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

by Robert Wright

Remember how the Buddha emphasized, in that original not-self sermon, that the various things we think of as parts of our self are in fact not under our control? The reason they’re not under our control is that—until we’re liberated, at least—they’re under the control of outside forces: they’re conditioned. And remember the Buddha’s emphasis on the impermanence of the things we think of as parts of the self? This too—the perennial arising and passing away of thoughts, emotions, attitudes—is a consequence of the ever-changing forces that act on us, forces that set off chain reactions inside us. The things inside us are subject to causes, to conditions—and it is the fate of all conditioned things to change when conditions change.

remember the Buddha’s emphasis on the impermanence of the things we think of as parts of the self? This too—the perennial arising and passing away of thoughts, emotions, attitudes—is a consequence of the ever-changing forces that act on us, forces that set off chain reactions inside us. The things inside us are subject to causes, to conditions—and it is the fate of all conditioned things to change when conditions change.

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...

This is the space where mindfulness can criti...

I’m talking about a carefully cultivated experiential understanding, a mindful awareness that brings the power to break, or at least loosen, the chains.

Making real progress in mindfulness meditation almost inevitably means becoming more aware of the mechanics by which your feelings, if left to their own devices, shape your perceptions, thoughts, and behavior—and becoming more aware of the things in your environment that activate those feelings in the first place. You could say that 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.

All of this flies in the face of stereotype. Mindfulness meditation is often thought of as warm and fuzzy and, in a way, anti-rational. It is said to be about “getting in touch with your feelings” and “not making judgments.” And, yes, it does involve those things. It can let you experience your feelings—anger, love, sorrow, joy—with new sensitivity, seeing their texture, even feeling their texture, as never before. And the reason this is possible is that you are, in a sense, not making judgments—that is, you are not mindlessly labeling your feelings as bad or good, not fleeing from them or rushing to embrace them. So you can stay close to them yet not be lost in them; you can pay attention to what they actually feel like.

And the reason this is possible is that you are, in a sense, not making judgments—that is, you are not mindlessly labeling your feelings as bad or good, not fleeing from them or rushing to embrace them. So you can stay close to them yet not be lost in the...

Still, you do this not in order to abandon your rational faculties but rather to engage them: you can now subject your feelings to a kind of reasoned analysis that will let you judiciously decide which ones are good guiding lights. So what “not making judgments” ultimately means is not letting your feelings make judgments for you. And what “getting in touch with your feelings” ultimately means is not being so oblivious to them that you get pushed aro...

Underlying this whole endeavor is a highly mechanistic conception of how the mind works. The idea is to finely sense the workings of the machine and use that understanding to rewire it, to subvert its programming, to radically alter its response to the causes, ...

rebellions are energizing! An oppressive enemy focuses the mind and steels you for the struggle ahead.

natural selection, like the robot overlords, engineered the delusions that control us; it built them into our brains.

natural selection perpetrated the delusion in order to get us to adhere slavishly to its agenda. Its agenda being, of course, to get genes into the next generation.

This is the core of natural selection’s value system, the criterion that guided the engineering of our brains. And we have every right to decide, like Neo, that our values differ from those of the force that controls us and that we want liberation from it. Which means, first and foremost, liberating ourselves from the delusions through which that control is exercised.

I’ve argued in this book that when you meditate you may, in various senses, see things a bit more clearly than you saw them before, and that this clarity can grow, increment by increment.

We’ve already seen a few additional bullet points on that list, some of which are more like insights (such as seeing the impermanence of everything) and some of which are more like feats† (such as overcoming tanha, or craving).

I sights and feats ... how many of each can I list?

in Buddhist thought the metaphysical and the moral are linked; meditatively apprehending Buddhism’s central metaphysical claims is said to erode the psychological roots of bad behavior.

