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

by Robert Wright

The good news is the other thing I came to believe: if you want to escape from the Matrix, Buddhist practice and philosophy offer powerful hope. Buddhism isn’t alone in this promise. There are other spiritual traditions that address the human predicament with insight and wisdom. But Buddhist meditation, along with its underlying philosophy, addresses that predicament in a strikingly direct and comprehensive way. 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.

As Morpheus says to Neo, “I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.” This book is an attempt to show people the door, give them some idea of what lies beyond it, and explain, from a scientific standpoint, why what lies beyond it has a stronger claim to being real than the world they’re familiar with.

In sum: you can best achieve success at meditation by not pursuing success, and achieving this success may mean caring less about success, at least as success is conventionally defined. If this sounds unbearably paradoxical, maybe you should quit reading here, because this won’t be the last time we find paradox in Buddhist practice or Buddhist teachings. Then again, there’s paradoxical stuff in modern physics (an electron is both a particle and a wave), and modern physics works fine. So you might as well keep reading.

When I first expanded my attention to encompass the obnoxiously intrusive jaw-grinding sensation, this involved relaxing my resistance to the sensation. I was, in a sense, accepting, even embracing a feeling that I had been trying to keep at a distance. But the result of this closer proximity to the feeling was to acquire a kind of distance from it—a certain degree of detachment (or, as some meditation teachers prefer, for somewhat technical reasons, to put it, “nonattachment”). 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.

Now, here is a question that is fundamental: Which, if either, of my two perceptions was “truer”—when the feeling felt unpleasant, or when the unpleasantness subsided and the feeling became, for practical purposes, neutral? To put it another way: Was the initial unpleasantness in any sense an illusion? Certainly, by adopting another perspective, I made it disappear—and that’s something that’s often true of what we call illusions: shifting your perspective dispels them. But are there any additional grounds for thinking of it as an illusion? This question goes way beyond my own little episodes of transcending overcaffeination and melancholy. It applies, in principle, to all negative feelings: fears, anxieties, loathing, self-loathing, and more. 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.

The question I’m circling around—which of our “normal” feelings, thoughts, and perceptions are in some sense illusions—is important for two reasons. One reason is simple and practical: obviously, if many unpleasant feelings—feelings of anxiety, fear, self-loathing, melancholy, and so on—are in some sense illusions, and we can use meditation to dispel them or at least weaken their grip on us, that’s news you can use. The other reason is at first glance more academic, but it ultimately has a kind of practical value as well. Figuring out when our feelings mislead us will help shed light on the question of whether the Buddhist view of the mind, and of the mind’s relationship to reality, is as crazy as it sometimes sounds. Is perceived reality, or a sizable chunk of it, really an illusion? This question takes us into depths of Buddhist philosophy that aren’t often plumbed in popular accounts of meditation. Naturally enough, these accounts tend to focus on things with a near-term payoff—stress reduction, boosting self-esteem, and so on—without getting deeply into the philosophical context in which Buddhist meditation arose and within which it has flourished. Using meditation this way, as a purely therapeutic device that doesn’t deeply change your view of reality, is a perfectly fine thing to do. It’s good for you, and it will probably be good for the world. Still, using meditation this way isn’t, by itself, taking the red pill. Taking the red pill means asking basic questions ab...

And then there is the famous Buddhist idea that the self—you know, your self, my self—is an illusion. In this view, the “you” that you think of as thinking your thoughts, feeling your feelings, and making your decisions doesn’t really exist.I If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together—the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness—you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems.

Why, and in what particular ways, are human beings naturally deluded? How exactly does the delusion work? How does delusion make us suffer? How does it make us make other people suffer? Why would the Buddhist prescription for dispelling the delusion—in particular, the meditative part of that prescription—work? And what would it mean for it to work fully? In other words, does the elusive state that is said to lie at the culmination of the meditative path—sometimes called enlightenment—really qualify for that term? What would it be like to see the world with perfect clarity? And speaking of the world: Is saving the world—keeping the psychology of tribalism from covering the planet in chaos and bloodshed—really a matter of just clarifying the vision of the world’s people? I shouldn’t say “just,” because, obviously, if delusion is deeply ingrained in us, then dispelling it will take work. Still, it would be nice to know if the struggle for enduring peace is also the struggle for truth; as long as we’re undertaking a task as Herculean as saving the world, it would be great to kill two birds with one stone! It would also be nice to think that when people pursue the path to liberation—use meditation to try and see the world more clearly, and in the process reduce their suffering—they are helping humanity broadly, that the quest for individual salvation advances the quest for social salvation.

