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

by Robert Wright

(Two of the most common Western conceptions of Buddhism—that it’s atheistic and that it revolves around meditation—are wrong; most Asian Buddhists do believe in gods, though not an omnipotent creator God, and don’t meditate.)

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.

“Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.”

To live mindfully is to pay attention to, to be “mindful of” what’s happening in the here and now and to experience it in a clear, direct way, unclouded by various mental obfuscations. Stop and smell the roses.

Buddhism offers an explicit diagnosis of the problem and a cure. And the cure, when it works, brings not just happiness but clarity of vision: the actual truth about things, or at least something way, way closer to that than our everyday view of them.

This is something that can happen again and again via meditation: accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness.

Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.

In fact, one of the take-home lessons of Buddhist philosophy is that feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we’d often be better off. Learning to do that is a big part of what mindfulness meditation is about.

Still, saying that it works isn’t the same as saying that it’s intellectually valid. Just because being less reactive to some of your feelings makes you happier doesn’t mean it brings a truer apprehension of the world. Maybe this less reactive stance is like a narcotic: it dulls the pain by insulating you from the real-world feedback that your feelings provide. Maybe it’s meditation, not your ordinary consciousness, that puts you in a dream world.

Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment.

So we could say that feelings are “true” if the judgments they encode are accurate—if, say, the things they attract the organism to are indeed good for it, or if

If you accept the idea that many of our most troublesome feelings are in one sense or another illusions, then meditation can be seen as, among other things, a process of dispelling illusions.

Our feelings weren’t designed to depict reality accurately even in our “natural” environment

The fact that we’re not living in a “natural” environment makes our feelings even less reliable guides to reality.

Underlying it all is the happiness delusion.

As we saw in chapter 2, feelings are designed by natural selection to represent judgments about things, evaluations of them; natural selection “wants” you to experience things as either good or bad. The Buddha believed that the less you judge things—including the contents of your mind—the more clearly you’ll see them, and the less deluded you’ll be.

Maybe by not-self the Buddha just meant something like “not usefully considered part of your self” or “not to be identified with.” In which case he was basically saying, “Look, if there’s part of you that isn’t under your control and therefore makes you suffer, then do yourself a favor and quit identifying with it!”

This is a matter of nearly unanimous agreement among psychologists: 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.

So if the conscious mind isn’t in control, what is in control? As we’ll see, the answer may be: nothing in particular. The closer we look at the mind, the more it seems to consist of a lot of different players, players that sometimes collaborate but sometimes fight for control, with victory going to the one that is in some sense the strongest. In other words, it’s a jungle in there, and you’re not the king of the jungle. The good news is that, paradoxically, realizing you’re not king can be the first step toward getting some real power.

So, all told, we’re under at least two kinds of illusions. One is about the nature of the conscious self, which we see as more in control of things than it actually is. The other illusion is about exactly what kind of people we are—namely, capable and upstanding.

This idea—that modules are triggered by feelings—sheds new light on the connection between two fundamental parts of Buddhism: the idea of nonattachment to feelings and the idea of not-self.

Feelings aren’t just little parts of the thing you had thought of as the self; they are closer to its core; they are doing what you had thought “you” were doing: calling the shots.

They concluded that what emotions do—what emotions are for—is to activate and coordinate the modular functions that are, in Darwinian terms, appropriate for the moment.

Observing feelings without attachment is the way you keep modules from seizing control of your consciousness. Easier said than done, I know.

We’re back to the moral of the split-brain experiments: people are capable of convincing themselves of whatever stories about their own motivation it’s in their interest (or their “interest” as defined by natural selection) to tell others.

Indeed, if there is something that qualifies as a constant amid the flux, something that really does endure, essentially unchanged, through time, that something is an illusion: the illusion that there is a CEO, a king, and that “I”—the conscious I—am it.

In this chapter we’ve seen how that conscious mind, in addition to hosting this one persistent illusion, also gets access to other, more transient illusions—about career ambitions, say—depending on which feeling puts which module in charge and what perspective that module wants to share with the world.

Feelings don’t just bring specific, fleeting illusions; they can usher in a whole mind-set and so alter for some time a range of perceptions and proclivities, for better or worse.

To see what I mean, just follow these four easy steps: (1) sit down on a cushion; (2) try to focus on your breath; (3) (this step is the easiest) fail to focus on your breath for very long; (4) notice what kinds of thoughts are making you fail.

There are three recurring themes here. 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.

Third, most of these thoughts involve other people. This too is unsurprising, given what social animals people are.

Which is to say, modules that make perfect sense in evolutionary terms: modules that deal with attracting mates, keeping them, enhancing your status (which can mean derogating rivals), taking care of kin, tending to your friendships (which includes making sure they are reciprocal and that you’re not getting exploited), and so on.

Anyway, the main point these meditation teachers are making is the same as the upshot of the modular-mind model: the conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them.

Escaping this drama—seeing your thoughts as passing before you rather than emanating from you—can carry you closer to the not-self experience, to that moment when you “see” that there is no “you” in there doing the thinking or doing anything else,

Anyway, here’s what I’ve noticed about thoughts that intrude when I’m trying to focus on my breath: they often seem to have feelings attached to them.

In all of these cases, the feelings associated with the thoughts will be commensurate in strength to the importance of the thoughts as natural selection defines importance. And when the default mode takes over—when your mind isn’t focused on talking to someone or reading a book or playing a sport or some other immersive task—it is the most “important” thoughts, the ones labeled with the strongest feelings, that get priority.

Mindfulness meditation is, among other things, an attempt to give the calm passions more power and give the violent passions less power.

After a few minutes of conversation I felt I got her gist. I asked, “So the idea is that everything meaningful about the world is something we impose on it?” She answered, “Exactly.”

We build stories on stories on stories, and the problem with the stories begins at their foundation. Mindfulness meditation is, among other things, a tool for examining our stories carefully, from the ground up, so that we can, if we choose, separate truth from fabrication.

Meditation can weaken the link between perceptions and thoughts, on the one hand, and the feelings, the affective resonances, that typically accompany them on the other.

And feelings infuse things with essence.

or, to use the ancient Pali word for loving-kindness, metta meditation.

In fact, you might say that not seeing essence and not having preconceptions are one and the same, because the essence we perceive in things is a preconception about them that has been programmed into our brain. These preconceptions typically get us to react to things in ways that are in some sense expedient, but not necessarily in ways that involve a true understanding of them.

Then he got serious again. “But I would say that in my opinion, my experience, as one continues to practice the Buddhist path, it enriches the emotional life, so that one becomes emotionally more sensitive, more happy and joyful.

After all, one virtue of mindfulness meditation is that experiencing your feelings with care and clarity, rather than following them reflexively and uncritically, lets you choose which ones to follow—like, say, joy, delight, and love. And this selective engagement with feelings, this weakened obedience to them, can in principle include the feelings that shape the essence we see in things and people.

In other words: nothing possesses inherent existence; nothing contains all the ingredients of ongoing existence within itself; nothing is self-sufficient. Hence the idea of emptiness: all things are empty of inherent, independent existence.

In Hindu thought, specifically within a Hindu school of thought known as Advaita Vedanta, there is the idea that the individual self or soul is actually just a part of what you might call a universal soul. To put the proposition in Hindu terminology: atman (the self or soul) is brahman (the universal soul). Now, to say that atman is anything at all—brahman, whatever—is to say that atman exists in the first place. And the very birth of Buddhism, its distinct emergence within an otherwise Hindu milieu, is thought to lie largely in the denial that atman exists.

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