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

by Robert Wright

Maybe the reason babies get so immersed in shapes and textures is because they haven’t yet developed their filing system, their sense of essence. In other words, they don’t yet “know” what the “things” surrounding them are, so the world is a wonderland of exploration. And maybe this helps explain how Weber could say that “emptiness” is actually “full”: sometimes not seeing essence lets you get drawn into the richness of things. Another way to put it is to say that in some cases the story evoked by essence is a minimizing story: That’s just a tree or just a piece of celery. But in other cases—the fantastic glass of wine, the tape measure that belonged to JFK—the story is an amplifying story, so loud that it overwhelms intrinsic experience. Maybe essences can be labels that discourage experience altogether, or labels that encourage experience but in some sense distort it. At any rate, that Weber equates having a strong emotional reaction to something with having a “story” about it makes sense to me, and so does the idea that jettisoning both the story and the emotion would tend to leave things with a less distinctive essence than they’d otherwise project. But is this really possible—stripping away the story, the background knowledge, behind your sensory experience? And, if so, what is going on in the brain when that happens?