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

by Robert Wright

I hasten to add that this doesn’t mean we live in a meaningless universe. Deeply embedded in Buddhist thought is the intrinsic moral value of sentient life—not just the value of human beings but the value of all organisms that have subjective experience and so are capable of pain and pleasure, of suffering and not suffering. And this value in turn imparts value to other things, such as helping people, being kind to dogs, and so on. Moral meaning is, in that sense, inherent in life.

as we go about our day-to-day lives, we impart a kind of narrative meaning to things. Ultimately these...

We build stories on stories on stories, and the problem with the stories begins at their foundation. Mindfulness meditation is, among other things, a tool for examining our stories carefully, from the ground up, so that we can, if we choose, separate truth from fabrication.

want to make the case that feelings play a bigger role in perception than we normally appreciate.

1980, the psychologist Robert Zajonc, expressing what was then a somewhat eccentric view, wrote, “There are probably very few perceptions and cognitions in everyday life that do not have a significant affective component, that aren’t hot, or in the very least tepid. And perhaps all perceptions contain some affect. We do not just see ‘a house’: we see ‘a handsome house,’ ‘an ugly house,’ or ‘a pretentious house.’ We do not just read an article on attitude change, on cognitive dissonance, or on herbicides. We read an ‘exciting’ article on attitude change, an ‘important’ article on cognitive dissonance, or a ‘trivial’ article on herbicides.”

Note, by the way, that Zajonc implicitly equates having feelings about things with making judgments about them. This equation is true to the Darwinian view (laid out in chapter 3) that, functionally speaking, feelings are judgments. It’s also true to the meditative technique of relaxing judgment by critically inspecting our feelings.

The more subtle and cleverly revealing way to explore people’s affective judgments goes beyond the question of whether people are natural evaluators and asks whether they’re automatic evaluators. In other words, do they have affective reactions to things before they even have time to really think about them?

“semantic priming.”

“affective priming.”

The presentation of the prime, the brief interval, and the presentation of the target word all happen in less than half a second.

So Zajonc seems to have been right; human beings are automatic evaluators. We tend to assign adjectives to nouns, whether consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly.

From natural selection’s point of view, the whole point of perception is to process information that has relevance to the organism’s Darwinian interests—that is, to its chances of getting its genes spread. And organisms register this relevance by assigning positive or negative values to the perceived information. We are designed to judge things and to encode those judgments in feelings.

With a species as complicated as ours, it may or may not always be obvious what relevance things ...

we’re designed by natural selection to get satisfaction out of finding the answers to questions, and over time, when I’ve asked how long something is, tape measures have given me the answer. Maybe that’s why I’ve come to like them. Or maybe it has to do with how using a tape measure makes me feel about myself, a fact that may in turn be grounded in my watching various role models use them when I was a kid.

the machinery in my mind that assigns feelings to things was originally designed to maximize genetic proliferation. That it no longer reliably does so is among the absurdities of being a human.

After all, even back in our hunter-gatherer days, the landscape featured things that didn’t affect our chances of spreading genes one way or the other. So there have always been things that didn’t evoke much in the way of feelings.

the perceptual landscape—the landscape of things that we’re paying attention to, the things that dominate our consciousness—will tend to be infused, however subtly, with feeling. If there’s something you don’t have any feelings at all about, you probably won’t much notice it in the first place. It may be only a slight exaggeration to say there’s no such thing as an immaculate perception.

If we think of ourselves as having a successful marriage and wonderful, thriving children, then the sight of our home probably gives off more positive vibes than if we think of ourselves as trapped in an oppressive marriage that has bred ne’er-do-well kids. And so on.

This is a major theme of Bloom’s: that the stories we tell about things, and thus the beliefs we have about their history and their nature, shape our experience of them, and thus our sense of their essence.

very, very quiet—

Hunting wabbit ...

Through our sense of essence we give things labels, and one use of labels is to file things away so you don’t have to spend time on them.

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.

When they drank wine from the $90 bottle, there was more activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex—the mOFC—than when they drank the same wine with a $10 label affixed. The mOFC is a part of the brain whose activity is correlated with pleasure of various kinds—not just tastes but aromas and music. This experiment suggests that it’s also a part of the brain that’s influenced by the story you’ve been told about the pleasure you’re feeling and by the preconceptions this story gives you. The $90 story gets this part of the brain more excited than the $10 story.

the mOFC seems to be where story, and hence expectation, mixes in with raw sensory data to modulate what the researchers called “the hedonic experience of flavor.”

SCARF model leaves out expectation ...

Most wine drinkers strike me as pretty happy with the way their wine tastes, however laden it may be with dubious narratives.

to see a weed as beautiful is to question whether it really should be called a weed.

Sister Monica Joan on Call the Miswife

Still, with weeds—more than with lamps or pencils or eyeglasses—we are approaching the realm of moral psychology, the realm of judgments about good and bad that have consequences for the way we treat other beings.

These moral stakes are the main reason I’m spending so much time on the doctrine of emptiness. At the root of the way we treat people, I think, is the essence we see them as having. So it matters whether these perceptions of essence are really true or whether, as the doctrine of emptiness suggests, they are in some sense illusions.

judging is what we’re designed to do.

No judgment!

