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

by Robert Wright

to give a talk at an annual conference called Poptech. The night before my talk I woke up at 2 or 3 a.m. with one of my little bouts of anxiety. After a few minutes of staying awake pondering the grave implications of staying awake pondering grave implications, I decided to sit up in my bed and meditate. I focused on my breathing for a while, but I also focused on the anxiety itself: the tight feeling in my gut. I tried to look at it, as I’d been taught to do at my meditation retreat, nonjudgmentally. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, and there was no reason to run away from it. It was just a feeling, so I sat there feeling it and watching it. I can’t say that the feeling felt great, but the more I accepted it, observing it nonjudgmentally, the less unpleasant it got. And then something happene...

look at an abstract sculpture in a museum. It looked like a kind of thick, knotted rope of tightness, occupying the part of my abdomen where anxiety is felt, but it didn’t feel like tightness anymore. My anxiety, which had been painful only minutes earlier, now felt neither good nor bad. And not long after it attained this neutral status, it dissolved entirely. After a few minutes of this pleasant relief from suffe...

It’s possible, in principle, to attack anxiety from another angle. Rather than focus on the feeling itself, as I did that night, you investigate the thoughts associated with it. This is the way cognitive-behavioral therapy works: your therapist asks questions like “Is there much likelihood of screwing up that presentation, judging by your history of giving presentations?” and “If yo...

are lacking in logic, the attendant feelings may weaken. So cognitive-behavioral therapy is very much in the spirit of mindfulness meditation. Both in some sense question the validity of feelings. It’s just that with cognitive-behavioral therapy, the questioning is more literal. By the way, if you’re thinking about combining these two approaches and becoming famous as the founder of a whole new...

Meanwhile, let’s review several senses in which feelings can be misleading:

1. Our feelings weren’t designed to depict reality accurately even in our “natural” environment. Feelings were designed to get the genes of our hunter-gatherer ancestors into the next generation. If that meant deluding our ancestors—making them so fearful that they “see” a snake that isn’t actually there, say—so be it. This class of illusions, “natural” illusions, helps explain a lot of distortions in our apprehension of the world, especially the social world: warped ideas about ourselves, about our friends, our kin, our enemies, our casual acquaintances, and even strangers. (Which about covers it, right?) 2. The fact that we’re not living in a “natural” environment makes our feelings even less reliable guides to reality. Feelings that are designed to create illusions, such as seeing a snake that isn’t there, may at least have the virtue of increasing the organism’s prospects for surviving and reproducing. But the modern environment can take various kinds of feelings that served our

ancestors in this Darwinian sense and render them counterproductive in the same sense—they may actually lower a person’s life expectancy. Violent rage and the yearnings of a sweet tooth are good examples. These feelings were once “true” at least in the pragmatic sense of guiding the organism toward behaviors that were in some sense good for it. But now they’re likely to mislead. 3. Underlying it all is the happiness delusion. As the Buddha emphasized, our ongoing attempts to feel better tend to involve an overestimation of how long “better” is going to last. What’s more, when “better” ends, ...

What he couldn’t have seen is its source. We were built by natural selection, and natural selection works to ...

period. In addition to not caring about the truth per se, it doesn’t care about our long-term happiness. It will readily delude us about what does and doesn’t bring lasting happiness if that delusion has propelled our ancestors’ genes forward. In fact, natural selection doesn’t even care about our short-term happiness. Just look at the price of all those false positives: being terrified by a snake that isn’t there ninety-nine times in a row could take a toll on a person’s psychological well-being. The good news, of course, is that on the hundredth time the fear may have helped keep our ancestors alive and thus led ultimately to the creation of us. Still, we are the heirs of this tendency toward false positives—not just in the realm of snakes but in the realm of other fears and everyday anxieties. As Aaron Beck, w...

Still, I hope you can see the virtue of subjecting your feelings to investigation—inspecting them to see which ones deserve obedience and which ones don’t, and trying to free yourself from the grip of the ones that don’t. And I hope you can see why this is difficult. It’s in the nature of feelings to make it hard to tell the valuable ones from the harmful ones, the reliable from the misleading. One thing all feelings have in common is that they were originally “designed” to convince you to follow them. They feel

right and true almost by definition. They actively discourage you from viewing them objectively.

To put this in more scientific-sounding terminology: I was beginning to observe the workings of what psychologists call the “default mode network.” This is a network in the brain that, according to brain- scan studies, is active when we’re doing nothing in particular—not talking to people, not focusing on our work or any other task, not playing a sport or reading a book or watching a movie. It is the network along which our mind wanders when it’s wandering. As for where the mind wanders to: well, lots of places, obviously, but studies have shown that these places are usually in the past or the future; you may ponder recent events or distant, strong memories; you may dread upcoming events or

eagerly anticipate them; you may strategize about how to head off some looming crisis or fantasize about romancing the attractive person in the cubicle next to yours. What you’re generally not doing when your mind is wandering is directly experiencing the present moment.

being repeatedly, frequently, helplessly carried away from experiential mode into default mode. Every time you realize you’ve been carried away, it’s tempting to feel frustration or anger or (my personal favorite) self-loathing. But the standard instruction is to not waste time on that; instead just note the fact that your mind was wandering, and perhaps even note what kind of wandering it was doing (dreading work, looking forward to lunch, lamenting a bad golf shot), and then return your focus to the breath.

