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

by Robert Wright

mind.

Indeed, if there is something that qualifies as a constant amid the flux, something that really does endure, essentially unchanged, through time, that something is an illusion: the illusion that there is a CEO, a king, and that “I”—the conscious I—am it. We saw in the previous chapter that this illusion makes sense in evolutionary terms. The conscious I is the I that speaks, the I that communicates with the world, so it gets access to perspectives whose purpose is to be shared with the world. These perspecti...

By and large, my philosophy is Live and let live: if you’re enjoying the Matrix, go crazy.

Feelings don’t just bring specific, fleeting illusions; they can usher in a whole mind-set and so alter for some time a range of perceptions and proclivities, for better or worse.

Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns running the show—and, in a sense, seizing control of the show. If the way they seize control of the show is through feelings, it stands to reason that one way to change the show is to change the role feelings play in everyday life. I’m not aware of a better way to do that

than mindfulness me...

Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.

Mindfulness meditation, the main vehicle of Vipassana, is a good way to study the human mind. At least, it’s a good way to study one human’s mind: yours. You sit down, let the mental dust settle, and then watch your mind work.

One of these steps is the most widely shared meditative experience of all: finding it really hard to meditate because your mind refuses to stay in one place. As I’ve already suggested, to see that your mind is wandering is to see part of what the Buddha meant when he challenged conventional conceptions of the self; if a CEO-self existed, then presumably the mind would obey its commands and focus on the breath when told to. Now we’re in a position to go further and see that observing

your mind in this unruly stage—trying to watch it as the default mode network rages on—can do more than suggest that the conscious “you” isn’t running the show; it can shed light on what is running the show, revealing a picture of the mind strikingly consistent with the modular model.

There are three recurring themes here. First, these thoughts involve the past and future, not the present; the one thing you’re not doing while having these thoughts is paying attention to what’s actually going on in the real world at this moment. Second, all of these thoughts involve you. By default, we think mainly self-referential thoughts. This is unsurprising, given that natural selection designed the brain to focus on our interests (at least, our “interests” as natural selection defined them). Third, most of these thoughts involve other people. This too is unsurprising, given

what social animals people are. Indeed, it turns out there’s a fair amount of overlap between the default mode network and what brain scans have identified as the “theory of mind network”—the part of the brain involved in thinking about what other people are thinking. There’s also a fourth theme here, a fourth thing that almost all of these mental meanderings have in common. Can you spot it? Hint: What were the previous two chapters of this book about? Exactly! Modules! Though the trains of thought that carry you away from direct experience can take you to lots of different places, pretty much all of those places seem to lie within the province of one of the sort of mental modules I’ve already described. Which is to say, modules that make perfect sense in evolutionary terms: modules that deal with attracting mates, keeping them, enhancing your status (which can mean derogating rivals), taking care of kin, tending to your friendships (which includes making sure

they are reciprocal and that you’re not getting explo...

The one glaring exception—the one thought in the list above that doesn’t seem to fit naturally into a major module—is number 5: looking forward to that beer you so richly deserve. Presumably, evolution didn’t build a “beer-drinking module” into us. But beer, like many other recreational drugs, is an invention that circumvents evolution’s logic: it taps directly into the reward center that no...

When your mind is wandering, it may feel like, well, like your mind is wandering—like it’s strolling along the landscape of modules and sampling them, indulging one module for a while, then eventually moving on to another one. But another way to describe it is to say that, actually, the differ...

one module to another, what’s actually happening is that the second module has acquired enough strength to wrestle control of your con...

What It’s Like to Watch Your Thoughts One way to get the idea, Goldstein said, is to “imagine that every thought that’s arising in your mind is coming from the person next to you.” How would you be relating to these thoughts then? His point was that you wouldn’t be identifying with them. “The thought itself is appearing and disappearing like a sound, but being identified with it is something we’re adding.” I asked, “So, then, in meditation there can be the sense that thoughts are just kind of coming out of nowhere, so to speak, almost like voices?” “Yeah,” he answered. I’m always happy to help sane people not sound like they’re crazy, so I added, “Although it’s not like you’re hearing things . . . literally?” “Yeah, correct.” I liked where this was heading. He seemed to be saying that thoughts, which we normally think of

as emanating from the conscious self, are actually directed toward what we think of as the conscious self, after which we embrace the thoughts as belonging to that self. This, in turn, seemed consistent with the idea that modules generate thoughts outside of consciousness and somehow inject them into consciousness. So I pressed the point. “Let me see if I have this right. During meditation, you can begin to see that . . . whereas you might have thought all your life that you’re thinking thoughts—the thing you think of as ‘you’ is thinking thoughts—it’s closer to being the case that the thoughts try to capture you, the thing you think of as ‘you.’ ” “Right.” “They come from somewhere in your body, somewhere in your brain.” “Yes.” So far so good. But then I pressed the point too far for Goldstein’s taste. I said, “But whatever part of the brain or body you think of as you is more

like the captive of the thoughts; the thoughts try to reach out and grab that—” “That’s kind of an interesting way to describe it, and it certainly feels like that. But I would phrase it a little differently. It’s just that the thoughts are arising and there’s a strong habit of mind to be identified with them. So it’s not so much they have the intent to reach out and capture us, but rather there’s this very strong habitual identification. This is how we’ve lived ou...

Though these teachers are inclined to say that “thoughts think themselves,” strictly speaking, I’d say modules think thoughts. Or rather, modules generate thoughts, and then if those thoughts prove in some sense stronger than the creations of competing modules, they become thought thoughts—that is, they enter consciousness. Still, you can see how, while observing the mind during meditation, it could seem like “thoughts think themselves”—because the modules do their work outside of consciousness, so, as far as the conscious mind can tell, the thoughts are coming out of nowhere. Anyway, the main point these meditation

teachers are making is the same as the upshot of the modular-mind model: the conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them. And that reception, it seems, is the part of the process Goldstein had observed with much more objectivity and clarity than I’d been able to muster—the part when the thoughts enter conscious awareness, the part when they “bubble up.”

