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

by Robert Wright

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...