By interrupting the workings of my default mode network, by “snapping out of it” and realizing that my mind was wandering and then returning to my breath, I was diluting the network’s dominance. As I got better at focusing on my breath for

longer periods, this network would become less and less active. At least, that’s a pretty fair guess. Brain-scan studies have shown this happening in novice meditators. Such studies have also shown that highly adept meditators, people who have meditated for tens of thousands of hours and are in a whole ’nother league from me, exhibit dramatically subdued default mode networks while meditating.

When the default mode network subsides—when the mind stops wandering—it can be a good feeling. There can be a sense of liberation from your chattering mind, a sense of peace, even deep peace. You may not get this feeling every time you meditate, but for some people it happens often enough that it’s one of the main inducements to get back o...

That’s why the early part of a mindfulness meditation session typically involves focusing on your breath or on something else. Mustering some concentration is what liberates you from the default mode network and stops the mental chatter that normally preoccupies you. Then, having used concentration meditation to stabilize your attention, you can shift your attention to whatever it is you’re now going to be mindful of—usually things that are happening inside you, such as emotions or bodily sensations, though you can also focus on things in the outside world, such as sounds. Meanwhile the breath recedes to the background, though it may remain

your “anchor,” something you’re fuzzily aware of even as you examine other things, and something you may return your attention to from time to time. The key thing is that, whatever you’re experiencing, you experience it mindfully, with that ironic combination of closeness and critical distance that I mentioned in describing how I had viewed the feeling of overcaffeination. I realize that mindfully viewing some feeling you’re having—anxiety or restlessness, for example—may not sound as exotically appealing as the psychedelic ecstasy that concentration meditation brought me on that summer night in Massachusetts. But there are several consolations of pursuing mindfulness meditation, and some of them have their exotic aspects.

Another virtue of mindfulness meditation is that it can make you more attuned to beauty. This effect is especially dramatic on a retreat, when you’re doing so much meditating and when your isolation from the “real world” is limiting the number of things for you to worry about, eagerly anticipate, or bitterly regret. With your default mode network deprived of fresh fuel, it’s easier to

stay in experiential mode.

This deepened absorption in everyday sensations can change your consciousness dramatically. Birdsong can sound surreally pretty. Textures of all kinds—the surface of bricks, of asphalt, of wood—can be enthralling. During a mid-retreat walk in the forest, I once found myself caressing—yes, pretty literally caressing—the intricately ...

The first time I entered the dining hall at mealtime, I was puzzled as to why so many people were eating with their eyes closed. Before long I got the picture: shuttering the visual field brought absorption in taste closer to 100 percent. The result was sublime. A single bite of salad—chewed slowly, savored not just for flavor but for texture—could bring fifteen seconds of near bliss. So imagine the buttered cornbread!

Speaking of pharmaceuticals: if I’m going to sing the praises of meditation retreats, I’m obliged to mention possible side effects. The very silence and seclusion that frees you from workaday concerns can also give you time to get immersed in other concerns—notably personal or family issues that in everyday life might visit you, and even revisit you, but not settle in for a long stay. What’s more, being in closer-than-usual contact with the actual workings of your mind can lead you to confront issues with a new and perhaps unsettling honesty. Which is just as well, when you think about it. Isn’t much of the point of Buddhism to confront suffering rather than evade it, and by confronting it, by looking at it unflinchingly, undermine it?

The routine business of mindfulness—

observing the world inside you and outside you with inordinate care—can do more than tone down troublesome feelings and enhance your sense of beauty. It can, in a slow, incremental, often uneven yet ultimately systematic way, transform your view of what’s really “out there” and what’s really “in here.” What begins as a modest pursuit—a way to relieve stress or anxiety, cool anger, or dial down self-loathing just a notch—can lead to profound realizations about the nature of things, and commensurately profound feelings of freedom and happiness. An essentially therapeutic endeavor can turn into a deeply philosophical and spiritual endeavor. This is the third virtue of mindfulness meditation: it offers a path to liberation from the Matrix.

Two of the three marks of existence sound as if, actually, they wouldn’t be too hard to apprehend. The first is impermanence. Who could deny that nothing lasts forever? The second mark of existence is dukkha—suffering, unsatisfactoriness. And who among us hasn’t suffered and felt unsatisfied? With these two marks of existence, the point of Vipassana meditation isn’t so much to comprehend them—since basic comprehension is easy enough—as to comprehend them with new subtlety, to see them at such high resolution that you deeply appreciate their pervasiveness. But the

third mark of existence, “not-self,” is different. With not-self, comprehension itself is a challenge.

however ironic it sounds, grappling with the sense in which you don’t exist is a step toward putting you—or at least “you”—in charge.