As the biologist George Romanes put it in 1884, twenty-five years after Darwin’s The Origin of Species appeared, “Pleasures and pains must have been evolved as the subjective accompaniment of processes which are respectively beneficial or injurious to the organism, and so evolved for the purpose or to the end that the organism should seek the one and shun the other.” This suggests one way to think about whether feelings are true or false. Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment.

So that’s one way to define true and false as they apply to feelings: if they feel good but lead us to do things that aren’t really good for us, then they’re false feelings. But there’s another sense in which feelings can be true or false. Some feelings, after all, are more than feelings; they don’t just imply judgments about whether doing certain things will be good for the organism; they come with actual, explicit beliefs about things in the environment and how they relate to the organism’s welfare. Obviously, such beliefs can be true or false in a pretty straightforward sense.

there are actually two differences between the snake illusion, on the one hand, and the doughnut and road rage illusions, on the other: (1) in the case of the snake, the illusion is explicit—it’s an actual false perception about the physical world and, for a moment, a false belief; (2) in the case of the snake, your emotional machinery is working exactly as designed. In other words, the snake illusion isn’t a result of “environmental mismatch”; it’s not a case where a feeling designed by natural selection to be in some sense “true” in a hunter-gatherer environment was rendered “false” by circumstances of modern life. Rather, natural selection designed this feeling to be almost always illusory in a literal sense; the feeling fills you with a conviction—a judgment about what’s in your immediate environment—that is pretty reliably untrue. 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.

My mother used to say, “We wouldn’t spend so much time worrying about what other people think of us if we realized how seldom they do.” She was right; our assumption that people give much thought to us one way or the other is often an illusion, as is our unspoken sense that it matters what pretty much everyone we see thinks of us. But these intuitions were less often illusory in the environment of our evolution, and that’s one reason they’re so persistent today.

I’m not saying that social anxiety isn’t in any sense a product of natural selection. The ancestral environment—the environment of our evolution—featured lots of social interaction, and this interaction had great consequence for our genes. If you had low social status and few friends, that cut your chances of spreading your genes, so impressing people mattered, even if PowerPoint wasn’t the thing you impressed them with. Similarly, if your offspring didn’t thrive socially, that boded ill for their reproductive prospects, and hence for your genes. So genes inclining us toward anxiety about our social prospects and our progeny’s social prospects seem to have become part of the human gene pool. 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. Thus can we have beliefs—about, for example, the near-certainty of impending disaster—that are false both in the literal and the pragmatic sense: they aren’t true, and they aren’t good for us. 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.

It’s possible, in principle, to attack anxiety from another angle. Rather than focus on the feeling itself, as I did that night, you investigate the thoughts associated with it. This is the way cognitive-behavioral therapy works: your therapist asks questions like “Is there much likelihood of screwing up that presentation, judging by your history of giving presentations?” and “If you did screw it up, would your career really vaporize on the spot?” Then, if you see that the thoughts are lacking in logic, the attendant feelings may weaken. So cognitive-behavioral therapy is very much in the spirit of mindfulness meditation. Both in some sense question the validity of feelings. It’s just that with cognitive-behavioral therapy, the questioning is more literal.

We were built by natural selection, and natural selection works to maximize genetic proliferation, period. In addition to not caring about the truth per se, it doesn’t care about our long-term happiness. It will readily delude us about what does and doesn’t bring lasting happiness if that delusion has propelled our ancestors’ genes forward. In fact, natural selection doesn’t even care about our short-term happiness. Just look at the price of all those false positives: being terrified by a snake that isn’t there ninety-nine times in a row could take a toll on a person’s psychological well-being. The good news, of course, is that on the hundredth time the fear may have helped keep our ancestors alive and thus led ultimately to the creation of us. Still, we are the heirs of this tendency toward false positives—not just in the realm of snakes but in the realm of other fears and everyday anxieties. As Aaron Beck, who is sometimes called the founder of cognitive-behavioral therapy, has written, “The cost of survival of the lineage may be a lifetime of discomfort.” Or, as the Buddha would have put it, a lifetime of dukkha. And the Buddha might have added: But this cost is avoidable, if you address the psychological causes of it head-on.