After conveying to Goldstein that I hadn’t meant that thoughts actually harbor a desire to capture our awareness, I asked whether, nonetheless, they sometimes seem like active things, not passive things. “In other words,” I said, “they’re actors in your consciousness that you’ve got to deal with, and you’re in the habit of going along with them, but that’s not necessary.” “Correct. And they become a lot less active when we see them for what they are. When we’re not pulled into the...

into the story and we feel so many emotions . . . excited, afraid, in love. . . . And then we sit back and see these are just pixels of light projected on a screen. Everything we thought is happening is not really happening. It’s the same way with our thoughts. We get caught up in the sto...

Escaping this drama—seeing your thoughts as passing before you rather than emanating from you—can carry you closer to the not-self experience, to that moment when you “see” that there is no “you” in there doing the thinking or doing anything else, ...

But, as we saw in chapter 5, some people say that the Buddha’s original not-self teaching is best seen not as a metaphysical truth but as a pragmatic strategy: regardless of whether a self exists, by jettisoning parts of what you think of as you...

happier p...

“When we have that basis of wisdom about the nature of thought, then we have more power to choose, okay, which thoughts are healthy . . . which thoughts are not so healthy—those we can let go.”

In the first case—while struggling to focus—you see thoughts capture you, and in the second case

you see them fail to capture you, but in both cases you realize that the thoughts aren’t coming from “you,” from your conscious self.

if the modular model is correct, then the view of thoughts afforded us by meditation is truer than the everyday, unreflective view,

feelings are the things that give a module temporary control of the show.

if you’re paying close attention to this “failure” to meditate, then, of course, it isn’t a failure to meditate—because paying attention to whatever is happening is mindfulness meditation.

Anyway, here’s what I’ve noticed about thoughts that intrude when I’m trying to focus on my breath: they often seem to have feelings attached to them. What’s more, their ability to hold my attention—in other words, to keep me enthralled, to keep me from noticing that they’re holding my attention—

As John Ruskin put it in the nineteenth century, “Curiosity is a gift, a capacity

of pleasure in knowing.”

“Every thought has a propellant, and that propellant is emotional.”

Feelings are, among other things, your brain’s way of labeling the importance of thoughts, and importance (in natural selection’s somewhat crude sense of the term) determines

which thoughts enter consciousness.

Over the history of our evolutionary lineage, thinking has played a larger and larger role in action, but the thinking has always had both its beginning and its end in feelings.

Another thing that can happen over evolutionary time is that feelings are assigned to more and more things. As our species became more complexly social, getting food and sex came to depend on navigating a social landscape, which included goals like forging alliances and being held in high esteem. So making friends and earning respect came to feel good, and being rejected came to

feel bad. This in turn opened up new avenues of thought: figuring out why a friend turned on you, imagining ways to impress people, and so on. Still, this growing web of feelings and thoughts was a straightforward extension of the basic value system evolution built into us t...

“Reason alone,” Hume argued, “can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.” Nothing “can oppose or retard the impulse of passion but a contrary impulse.”

Natural selection has made us want foods with certain kinds of tastes, and has also made us want to live a long, healthy life. The struggle for self-control—in this particular case, at least—is a clash between these two values and between feelings associated with these two values. If reason is to play a role in the struggle, it is only as a proxy for these values. It’s the desire to live a long, healthy life that focuses our reasoning on the link between sugar consumption and longevity, and it’s through this desire that the results of the reasoning can overpower the desire for the chocolate itself. It’s in this sense that reason remains a “slave” to the passions, as Hume put it—and thus a slave to natural selection’s overarching value system.

“There were certain systems in your head that were designed to be motivated to eat high-calorie foods, and those systems had certain kinds of motives or beliefs or representations, and there are other systems in your head that have motivations associated with long-term health, and those systems have certain beliefs about the chocolate.” In the end, modules of the second kind, modules focused on the long term, “inhibited the behavior that was being facilitated by the short-term modules.” In other words, neither kind of module was more “rational” than the other; they just had different goals, and on this particular day, one was stronger than the other.

contest of feelings.

All of this highlights a puzzle: Why does our conscious mind have to spend time witnessing the presentation of reasons—that is, participating in the “deliberation”? If it’s just a show trial—if it all comes down to a contest of power between modules that have summoned whatever fortifying logic might support their cause—couldn’t the whole thing happen subconsciously, freeing up the conscious mind to do something constructive, like ponder the mind-body problem? Well,

recall that the conscious mind—being the part of your mind that communicates with the world—seems to be a kind of public relations agent. “My guess,” said Kurzban, is that the reason your conscious mind observes the debate, including the winning rationale, is so that “if someone ever challenges you or asks you why you did x, y, or z,” you’ll be able to cite a plausible rationale.

So if you’re walking out of a store jamming a 3.5-ounce chocolate bar into your mouth and a passerby looks at you quizzically, you can say, “This is so I can get more work done this afternoon.” Presumably the passerby will then think mor...

Sometimes the social stakes are higher than what a passing stranger thinks of you. If everyone you know finds out that you’ve been cheating on your spouse, you can’t just say “I was driven by sexual urges that were designed b...

will go around saying you’re the kind of person who cheats on a spouse. And of course, you’re not that kind of person! So you need to be able to say something more like “But you have to understand: my spouse had grown emotionally distant and wasn’t meeting my deep need for companionship and intimacy.” Then people will say they can’t really blame you. So it helps to have already heard that side of...