Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

by Robert Wright

I’m not talking about the “supernatural” or more exotically metaphysical parts of Buddhism—reincarnation, for example—but rather about the naturalistic parts: ideas that fall squarely within modern psychology and philosophy.

I’ll try to proceed with appropriate humility and nuance as I make my argument that Buddhism’s diagnosis of the human predicament is fundamentally correct, and that its prescription is deeply valid and urgently important.

they adopted a version of Buddhism, a version that had been stripped of some supernatural elements typically found in Asian Buddhism, such as belief in reincarnation and in various deities. This Western Buddhism centers on a part of Buddhist practice that in Asia is more common among monks than among laypeople: meditation, along with immersion in Buddhist philosophy.

that one thing is getting genes into the next generation.

What’s fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings is the general dynamic of being powerfully drawn to sensory pleasure that winds up being fleeting at best. One of the Buddha’s main messages was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly and leave us thirsting for more. We spend our time looking for the next gratifying thing—the next powdered-sugar doughnut, the next sexual encounter, the next status-enhancing promotion, the next online purchase. But the thrill always fades, and it always leaves us wanting more.

dukkha, could, for some purposes, be translated as “unsatisfactoriness.”

Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.

knowing the truth about your situation, at least in the form that evolutionary psychology provides it, doesn’t necessarily make your life any better. In fact, it can actually make it worse. You’re still stuck in the natural human cycle of ultimately futile pleasure-seeking—what psychologists sometimes call “the hedonic treadmill”—but now you have new reason to see the absurdity of it.

meditation may help you lengthen your attention span, dampen your rage, and view your fellow human beings less judgmentally.

feelings was: to get organisms to approach things or avoid things that are, respectively, good for them or bad for them. Nutrients, for example, keep organisms alive, so natural selection favored genes that gave organisms feelings that led them to approach things containing nutrients—that is, food. (You may be familiar with such feelings.) Things that harm or kill organisms, in contrast, are best avoided, so natural selection gave organisms feelings that inclined them to avoid such things—feelings of aversion. To approach or to avoid is the most elemental behavioral decision there is, and feelings seem to be the tool natural selection used to get organisms to make what, by natural selection’s lights, was the right decision.

This is a reminder that natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.

In this sense our social anxieties can be considered “natural.” But they’re operating in a very different environment from the environment they were “designed” for, and this fact may explain why they’re often unproductive, sponsoring illusions that are of no value at all.

This class of illusions, “natural” illusions, helps explain a lot of distortions in our apprehension of the world, especially the social world: warped ideas about ourselves, about our friends, our kin, our enemies, our casual acquaintances, and even strangers. (Which about covers it, right?)

When the default mode network subsides—when the mind stops wandering—it can be a good feeling. There can be a sense of liberation from your chattering mind, a sense of peace, even deep peace. You may not get this feeling every time you meditate, but for some people it happens often enough that it’s one of the main inducements to get back on the cushion the next day, part of the positive reinforcement that sustains the practice.

The anxiety came to seem like something I was observing as much as feeling, something I was experiencing with dispassion. Maybe the Buddha would say that my consciousness had ceased to be “engaged” with the anxiety.

the conscious self is not some all-powerful executive authority. In fact, according to modern psychology, the conscious self has even less power than Aggivessana attributed to it after the Buddha clarified his thinking.

The split-brain experiments powerfully demonstrated the capacity of the conscious self to convince itself that it’s calling the shots when it’s not.

Psychologists have devised various ways to get people to do things without being aware of why they’re doing them. A common technique is to present information subliminally—for example, to flash a word or an image on a screen for a small fraction of a second, not long enough for conscious awareness to set in.

On the average four-person team, the sum of the claimed credit was 140 percent. The key word in the previous sentence is credit. When team efforts fail, our perceived contribution to the outcome shrinks.

Our egocentric biases are aided and abetted by the way memory works. Though certain painful events get seared into our memories—perhaps so we can avoid repeating the mistakes that led to them—we are on balance more likely to remember events that reflect favorably on us than those that don’t. And we remember positive experiences in greater detail than negative experiences, as if the positive events are specially primed for sharing with the public in rich detail.

So if we reshape the story a bit each time—omitting inconvenient facts, exaggerating convenient ones—we can, over time, transform our actual belief about what happened. Which presumably makes it easier to convince others that our story is true.

But note that both kinds of people were wrong; their particular personalities had steered them toward different kinds of illusions, but in both cases illusion is the operative word.