Some, maybe most, of our feelings serve us reasonably well; they don’t much distort our view of reality, and they help keep us alive and flourishing. My attraction to apples, my aversion to grasping knife blades and scaling skyscrapers—all to the good. Still, I hope you can see the virtue of subjecting your feelings to investigation—inspecting them to see which ones deserve obedience and which ones don’t, and trying to free yourself from the grip of the ones that don’t. And I hope you can see why this is difficult. It’s in the nature of feelings to make it hard to tell the valuable ones from the harmful ones, the reliable from the misleading. One thing all feelings have in common is that they were originally “designed” to convince you to follow them. They feel right and true almost by definition. They actively discourage you from viewing them objectively.

by frequently noticing that my mind was wandering, I was breaking new ground. In my ordinary, workaday life, when my mind wandered I would follow it over hill and dale, not even aware that I was being led. Now I was following it for only short stretches before breaking free—at least, briefly free, free for long enough to realize it had been leading me, a realization that would then give way to its leading me some more. To put this in more scientific-sounding terminology: I was beginning to observe the workings of what psychologists call the “default mode network.” This is a network in the brain that, according to brain- scan studies, is active when we’re doing nothing in particular—not talking to people, not focusing on our work or any other task, not playing a sport or reading a book or watching a movie. It is the network along which our mind wanders when it’s wandering.

By interrupting the workings of my default mode network, by “snapping out of it” and realizing that my mind was wandering and then returning to my breath, I was diluting the network’s dominance. As I got better at focusing on my breath for longer periods, this network would become less and less active. At least, that’s a pretty fair guess. Brain-scan studies have shown this happening in novice meditators. Such studies have also shown that highly adept meditators, people who have meditated for tens of thousands of hours and are in a whole ’nother league from me, exhibit dramatically subdued default mode networks while meditating.

having used concentration meditation to stabilize your attention, you can shift your attention to whatever it is you’re now going to be mindful of—usually things that are happening inside you, such as emotions or bodily sensations, though you can also focus on things in the outside world, such as sounds. Meanwhile the breath recedes to the background, though it may remain your “anchor,” something you’re fuzzily aware of even as you examine other things, and something you may return your attention to from time to time. The key thing is that, whatever you’re experiencing, you experience it mindfully, with that ironic combination of closeness and critical distance that I mentioned in describing how I had viewed the feeling of overcaffeination.

At this point I will refrain from delivering an extended sermon on “living in the moment” or “being in the present” or “staying in the now” or any other combination of those three verbs and those three nouns. With everyone from evangelical ministers to professional golfers singing the praises of present-mindedness, this theme needs no assistance from me.

Becoming enlightened, in the Buddhist sense of the term, would entail wholly ridding yourself of the twin illusions from which people tend to suffer: the illusion about what’s “in here”—inside your mind—and about what’s “out there” in the rest of the world.† Just in case this state of perfect understanding doesn’t sound appealing, I should add that another term used to describe it is liberation, as in liberation from suffering (or at least from dukkha, however you choose to translate that multifaceted word). And yet another term for this state is nirvana. Surely you’ve heard of nirvana? There is some controversy over how accessible enlightenment is. Some people think it’s a realistic goal for all of us. Some people think it’s so elusive that to find it you’ll have to head off to a forest in Asia and work on the project 24/7 for months, if not years. And some people say it’s not really attainable at all. True, pure enlightenment, in this view, is like what mathematicians call an asymptote: something you can get closer and closer to but never quite reach.

