10% Happier

by Dan Harris

At the end, the meditator arrives at the true goal of Buddhist meditation: to see that the “self” that we take to be the ridgepole of our lives is actually an illusion. The real superpower of meditation is not just to manage your ego more mindfully but to see that the ego itself has no actual substance. Close your eyes and look for it, and you won’t find any “self” you can put your finger on. So, for example, in my backbirdknee jag, if I were more enlightened, I would have been able to see that not only is reality not as monolithic as it appears, but also the “me,” who was noting all the arising objects, isn’t solid either. “The strong, deeply entrenched reference point of ‘I’ has been seen through,” says Goldstein from the front of the room. “That’s Nibbana.” The illusion of the self is, per the Buddhists, the wellspring of all our negative emotions—specifically, greed and hatred and confusion about “the nature of reality” (i.e., that we’re much more than our egos, that we are connected to the whole). Once the self is seen as unreal, these emotions are uprooted from the mind, and the meditator becomes “perfected.” The mind goes from a monkey to a gazelle.