Carved by Experience is a close look through psychoanalysis and Buddhism into the mind's most basic conditioning: to crave the pleasant and reject the unpleasant. Drawing upon the rich literature concerning projective mechanisms, Buddhist concepts such as kamma (karma) and conditioned arising, personal stories, and real-life situations, the book follows the manner in which this conditioning takes part in the way we experience reality, perceive it, and react to it. It explores the self-reinforcing habitual patterns formed by this conditioning, and the way they are reproduced across...