It’s this metaphysical-moral linkage—the fact that certain moral values are implied by metaphysical enlightenment—that makes the clearer perception of reality tantamount to a rebellion against natural selection. The particular values implied by this clarity, the values you would fully embody if you reached full enlightenment, are in many ways directly at odds with the values implied by our ordinary view of reality, the values that natural selection embedded in that view.

Are the values of natural selection’s that are being rejected in the course of enlightenment actually false? Yes, in some sense. Consider the absurdity of the current situation: this planet is full of people operating on the premise that their interests trump the interests of pretty much everyone else on the planet—yet it can’t be the case that everybody is more important than everybody else. So a core tenet of natural selection’s value system is internally contradictory. Rejecting it, then, would pretty much have to move you closer to the truth.

the kinds of thoughts and feelings our brain is inclined to have were initially designed by natural selection to help take care of this vehicle containing our genes. So identifying with these thoughts and feelings—owning them, and thus letting them own us—is often just another way of asserting our specialness.

I don’t know exactly what it would be like to have the full-on not-self experience, but I’ve got a feeling that my sense of specialness, of unique privilege, would approach the vanishing point. And if that sense of specialness is indeed false—an illusion implanted in us by natural selection—then, exactly to the extent that it did approach the vanishing point, I would be approaching the truth.

Aside from not-self, the most famously counterintuitive metaphysical truth claimed by Buddhism is emptiness.

The experience of emptiness, like the experience of not-self, defies and denies natural selection’s nonsensical assertion that each of us is more important than the rest of us.

Emptiness, you may recall, is, roughly speaking, the idea that things don’t have essence. And the perception of essence seems to revolve, however subtly, around feelings; the essence of anything is shaped by the feeling it evokes.

At the dawn of organic sentience, when feelings made their first appearance in the living world, their mission was to take care of the organism, specifically to get it to approach things that are good for it (like food) and avoid things that are bad for it (like toxins). As beings got more complex, the behaviors that feelings induced got more complex than just approaching or avoiding—like, for example, yelling at people who are doing things that are bad for you and flattering people who might do things that are good for you. Another way to put this is that feelings, viewed in the context of their evolutionary purpose, are implicit judgments about things in the environment, about whether they are good for the organism or bad for the organism, and about what behaviors (approach, avoid, scream, flatter) will be useful for the organism, given these judgments.

Are those judgments accurate or inaccurate? Sometimes, especially in the modern world, they’re inaccurate. Witness road rage, rampant anxiety, and various other kinds of feelings that don’t serve the interests of the typical twenty-first-century human being.

But note that phrase serve the interests. This whole evaluation, by accepting a particular organism’s interests as the criterion for whether judgments are accurate, is accepting natural selection’s basic frame of reference: that you, this particular organism, are special; your interests are the most important interests, and therefore your particular perspective—the perspective that judges everything in relation to those interests—is the appropriate perspective for evaluating the goodness or badness of things in the world. Is that the way feelings and the perceptions they foster should be evaluated—from your particular perspective, or, for that matter, from anyone’s particular perspective?

Before we go further, I want to assure you that I’m not going to suggest that you start ignoring al...

Up to a point, seeing the world from your particular perspective has its virtues from a standpoint of social efficiency and even social harmony and, yes, simple pleasure—and is a pretty defensible way to approach the bulk of your daily business.

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.

let’s ask a question about essence that’s analogous to the question Einstein asked: What happens to essence when we let go of our particular perspective—the perspective that the feelings that shape the perceived essences of things were designed to serve?

I think the answer is that essence disappears. After all, without a perspective to serve, there would be no feelings in the first place.