Vipassana teaching puts so much emphasis on mindfulness that some people use the two terms interchangeably. But the distinction is important. Mindfulness meditation is a technique you can use for various purposes, beginning with simple stress reduction. But if you are doing mindfulness meditation within a traditional Vipassana framework, the ultimate purpose is more ambitious: to gain insight. And not just insight in the everyday sense of understanding some new stuff. The idea is to see the true nature of reality, and Buddhist texts going back more than a millennium spell out what that means. They define vipassana as apprehending what are known as “the three marks of existence.” Two of the three marks of existence sound as if, actually, they wouldn’t be too hard to apprehend. The first is impermanence. Who could deny that nothing lasts forever? The second mark of existence is dukkha—suffering, unsatisfactoriness. And who among us hasn’t suffered and felt unsatisfied? With these two marks of existence, the point of Vipassana meditation isn’t so much to comprehend them—since basic comprehension is easy enough—as to comprehend them with new subtlety, to see them at such high resolution that you deeply appreciate their pervasiveness. But the third mark of existence, “not-self,” is different. With not-self, comprehension itself is a challenge.† Yet according to Buddhist doctrine, it is crucially important to grasp not-self if your goal is vipassana: seeing reality with true cla...

Ajahn Chah, a twentieth-century Thai monk who did much to spread awareness of Vipassana meditation in the West, used to warn about the difficulty of grasping the Buddhist idea of anatta, or “not-self.” The basic idea is that the self—your self, my self—in some sense doesn’t exist. “To understand not-self, you have to meditate,” he advised. If you try to grasp the doctrine through “intellectualizing” alone, “your head will explode.” I’m happy to report that he was wrong about the exploding head. You can try to fathom not-self without meditating and without fear of detonation. I’m not saying you’ll succeed in fathoming not-self. I’ll try to help you get as close to success as possible, but if at the end of this chapter you feel you still don’t have a crystal-clear understanding of the idea, don’t worry: you’re not alone.

According to Buddhism, truly, deeply realizing that you are selfless—in the sense of not having a self—can make you selfless in the more familiar sense of the term. Listen to how dramatically Walpola Rahula, a Buddhist monk who in 1959 published an influential book called What the Buddha Taught, put the matter: “According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities, and problems. It is the source of all the troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.”

What qualities would you expect self to possess? More fundamentally, what did the word self mean to the Buddha? Unfortunately, the Buddha didn’t spend a lot of time defining his terms. Still, if you pay close attention to his arguments against the self, you can get some sense of what he meant by self—a sense of what particular properties he’d expect something worthy of the name self to have. For starters, he links the idea of self to the idea of control. Listen to what he says about the aggregate of “form,” the physical body: “If form were self, then form would not lead to affliction, and it should obtain regarding form: ‘May my form be thus, may my form not be thus.’ ” But, he notes, our bodies do lead to affliction, and we can’t magically change that by saying “May my form be thus.” So form—the stuff the human body is made of—isn’t really under our control. Therefore, says the Buddha, it must be the case that “form is not-self.” We are not our bodies.

Control isn’t the only property that people tend to associate with the self, and it’s not the only property the Buddha examines in this discourse. When I think of my self, I think of something that persists through time. I’ve changed a lot since I was ten years old, but hasn’t some inner essence—my identity, my self—in some sense endured? Isn’t that the one constant amid the flux? The Buddha would naturally be skeptical of this claim, since he holds that everything is in flux and nothing is permanent. In the Discourse on the Not-Self, he applies this skepticism to each of the five aggregates. “What do you think of this, O monks? Is feeling permanent or impermanent?” Obligingly, the monks reply, “Impermanent, O Lord.” He continues, “Is perception permanent or impermanent?” And so on—mental formations, the body, consciousness: none of the aggregates is permanent, the monks agree. So two of the properties commonly associated with a self—control and persistence through time—are found to be absent, not evident in any of the five components that seem to constitute human beings. This is the core of the argument the Buddha makes in this first and most famous discourse on not-self, and it’s commonly taken as the core Buddhist argument that the self doesn’t exist.

if there’s no self, then what is the nature of the “he” that is liberated after all the things that aren’t self have been disowned? Who is doing the disowning? If you don’t exist, then how can you say of each aggregate, “This is not mine, this I am not”? If it makes sense to say that there’s something you don’t possess and that there’s something you are not, then there must be a you in the first place, right? How can the Buddha, on the one hand, insist that the self doesn’t exist, and, on the other hand, keep using terms like I and you and he and she? One common Buddhist response to these kinds of questions is this: Though in the deepest sense the self doesn’t exist, human language isn’t very good at describing reality at the deepest level. So as a practical matter—as a linguistic convention—we have to talk about there being an I and a you and a he and a she. In other words, the self doesn’t exist in an “ultimate” sense, but it exists in a “conventional” sense.

