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

by Robert Wright

Hence the idea of emptiness: all things are empty of inherent, independent existence.

interdependent co-arising.

“No, no, you’re completely wrong; it’s actually interdependence and interconnection, not unity or oneness.” Don’t interdependence and interconnection point to unity and oneness? I mean, they’re not exactly the same thing, but isn’t it fair to say that the more interdependence and interconnection there is, the closer you are to oneness?

if there’s really not much difference between saying that things are so interconnected and interdependent as to lack individual identity and saying that things are so interconnected and interdependent as to be a single thing.

culprit

Nirvana does entail bliss, but it entails a lot more than bliss—most notably enlightenment.

But is it truth? 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.

In the case of the exterior not-self experience, rebellion against the values of our overlord does seem to amount to some measure of enlightenment in the everyday sense of the word: it moves us toward a truer view of the world.

The argument for the truth of emptiness is basically the same as the argument I just made for the truth of not-self.

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. It is when things don’t evoke much in the way of feelings—when our normal affective reaction to things is subdued—that we see these things as “empty” or “formless.”

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)

useful for the organism, given the...

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.

“Affective judgments are always about the self. They identify the state of the judge in relation to the object of judgment.”

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.

This relativity of judgment is part of what Buddhists mean when they talk about the illusory nature of everyday perceptions. Chandrakirti,

said that what a human would see as water might seem like nectar to a certain kind of god and like pus or blood to a hungry ghost—and would taste accordingly.

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.

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,

sentient

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.

But 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.

enmity

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.

That is, human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields that control us in many and subtle ways, convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it’s not a reflection of the “real us”; whereas they and theirs aren’t in the right and aren’t by nature good, and when they do the occasional good thing, it’s not a reflection of the “real them.” And it doesn’t help matters that these reality-distortion fields often magnify, even out-and-out fabricate, the threat posed by them and theirs.