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

by Robert Wright

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.”