The Buddha does, in this first discourse on the not-self, talk as if “you” abandon consciousness just as thoroughly as you abandon the other aggregates—as if, in other words, the “you” that is left after liberation is no more closely associated with consciousness than with the other aggregates. It’s a valid point. On the other hand, there are discourses—not many, but some—in which the Buddha seems to sing a slightly different tune. In one discourse, describing what happens after you take the not-self teaching seriously and abandon your attachment to the five aggregates, he says that consciousness itself is “liberated.” What’s more, as he describes the state of this liberated consciousness, he shifts almost seamlessly to describing the state of the person who has been liberated. He says of consciousness: “By being liberated, it is steady; by being steady, it is content; by being content, he is not agitated. Being unagitated, he personally attains nirvana.”

“Engagement” refers, rather, to a stronger connection between consciousness and the other aggregates. Engagement is the product of a “lust,” as the Buddha puts it, that people have for the aggregates; there is a clinging to them, a possessive relationship to them. In other words, the “engagement” persists so long as the person fails to realize that the aggregates are “not-self.” The person clings to emotions, thoughts, and other elements of the aggregates as if they were personal belongings. But they’re not.† This discourse—the Buddha’s discourse on engagement—suggests an appealingly simple model: liberation consists of changing the relationship between your consciousness and the things you normally think of as its “contents”—your feelings, your thoughts, and so on. Once you realize that these things are “not-self,” the relationship of your consciousness to them becomes more like contemplation than engagement, and your consciousness is liberated. And the “you” that remains—the you that, in that first discourse on the not-self, the Buddha depicts as liberated—is this liberated consciousness.

Advanced meditators sometimes report experiencing a “witness consciousness” that seems to roughly fit this description of the second kind of consciousness, and some of them experience it for a long time. Maybe if it lasted forever they could claim to be enlightened. Maybe this “witness consciousness” is where the “you” that is left over after liberation resides.† Maybe. Or maybe we should just acknowledge that Ajahn Chah was onto something: trying to understand the idea of not-self by “intellectualizing” could make your head explode. And maybe, in light of this possibility, we should stop the intellectualizing right here. Of course, your head, though intact, may still be in a somewhat confused state. But I have good news: you don’t have to dispel your confusion right now; you can wait a few years, until you’ve meditated so much that you become fully enlightened. Then, having directly apprehended not-self, you can explain it to me. Meanwhile, here’s what I recommend: Continue to entertain the proposition you’ve probably been entertaining your whole life, that somewhere within you there’s something that deserves the name I. And don’t feel like you’re committing a felony-level violation of Buddhist dogma just because you think of yourself as being a self. But be open to the radical possibility that your self, at the deepest level, is not at all what you’ve always thought of it as being. If you followed the Buddha’s guidance and abandoned the massive chunks of psychological la...

I actually know a guy who has put in many, many hours of meditation and once tested this proposition. Before having a cavity filled, he decided, as a kind of experiment, to tell the dentist to skip the Novocain. He didn’t report loving the experience, but he said he preferred it to the typical post-dentist experience of walking around for hours with a partly paralyzed face. Personally, I’ll take the partly paralyzed face. I don’t think I could enter a state of profound mindfulness in a dentist’s chair. However, once, about ten days into a two-week meditation retreat, I did something kind of like that. A tooth—which turned out to require a root canal—had started hurting me whenever I drank anything. The pain was sharp and could be excruciating, even if what I was drinking was at room temperature. So, just to see what would happen, I sat down in my room and meditated for thirty minutes and then took a giant swig of water and made a point of bathing the tooth in it. The result was dramatic and strange. I felt a throbbing so powerful that I got absorbed in its waves, but the throbbing didn’t consistently feel bad; it was right on the cusp between bitter and sweet and just teetered between the two. At times it was even awesome in the old-fashioned sense of actually inspiring awe—breathtaking in its power and, you might even say, its grandeur and its beauty. Maybe the simplest way to describe the difference between this and my ordinary experience with tooth pain is that there wa...