This experiment fits into a large body of psychological literature about something called “the fundamental attribution error.” The word attribution refers to the tendency to explain people’s behavior in terms of either “dispositional” factors—in other words, the kind of person they are—or “situational” factors, like whether they happen to be late for a talk. The word error refers to the fact that these attributions are often wrong, that we tend to underestimate the role of situation and overestimate the role of disposition. In other words, we’re biased in favor of essence.

natural selection didn’t design human minds to size people up accurately. It designed human minds to size people up in a way that would lead to interactions that benefited the genes of the humans doing the sizing up.

To summarize, there’s one situational variable that always biases our evaluations of people: every time we see them doing something, they’re doing it in our presence, and for all we know they behave differently around or toward other people. But it makes sense—in a self-serving way—for us to ignore this variable and attribute the behavior we see to their disposition. That way we’ll see them as possessing the essence—good or bad—that it’s most in our interest to see them possessing. Conveniently, our friends and allies will have essence-of-good, and our rivals and enemies will have essence-of-bad.

Hastorf and Cantril turned the occasion into a study of tribal psychology. They showed films of the game to Princeton students and Dartmouth students and found sharp differences of perspective. For example, while Princeton students, on average, saw Dartmouth commit 9.8 infractions of the rules, Dartmouth students, on average, saw 4.3 Dartmouth infractions. These findings may not shock you; that tribal affiliation can skew perception is common knowledge. But this study took a real-world example of this bias and carried it from the realm of anecdote into the realm of data. That’s how it became a classic.

Natural selection designed parts of the human mind specifically to steer us through conflicts—conflicts between individuals and conflicts between groups. Some of our mental machinery is exquisitely geared to that function, including the essence-preservation machinery that makes our enemies more readily blameworthy for bad behavior than our allies and makes it easy to witness the suffering of our enemies with indifference.

In fact, “satisfaction” is more like it than “indifference.” One piece of moral equipment natural selection implanted in our brains is a sense of justice—the intuition that good deeds should be rewarded and bad deeds should be punished. So seeing evildoers suffer can give us the gratifying sense that justice has been done. And, conveniently, it’s our enemies and rivals who typically are guilty of doing bad things; when our friends and allies do them, they are likely just victims of circumstance and so not deserving of harsh punishment.

the Four Noble Truths, which explain the cause of dukkha—of suffering, of unsatisfactoriness—and the cure. He says that the basic cause of dukkha is tanha, a word usually translated as “thirst” or “craving” and sometimes as “desire.” To put a finer point on it, the problem is the unquenchability of tanha, the fact that attaining our desires always leaves us unsatisfied, thirsting for more of the same or thirsting for something new.

tanha to include not just the desire for things you find pleasant—sex, chocolate, a new car, a newer car; it also includes the desire to be free of things you find unpleasant. In other words, tanha fuels not just attraction to alluring things but also aversion to off-putting things. In this view, my annoyance at the snoring in the meditation hall was tanha. It was a desire to be free of the snoring noise.

Aversion to landscaping companies

you desire to be free of something, then you have in mind the goal of creating more distance between yourself and that something

From a Darwinian perspective, tanha was engineered into us so that we would take care of ourselves—which is to say, so that each of us would take care of the vehicle that contains our genes.

Natural selection does not engineer is with similarly strong urges to protect our environment unless we perceive a direct risk to our ability to spread our genes within it

avoid the “three poisons” of raga, dvesha, and moha.

“greed, hatred, and delusion,”

The word for greed refers not just to greed in the sense of thirst for material possessions but also to thirst in a more general sense: to any grasping attraction to things. And the word for hatred can mean not just negative feelings toward people but negative feelings toward anything—all feelings of aversion.

the first two poisons are the two sides of tanha: a craving for the pleasant, an aversion to the unpleasant.

Once Gary Weber, trying to describe his state of consciousness—a state apparently featuring little if any sense of self or of essence—said to me, “It’s a space you can’t imagine bringing anything in to improve it or taking anything away that would make it better.” He was basically describing the opposite of tanha. Tanha’s premise, after all, is that things can always be made better by taking something away or adding something. Part of tanha’s job description is to never be satisfied.

Buddhists who believe in reincarnation see nirvana as the thing that can free them from an otherwise endless cycle of rebirth.

In The Good Place, Michael subjected the four to an immense number of cycles of rebirth; and in the final season they finally figured out how they could finally free themselves from endless cycles of rebirth. What an amazing show!

liberation from the suffering tanha brings—liberation from the craving to capture pleasant feelings and escape unpleasant feelings, liberation from the persistent desire for things to be different than they are.

even if you would just like your one and only life to be better, you are still seeking liberation from conditions—from chains of causation that otherwise shackle you. The things in your environment—the sights, the sounds, the smells, the people, the news, the videos—are pushing your buttons, activating feelings that, however subtly, set in motion trains of thought and reaction that govern your behavior, sometimes in ways that are unfortunate. And they will keep doing that unless you start paying attention to what’s going on.

This has been the point of much of this book. The human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it. It is designed, in a certain sense, to be controlled by that input. And a key cog in the machinery of control is the feelings that arise in response to the input. If you interact with those feelings via tanha—via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings—you will continue to be controlled by the world around you. But if you observe those feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can in some measure escape the control; the causes that ordinarily shape your behavior can be defied, and you can get closer to the unconditioned.

This is the core of the book. For a person with ADHD and emotional dysregulation and high sensitivity and RSD - the ability to intercept the emotions is actually life changing.

less time having my buttons pushed,

Know what your buttons are!

more time observing—

Coaching allows you to observe