Beautifully refreshing, "we're like whirlpools and music, hurricanes and icicles ... we're seemilgly particular things, yet in each moment, all is fresh and new". I think ill be revisiting this book many more times

Very well written and somewhat helpful to me - a person who does not practice Zen Buddhism. Of my recent reading on Buddhism, this was the most helpful.

Challenging

I admittedly gave up after the third chapter. Makes Buddhism sound even more esoteric and challenging, and selectively capitalizes words like "truth" and "reality." Apparently there's a difference between reality and Reality. Ugh.

The book doesn't led me anywhere. I could only quarter of it, as I couldn't read more. I couldn't find a purpose of reading it and where it is leading to. I don't recommend it if you have already read couple of books on Buddhism.

I don't particularly like the writing style.

"Buddhism is not what you think" refers to the view of Zen Buddhists on how we all look at the world around us and ourselves in it. This flawed view of everything consists of seeing the world, and our minds immediately applying countless moulds - our concepts like "cat", "book" and "rain" - on this view. Steve Hagen goes to great lengths in his book to teach us that the reality does not consist of the concepts we use, but merely is the way it is. All we need to do is to just see the world, and not apply any concepts upon it.

Buddhism is REALLY not what I thought!
The author beautifully sheds light what being enlightened really is not. You might be asking what it is then? The answer is: that is the wrong question to ask!

Here are some key points I've found most important,
First thing first, Buddhism is not a belief system, a follower is not required to believe in anything supernatural. Buddha was a human, who found out that our suffering is caused by our craving to get happiness.
Imagine our life as a beach, there are two types of waves flowing in towards us, "happy wave", and "unhappy wave". For all our life we try to get wet in the happy wave, and stay away from the unhappy wave. We crave the happy wave so much that we do anything to get it, and anything to get away from the unhappy wave. And all our problems, arise from this craving. So instead of craving for this happy wave, Buddhism suggests you to lay down on the beach, and welcome any wave that comes to you, and not to be bothered.

The first rule, is life is painful. Face it, don't run away from it.

Though this book debunked some important misconception of Buddhism, it does not clearly suggest what the Buddhist way is. It is a bit hard to follow at the beginning, and I will not recommend it to complete beginners. But it's much better read once you get some idea about Buddhism for this book to debunk.

4/5 stars (audio)

I'm surprised I didn't jot this down, but in one of the chapters Steve Hagen makes a distinction between Belief and Knowledge.

If I remember correctly, there are two insights packed into this distinction.

First that Science is about Belief, which maybe something materialists like me may not be comfortable with at first glance... but actually kind of makes sense. It just so happens that Science has a very good way of controlling belief so that we're not just believing any old thing, but the bits and pieces that are left behind when we've ruled out a bunch of our other beliefs in a good way.

The second insight is that Science and Religion are often fighting in the Belief category, which is stupid. Science is an excellent tool for managing Belief (eg. we can rule out that the sun goes around the Earth because X), and Religion has no business trying to interfere, particularly since it's got its own territory to tend to (Knowledge). This is a bit like that irritating Science-says-Why/Religion-says-How thing that people use (which sounds really trite to me), but somehow a bit more satisfying.

I hope that without a copy of his book and many months after reading it, this interpretation of his statement is correct.

I kinda like this distinction, but something which bugs me is the word choice "Knowledge". It sounds like this could lead a lot of people to confusion because "Knowledge" for many people is just very strong belief (I don't Think it's true, I Know it's true -- well, actually, you don't Know it's true, you think very fervently that it's true). I wish there was a better word than Knowledge, something that better conveys the orthogonality with Belief.

Hope somebody knows what I'm trying to get at and can run with it...

He repeats himself so many times that it becomes a bit boring after a while. The choice of words should have been a bit more precise - this lack of care for the exact "name" is really a pity because the general ideas are quite interesting.

A good basic intro book into Buddhism teaching how to get out of our thinking & overly analytical minds and how to just observe and be in the moment, be in the now.