According to Buddhism, truly, deeply realizing that you are selfless—in the sense of not having a self—can make you selfless in the more familiar sense of the term.

“According to the teaching of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements,

impurities, and problems. It is the source of all the troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.”

The Buddha’s strategy in this discourse is to shake the monks’ confidence in their traditional ideas about the self by asking them where exactly, in a human being, we would find anything that warrants the label self. He conducts this search systematically; he goes through what are known as the five “aggregates” that, according to Buddhist philosophy, constitute a human being and that human’s experience. Describing these aggregates precisely would take a chapter in itself, but

for present purposes we can label them roughly as (1) the physical body (called “form” in this discourse), including such sense organs as eyes and ears; (2) basic feelings; (3) perceptions (of, say, identifiable sights or sounds); (4) “mental formations” (a big category that includes complex emotions, thoughts, inclinations, habits, decisions); and (5) “consciousness,” or awareness—notably, awareness of the contents of the other four aggregates. The Buddha runs down this list and asks which, if any, of these five aggregates seem to qualify as self. In other words, which of the aggregates evince the qualities you’d expect self to possess?

For starters, he links the idea of self to the idea of control. Listen to what he says about the aggregate of “form,” the physical body: “If form were self, then form would not lead to affliction, and it should obtain regarding form: ‘May my form be thus, may my form not be thus.’ ” But, he notes, our bodies do lead to affliction, and we can’t magically change that by saying “May my form be thus.” So form—the stuff the human body is made of—isn’t really under our control. Therefore, says the Buddha, it must be the case that “form is not-self.” We are not our bodies. He then goes through the other four aggregates, one by one. “If feeling were self, then feeling would not lead to affliction,” and you’d be able to change your feelings by saying “May my feeling be thus, may my feeling not be thus.” But, of course, we don’t ordinarily have this kind of control over our feelings—hence the tendency

of unpleasant feelings to linger even though we’d rather they didn’t.† So feeling, the Buddha concludes, “is not-self.” So too with perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Are any of these things really under control—so completely under control that they never lead to suffering? And if they’re not under control, then how can we think of them as part of the self?

When I think of my self, I think of something that

persists through time. I’ve changed a lot since I was ten years old, but hasn’t some inner essence—my identity, my self—in some sense endured? Isn’t that the one constant amid the flux?

The Buddha would naturally be skeptical of this claim, since he holds that everything is in fl...

So two of the properties commonly associated with a self—control and persistence through time—are found to be absent, not evident in any of the five components that seem to constitute human beings.

Near the end of the discourse, delivering the take-home lesson, the Buddha instructs the monks to go through each of the aggregates and say, “This is not mine, this I am not, this is not my self.” He says that a monk who follows this guidance unswervingly “becomes passion-free. In his freedom from passion, he is emancipated.”

“You’re real. But you’re not really real.”

maybe not all aggregates are created equal. Maybe one of them—consciousness—is special. Maybe, after “you” let go of all five aggregates, it’s this one aggregate that is liberated, released from entanglement with the other four. And maybe that’s what “you” are after letting go of the idea of the self: a kind of purified form of consciousness.

What’s more, as he describes the state of this liberated consciousness, he shifts almost seamlessly to describing the state of the person who has been liberated. He says of consciousness: “By being liberated, it is steady; by being steady, it is content; by being content, he is not agitated. Being unagitated, he personally attains nirvana.”

the “engagement” persists so long as the person fails to realize that the aggregates are “not-self.” The person clings to emotions, thoughts, and other elements of the aggregates as if they were personal belongings. But they’re not.†

This discourse—the Buddha’s discourse on engagement—suggests an appealingly simple model: liberation consists of changing the relationship between your consciousness and the things you normally think of as its “contents”—your feelings, your thoughts, and so on.

Once you realize that these things are “not-self,” the relationship of your consciousness to them becomes more like contemplation than engagement, and your consciousness is liberated. And the “you” that remains—the you that, in that first discourse on the not-s...

Advanced meditators sometimes report experiencing a “witness consciousness” that seems to roughly fit this description of the second kind of consciousness, and some of them experience it for a long time. Maybe if it lasted forever they could claim to be enlightened. Maybe this “witness consciousness” is where the “you” that is left over after liberation resides.

But be open to the radical possibility that your self, at the deepest level, is not at all what you’ve always thought of it as being. If you followed the Buddha’s guidance and abandoned the massive chunks of psychological landscape you’ve always thought of as belonging to you, you would undergo a breathtaking shift in what it means to be a human. If you attained the state he’s recommending, this would be very different from having a self in the sense in which you’ve always had one before.

my consciousness was no longer engaged with it in the sense of having possessive feelings toward it.