One lesson I take away from my experience disowning these various unpleasant feelings—the tension in my jaw from overcaffeination, the tooth pain, the anxiety—is the paradox of control. All three feelings, in their initial, annoying persistence, proved that they were not under my control—indeed, if anything, they were controlling me! And, according to the Buddha’s conception of “self,” my lack of control over them in turn proved that they were not part of my self. But once I followed that logic—quit seeing these things I couldn’t control as part of my self—I was liberated from them and, in a certain sense, back in control. Or maybe it would be better to put it this way: my lack of control over them ceased to be a problem.

In any event, Harvey believes, the not-self teaching “is not so much a thing to be thought about as to be done.” And who knows, maybe that was the Buddha’s view of the matter. Maybe he wasn’t really trying to articulate a doctrine but rather to draw you down a path. And that path involves showing you how many things there are that you think of as part of your self but that don’t have to be thought of that way. In this view, the Buddha, in that first discourse on the not-self, wasn’t delivering a lecture about metaphysics or the mind-body problem or anything else so purely philosophical; he was just trying to get the monks to think about their minds in a way that would lead them toward liberation.

Think of yourself as having, in principle, the power to establish a different relationship with your feelings and thoughts and impulses and perceptions—the power to disengage from some of them; the power to, in a sense, disown them, to define the bounds of your self in a way that excludes them. Think of some degree of liberation as being possible—and don’t worry about the fact that this would seem to imply that there’s a self to be liberated. There are worse things than being a self that gets liberated.

some scholars will tell you that there is little or nothing in these texts that we can confidently attribute to him. Like the “historical Jesus,” the “historical Buddha” is hard to discern through the mists of history. Just as the gospel accounts of Jesus are products of evolution, of oral and textual accretion over time, so are ancient accounts of the Buddha’s utterances. Even assuming that most of these accounts were originally grounded in things he actually said, they were subject to amendment, intentional or not, as they passed through the generations. In this light, it’s hardly surprising that there should be inconsistencies and outright contradictions within the Buddhist canon. Still, amid all the disagreement over what the Buddha said and what the Buddha meant, there are some themes that everyone agrees are part of the Buddhist tradition from early on. And one of these is that our conception of our selves is, at best, wildly off the mark. We associate the self with control and with firm persistence through time, but on close inspection we turn out to be much less under control, and much more fluid, with a much less fixed identity, than we think.

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. Aggivessana was just acknowledging that, on reflection, the various aggregates aren’t under complete control. After all, if they were, then, as the Buddha was known to ask, why would they cause so much suffering? Modern psychology is making a stronger point. It’s basically saying: You know how, on reflection, you conclude, along with Aggivessana, that you’re not in total control? Well, you’re actually in even less control than you conclude on reflection.

More than once I’ve heard a meditation teacher say, “Thoughts think themselves.” By the end of a retreat, oddly, that can start to make sense. 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. Of course, it’s hard to admit you’re not king, and that’s not just because king seems like a great thing to be. It’s because we feel like we’re king; we feel that our conscious self is in charge of our behavior, deciding what to do and when. But a number of experiments over the past few decades have cast doubt on this intuition.

In 1980 the psychologist Anthony Greenwald invented the term beneffectance to describe the way people naturally present themselves to the world—as beneficial and effective. Lots of experiments since then have shown that people not only put out this kind of publicity about themselves but actually believe it. And they could be right! There are beneficial and effective people in the world. But one thing that can’t be the case is that most people are above average in these regards. Yet study after study has shown that most people do think they’re above average along various dimensions, ranging from athletic ability to social skills. And this sort of self-appraisal can firmly resist evidence.

If there is anything we’re more impressed by than our competence, it’s our moral fiber. One finding among many that drive this point home is that the average person believes he or she does more good things and fewer bad things than the average person. Nearly half a millennium after Montaigne died, science has validated the logic behind his perhaps too modest remark: “I consider myself an average man except for the fact that I consider myself an average man.”