First, these thoughts involve the past and future, not the present; the one thing you’re not doing while having these thoughts is paying attention to what’s actually going on in the real world at this moment. Second, all of these thoughts involve you. By default, we think mainly self-referential thoughts. This is unsurprising, given that natural selection designed the brain to focus on our interests (at least, our “interests” as natural selection defined them). Third, most of these thoughts involve other people. This too is unsurprising, given what social animals people are.

“Let me see if I have this right. During meditation, you can begin to see that . . . whereas you might have thought all your life that you’re thinking thoughts—the thing you think of as ‘you’ is thinking thoughts—it’s closer to being the case that the thoughts try to capture you, the thing you think of as ‘you.’ ”

the conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them. And that reception, it seems, is the part of the process Goldstein had observed with much more objectivity and clarity than I’d been able to muster—the part when the thoughts enter conscious awareness, the part when they “bubble up.”

If everyone you know finds out that you’ve been cheating on your spouse, you can’t just say “I was driven by sexual urges that were designed by natural selection to maximize genetic legacy.”

“consulting” may actually mean consulting: seeking guidance.

It’s in this way that, in a modern environment, gratification can reinforce behaviors quite different from the kinds of behaviors it was designed to reinforce.

“So the idea is that everything meaningful about the world is something we impose on it?” She answered, “Exactly.”

human beings are automatic evaluators. We tend to assign adjectives to nouns, whether consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly.

machinery in my mind that assigns feelings to things was originally designed to maximize genetic proliferation.

People liked the $90 version better. No surprise there. What was interesting was what their brains did as they made these evaluations. When they drank wine from the $90 bottle, there was more activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex—the mOFC—than when they drank the same wine with a $10 label affixed. The mOFC is a part of the brain whose activity is correlated with pleasure of various kinds

Decades of social psychology experiments have shed light on how that machinery works. For starters, it works fast. We start sizing people up the moment we first encounter them, and in some cases we can do a good job on the basis of little evidence. For example, if you show people a short videotape of someone talking or engaging in social interaction and then ask them to assess something about the person—her professional competence, for example, or her status—the assessments match up pretty well with more objective measurements. That holds true even when there’s no audio, so that all the cues are nonverbal. And a judgment rendered after thirty seconds is almost as likely to be accurate as a judgment rendered after five minutes.

Scientists have found that by replacing the gut bacteria in shy, anxious mice with bacteria from gregarious mice, they can make the shy mice gregarious.

I had dialogues with brain scientists and serious meditators on a website I run called Bloggingheads.tv, and I wove excerpts of the videos into my online lectures. One excerpt started something of a controversy in the course’s discussion forum.

The human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it.

Science, in its displacement of traditionally religious worldviews, is sometimes said to have brought on the “disenchantment” of the world, draining it of magic.

For more than two millennia, Buddhism had been studying how the human mind is programmed to react to its environment, how exactly the “conditioning” works. Now, with Darwin’s theory, we understood what had done the programming. And

just think of yourself as fighting your creator, natural selection. After all, natural selection, like the robot overlords, engineered the delusions that control us; it built them into our brains. If you’re willing to personify natural selection, you can carry the comparison with robot overlords a bit further: natural selection perpetrated the delusion in order to get us to adhere slavishly to its agenda.

So a core tenet of natural selection’s value system is internally contradictory. Rejecting it, then, would pretty much have to move you closer to the truth. In the case of the exterior not-self experience, rebellion against the values of our overlord does seem to amount to some measure of enlightenment in the everyday sense of the word: it moves us toward a truer view of the world.

Young pandas like a nice meal of mother panda dung; I think I’ll pass, thanks.

Our entire notion of good and bad, our whole landscape of feelings—fear, lust, love, and the many other feelings, salient and subtle, that inform our everyday thoughts and perceptions—are products of the particular evolutionary history of our species.

At some level, it’s always the same thing: human beings operating under the influence of human brains whose design presupposed their specialness. That is, human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields that control us in many and subtle ways, convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it’s not a reflection of the “real us”; whereas they and theirs aren’t in the right and aren’t by nature good,

I think the salvation of the world can be secured via the cultivation of calm, clear minds and the wisdom they allow. Such minds can, for one thing, keep us from overreacting to threats and thus from feeding the vicious circles that intensify conflicts. Calm, clear minds can also help us soberly assess what animates the threats—and so figure out, for example, what kinds of things encourage people to join or support violent causes, and what kinds of things discourage them from doing that.

“Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world; red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.”