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

by Robert Wright

You might say that the path of meditative progress consists largely of becoming aware of the causes impinging on you, aware of the way things manipulate you—and aware that a key link in that manipulation lies in the space where feelings can give rise to tanha, to a craving for pleasant feelings and an aversion to unpleasant feelings. This is the space where mindfulness can critically intervene.

enlightenment in the Buddhist sense has something in common with enlightenment in the Western scientific sense: it involves becoming more aware of what causes what.

Einstein became famous by asking a similar question in the realm of physics. He acknowledged that our intuitions about the physical world—about how fast objects move, for example—work fine for the purpose of steering each of us through that world. After all, for practical purposes, what matters is how fast things are moving in relation to us. But, he said, if you want a deeper understanding of physics, you need to detach yourself from your particular perspective—from any particular perspective—and ask: Suppose I occupied no vantage point? Since I wouldn’t be able to ask how fast things are moving relative to me, what exactly would it mean to ask how fast things are moving? Questions like this led him to the theory of relativity and the realization that E=mc2.

As enlightenment begins to dawn, reality, which had seemed all chopped up, turns out to possess an underlying continuity, a kind of infrastructure of interconnection. Some people call it emptiness, others call it unity, but all agree that it looks less sharply fragmented than it looked before they got the picture.

John Keats’s famous verse, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

there is a close enough association between the psychological dynamics that make us suffer and the psychological dynamics that make us behave badly toward people that the Buddhist prescription for lessening or ending suffering will tend to make us not just happier but better people.