation of attention and suffering, stripped of its religious metaphysics, and complete a 21-day meditation practice. By the end, you can articulate which Buddhist claims hold up under scientific scrutiny, which don't, and which sit in the contested middle. The Buddhist claim — that the experienced self is a continuous flow of arising-and-passing events which the mind reifies into the appearance of a stable entity — is structurally identical to how a distributed system represents identity: no continuous "self" of the system, only state transitions and message passes that an observer reifies into an "instance." Distributed-systems engineering has held the no-fixed-self position since the 1970s. Sati (mindfulness — more precisely, clear seeing of what is currently the case) is observability for the inner system: attending to system state without intervening, judging, or acting. Most engineers learn this for production before they learn it for themselves. Upekkhā (equanimity) is idempotency of inner state under repeated provocation — not the same as not caring; the same as not amplifying. And dukkha — more precisely the unsatisfactoriness of grasping — is the operational description of the launch cycle: the launch fails, suffering; the launch succeeds, and the next launch's grasping begins. The point of the practice is not to stop launching. The point is to launch without the grasping.