Kurzban has written, “In the end, if it’s true that your brain consists of many, many little modules with various functions, and if only a small number of them are conscious, then there might not be any particular reason to consider some of them to be ‘you’ or ‘really you’ or your ‘self’ or maybe anything else particularly special.” When Kurzban wrote that—in a book called Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind—he wasn’t conversant with the Buddhist idea of not-self. But millennia after that idea arose, science had steered him toward it. I’d take issue with Kurzban’s suggestion that the conscious mind isn’t “special.” The conscious mind is special, I’d argue, because it’s, well, conscious. As such, it can feel pleasure and pain, joy and sadness. The capacity for feeling, and for subjective experience in general, is what gives life meaning and what gives valence to moral questions. If you imagine a planet full of humanlike robots, incapable of subjective experience, would there be anything obviously wrong about destroying them, or anything obviously good about creating more of them? Still, the conscious mind—the conscious “self”—isn’t special in the way we commonly assume it’s special. It’s not calling as many of the shots as we think it is. It’s less like a president than like the speaker of the US House of Representatives, who presides over votes and announces the outcome but doesn’t control the votes. Of course, the speaker of the House may do...

We all know that we behave differently when in different moods, so it stands to reason that putting us in a romantic mood would change our behavior. But the people who did this study don’t think that the “moods” paradigm is the best one to use here. Douglas Kenrick and Vladas Griskevicius, two of the psychologists who collaborated on the study, see us each as having multiple “subselves”—or modules, as Kenrick sometimes calls them—and they think that in this case which movie you watch determines which subself, or module, controls your reaction to the ad. The romantic movie puts your “mate-acquisition” module in charge. The scary movie puts your “self-protection” module in charge. I can imagine the Buddha liking this kind of language. The alternative way of describing the situation—saying that “I” act differently when in different “moods”—is just a way of evading the question he seems to have been asking: If you have different preferences from one moment to the next, then in what sense is it the same “you” from moment to moment? Isn’t this image of you exchanging one mood for another just a way of covering up the fact that today’s you and tomorrow’s you aren’t really the same you?

So if the conscious self isn’t the thing that changes our channels, putting a new module in charge, what is? Well, the activation of modules is closely associated with feelings. The Shining makes you feel fearful, and this fear seems to have played a role in activating the self-protection module, with its tendency to seek shelter in a crowd. Before Sunrise activates feelings of romance, and these feelings seem to have invoked the mate-acquisition module, with its inclination toward intimacy. 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. We’ve already seen one kind of connection: when you let go of a feeling by viewing it mindfully, you’re letting go of something you had previously considered part of your self; you are chipping away at the self, bit by bit. But now we see that calling this a “chipping away” may understate the magnitude of what you’re doing. 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. It’s feelings that “decide” which module will be in charge for the time being, and it’s modules that then decide what you’ll actually do during that time. In this light, it becomes a bit clearer why losing attachment to feelings could help you reach a point where there seems to be no self.

The feeling of jealousy is so powerful that it may be hard to imagine resisting it. But resistance, strictly speaking, isn’t the mindful way of dealing with jealousy anyway. Rather the idea would be to observe the feeling mindfully as it begins to emerge and so never become firmly attached to it. If you don’t yield to attachment—if you don’t, as the Buddha might say, let your consciousness become “engaged” with the feeling—then the jealousy module presumably won’t be activated. Observing feelings without attachment is the way you keep modules from seizing control of your consciousness. Easier said than done, I know. Should you succeed in severing your attachment to jealousy, this needn’t leave you incapable of dealing with the situation. You can still reflect on the fact of your mate’s infidelity and decide whether it means you should end your relationship. But without surrendering to jealousy, you’ll be better able to determine whether the infidelity is a fact, better able to decide on a wise course of action, and, in any event, less likely to kill somebody.

So we have three things that can change about people who sense a mating opportunity: they can become crowd-averse, suddenly partial to intimate environments; their intertemporal utility function can get recalibrated; and their career goals, at least for the time being, can become more materialistic.† These three changes hardly exhaust the list of things that can happen to a person’s mind in mating mode. But already you can see why it’s tempting to think that a module—or a “subself,” as Kenrick and Griskevicius put it—takes control of the mind when people are in the presence of a potential mate who strikes them as attractive.