As Robert Zajonc, the psychologist whose work figured centrally in chapter 11, explained, “Affective judgments are always about the self. They identify the state of the...

if we’re going to thoroughly follow Einstein’s example, and assume that no single perspective has special access to the truth, then we need to transcend not only the perspective of individual people but also the perspective of our whole species. We need to drop the assumption that the way we look at things is inherently more valid than the way other animals look at things.

for example: The fear instilled in a human by a snake amounts to a judgment that the snake is bad—something to be avoided. But the lust inspired by that very same snake in a member of its own species means the snake is good—something to be copulated with. Rotting flesh fills us with revulsion because approaching it could bring contact with tiny parasites; but from the point of view of the tiny parasites, rotting flesh is the ideal culinary milieu. And so on: stagnant, fetid swamps are off-putting unless you’re, say, a mosquito or an alligator, in which case they’re sublime. Young pandas like a nice meal of mother panda dung; I think I’ll pass, thanks. This relativity of judgment is part of what Buddhists mean when they talk about the illusory nature of everyday perceptions.

Our entire notion of good and bad, our whole landscape of feelings—fear, lust, love, and the many other feelings, salient and subtle, that inform our everyday thoughts and perceptions—are products of the particular evolutionary history of our species. If having sex with armadillos had been the only way our ancestors could get their genes into the next generation, you and I would think armadillos are attractive—not just cute in an offbeat way, but deeply enticing.

I’ve seen people argue about what constitutes great wine, or great art, as if convinced they were really right and the other person was wrong. That’s the thing about feelings, a thing that is particularly true when we talk about their role in shaping essence: they can render judgment so subtly that we don’t realize that it’s the feelings that are rendering the judgment; we think the judgment is objective.

That’s the way the perception of essence works: it smuggles judgments into our mind by cloaking them in feelings that are themselves so subtle, or at least so routine, as to often escape conscious recognition. And these feelings, these elementary ingredients of perceived essence, are by their nature tied to a particular perspective—the perspective of a species, or (as in the Ferrari case) the perspective of an individual within that species.

I’m not encouraging you to let go of the entire repertoire of feelings and thoughts that is the heritage of our evolutionary lineage. Your bias toward snake evasion is understandable if staying alive is high on your list of priorities, as I think it should be.

nineteenth-century moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick when he alluded to “the self-evident principle that the good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other.”

our ordinary point of view, the one we’re naturally endowed with, is seriously misleading.

it is in the spirit of Buddhism to be skeptical of demonizing anyone or anything, so let me say a few kind words about natural selection: it did create sentient life, and sentient life can be a wonderful thing.

if natural selection indeed holds sentient life in high esteem, it’s got a funny way of showing it! After all, the creation of complex life has involved the premature death of lots of living things—

the specialness of self is such a strong intuition. For our ancestors, it was often either them or the other guy, and genes that encouraged them to think the other guy was as important as they were wouldn’t have gone anywhere. So the sense of specialness and the attendant baggage of “self,” whatever you think of them, were unavoidable features of sentient life so long as life was created by natural selection.

here’s the unfortunate paradox: we’ve gotten to a point in human history when the sense of specialness could actually endanger the continued flourishing of sentient life. I

we’re living in an age when information technologies make it easy for relatively small numbers of people bound by a common enmity to find each other, no matter where on earth they are, and then coordinate to deploy violence. Hatred, even when diffuse and far-flung, has increasingly lethal potential. What causes all the hatred? At some level, it’s always the same thing: human beings operating under the influence of human brains whose design presupposed their specialness.

Maybe, given the constraints under which this universe operates, the only way for complex consciousness to arise on this planet was for it to be warped in the process, distorted by the exaltation of self. And maybe, once social organization approaches the global level, the only way for complex consciousness to flourish on this planet—or even to survive—is for it to now be unwarped, or at least partly unwarped.

in the future I could treat my inner critic with some critical distance, if not outright disdain. As much as I had resisted entreaties to quit beating myself up, as much as I had minimized the toll it took on me, the prospect of living without this self-torture now seemed powerfully appealing.

Why do I still meditate? Why do I devote somewhere between thirty and fifty minutes of each day to a practice that will not, apparently, get me very close to enlightenment anytime soon? There are several reasons. I’ll start with the little ones.