as Buddhism is established really as a science of the mind.  It’s based on observation

of the mind.  And everything that Buddha taught can be empirically verified through

your own experience.  In other words, you can test it.  Actually, I think it’s a

very interesting science because you’re the scientist.  You’re not just reading

about what other scientists have done and, you know, confirmed and so forth like that,

but you, yourself, are the experimenter.  You experiment with your own mind.  

What Buddha basically said is that we can understand through our own experience that

happiness comes from inner peace.  And we can explore that in our own experiences and

see, well, that’s true, happiness does come from inner peace.  And maybe even more importantly,

we can also then establish, I have the capacity for inner peace in my own mind.  In fact,

we might even say that through training of the mind, through practicing meditation, you

can see that it’s actually not difficult.  All we need to do is learn to let go of

our unhappy thoughts, and our mind automatically becomes peaceful.  So in other words, you

don’t have to, like, make your mind peaceful, you just have to let go of your unhappy thoughts,

your angry thoughts or your anxious thoughts.  

And what happens through that is that you then begin to experience a sense of peace,

a deep inner peace.  And you can verify that through your own experience.  And through

that, you get in touch then with your own potential for peace or other virtuous minds,

like love or compassion or joy or kindness, generosity.  In other words, you can verify

it through your own experimentation that that is the case. 

What we then discover is that the mind has this incredible capacity for profound peace

or, we might say, for limitless love, for limitless kindness.  That’s where I find

some fault with the – you know, as you’re calling it, the “new atheism.”  Simply

because I don’t think they are paying enough attention to the science of the mind through

which we can establish, so to speak, an alternative science, but it’s equally, empirically verifiable

that there is a spiritual dimension to our being that you can discover through your own

practice, in fact, that there is this, yeah, you might say a divine element to our nature

because we discover that the mind has this capacity for limitless love, limitless compassion,

limitless joy.