So what do we do about all this? If our mind keeps getting seized by different modules, and each module carries with it different illusions, how do we change the situation? The answer isn’t simple, but what should already be clear is that getting more control over the situation may have something to do with feelings. A link between feelings and illusion was somewhat apparent back in chapter 3, when I noted that some feelings are in one sense or another “false,” so getting some critical distance from them can clarify things. But the case against being enthralled by our feelings only grows when you realize that their connection to illusion can be described in a second way. 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. Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns running the show—and, in a sense, seizing control of the show. If the way they seize control of the show is through feelings, it stands to reason that one way to change the show is to change the role feelings play in everyday life. I’m not aware of a better way to do that than mindfulness meditation.

You know the old saying about Zen meditation, Tibetan meditation, and Vipassana meditation? Well, no, you probably don’t. It’s a saying that’s meant to capture the difference between these three Buddhist contemplative traditions—Vipassana, with its emphasis on mindfulness; Tibetan, which often steers the mind toward visual imagery; and Zen, which sometimes involves pondering those cryptic lines known as koans. Here’s the saying: Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists. Like most stereotypes, this one exaggerates contrasts, but it does contain a valid point: Mindfulness meditation, the main vehicle of Vipassana, is a good way to study the human mind. At least, it’s a good way to study one human’s mind: yours. You sit down, let the mental dust settle, and then watch your mind work.

When your mind is wandering, it may feel like, well, like your mind is wandering—like it’s strolling along the landscape of modules and sampling them, indulging one module for a while, then eventually moving on to another one. But another way to describe it is to say that, actually, the different modules are competing for your attention, and when the mind “wanders” from one module to another, what’s actually happening is that

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, that moment when what seems like a metaphysical truth is unveiled. But, as we saw in chapter 5, some people say that the Buddha’s original not-self teaching is best seen not as a metaphysical truth but as a pragmatic strategy: regardless of whether a self exists, by jettisoning parts of what you think of as your self, you clarify your view of the world and become a better and happier person. And this pragmatic strategy of not-self, no less than the metaphysical discovery of not-self, would seem to be furthered by the kind of perspective Goldstein was describing. As he put it, “When we have that basis of wisdom about the nature of thought, then we have more power to choose, okay, which thoughts are healthy . . . which thoughts are not so healthy—those we can let go.”

if the modular model is correct, then the view of thoughts afforded us by meditation is truer than the everyday, unreflective view, the view that has thoughts emanating from a CEO self. And this isn’t the end of the validation that Vipassana meditation gets from the modular model. Just as the mindful view of thoughts makes sense in light of this model, so does the mindful view of feelings. As we’ve seen, in the modular model, feelings are the things that give a module temporary control of the show. You see someone who inspires feelings of attraction, and suddenly you’re in mate-acquisition mode, seeking intimacy, being exquisitely considerate, maybe showing off, and in other ways becoming a different person. You see a bitter rival, and the ensuing feelings lead you to seek something different from intimacy (though showing off, depending on the circumstance, may still be in order). It stands to reason that if these feelings—of attraction and affection, of rivalrous dislike—didn’t get purchase in the first place, the corresponding modules wouldn’t seize control. So one of the ideas behind mindfulness meditation—that gaining a kind of critical distance from your feelings can give you more control over which you is you at any given moment—makes perfect sense in light of the modular model of the mind.

Even that most cerebral of mind wanderings—wondering—seems to have feelings that accompany it. If I’ve sat down to meditate and I find myself indulging my curiosity about something—pondering some puzzle—and I pay close attention, I see that there’s something pleasant about the pondering, a kind of continuously doled-out carrot that keeps me meandering along the path of the puzzle toward a solution; and if I find that solution, I’m given a culminating burst of satisfaction as a reward. As John Ruskin put it in the nineteenth century, “Curiosity is a gift, a capacity of pleasure in knowing.” At least, sometimes curiosity feels like that—like a pleasure so refined that you barely notice it. But Samuel Johnson, writing in the eighteenth century, put a different spin on it: “The gratification of curiosity rather frees us from uneasiness than confers pleasure; we are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction.”