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

by Robert Wright

it’s hard to separate the valid reasons from the invalid reasons, because sometimes the least valid reasons feel good—and feelings tend to carry the day.

The point is just that it makes sense that natural selection would design a modular mind this way—that “winning” modules would amass more power when their judgment is vindicated. And note that the form vindication takes, in at least some cases, is sensual gratification. If the libidinous module counsels sexual assertion and this leads to an orgasm, then its counsel will carry more weight next time.

It’s in this way that, in a modern environment, gratification can reinforce behaviors quite different from the kinds of behaviors it was designed to reinforce.

a module getting stronger and stronger rather than as some all-purpose muscle called “self-discipline” getting weaker and weaker.

Brewer said the basic idea is to not fight the urge to, say, smoke a cigarette. That doesn’t mean you succumb to the urge and light up a cigarette. It just means you don’t try to push the urge out of your mind. Rather, you follow the same mindfulness technique that you’d apply to other bothersome feelings—anxiety, resentment,

melancholy, hatred. You just calmly (or as calmly as possible, under the circumstances) examine the feeling. What part of your body is the urge felt in? What is the texture of the urge? Is it sharp? Dull and heavy? The more you do that, the less the urge seems a part of you; you’ve exploited the basic irony of mindfulness meditation: getting close enough to feelings to take a good look at them winds up giving you a kind of critical distance from them. Their grip on you loosens; if it loosens enough, they’re no longer a part of you.

There’s an acronym used to describe this technique: RAIN. First you Recognize the feeling. Then you Accept the feeling (rather than try to drive it away). Then you Investigate the feeling and its relationship to your body. Finally, the N stands for Nonidentification, or, equivalently, Nonattachment. Which is a nice note to end on, since...

Brewer described this therapy as...

not “feeding” the urge to smoke. He said, “If you don’t feed a stray cat, it quits coming to your door.” I like this metaphor, with its suggestion that, somewhere within you, there’s an animal that needs taming. After all, the modular model of the mind holds that, in a sense, there are a number of animals in your mind—modules that have a certain amount of independence and sometimes struggle with one another for dominance. What’s more, I’ve just suggested that, as with animals, the behavior of modules is shaped by positive reinforcement; if they keep getting rewarded for something, they’ll do it more and more. That, apparently, is what addiction is. A rat...

This comparison puts a finer point on the difference between fighting the urge to smoke and addressing th...

urge is like pushing the rat away every time it approaches the bar. This works in the short run; if the rat can’t press the bar, no food pellet will come out, and maybe after a while the rat will even give up on approaching the bar. Still, whenever the rat is allowed to get near the bar, it will press it, because it has seen nothing to indicate that pressing the bar won’t bring food. Treating the urge mindfully, I’d say, is more like arranging it so that when the rat presses the bar, no food pellets come out. The urge—the thing that’s analogous to pressing the bar—is allowed to fully form, yet it doesn’t get reinforced, because your mindful inspection of it has deprived it of its force an...

For example: right now I’m focused on writing this sentence, and writing this sentence feels fine; I like to succeed at things, and so long as this sentence keeps unfolding on my computer screen, I’m succeeding at something! But if I get to a point where I can’t decide what sentence should go next, I’ll start feeling a bit uncomfortable. And if it isn’t just a question of how to word the next sentence—if it’s a larger question about what the next sentence should say, and indeed where this whole stream of writing should head—I feel really uncomfortable. I like fiddling with sentences, but I hate pondering structural problems. But wait—there’s an alternative to the discomfort of confronting an unwritten and not obviously writable sentence. My browser is open, and it has occurred to me that I should do some

shopping: I need a new smartphone. I mean, I don’t have to have a new smartphone, but my old smartphone has developed this weird problem where it thinks the headphones are plugged in even when they’re not. So if somebody calls me, I can’t hear what they’re saying unless I either plug in the headphones or switch the speakerphone on. Can you imagine trying to go through life with such a burden? Don’t you think I should spend the next few minutes researching smartphones? Well, whether you do or not, I am a gadget freak, so the thought of doing that feels good—way, way better than the thought of figuring out what sentence should go next. Case closed. See you later. I’m not sure which module injected this “Why don’t you research smartphones?” thought into my mind—apparently a module that likes acquiring possessions. In any event, the module timed the thought masterfully, for just the moment when writing was starting to feel uncomfortable. Modules are crafty that way.

Anyway, the main point is that you can think of the problem of distraction as analogous to the problem of quitting smoking. And if you think of it that way—think of your goal as being to weaken the module that favors leading you away from your work—this might affect how you address the problem. Ordinarily, if you were determined to stay focused on your work notwithstanding a strong desire not to stay focused on your work, you might respond to the thought of researching smartphones with a reprimand: No, don’t think about smartphones—get back to writing! But if you take the mindful approach, you say: Go ahead, think about smartphones. Close your eyes and imagine how it would feel to search for the latest review of the latest sma...

Though we don’t generally think of nicotine addiction and a short attention span as having much in common, both really are problems of impulse control. And in both cases, we can, in principle, weaken the impulse by not fighting it, by letting it form and observing it carefully. This deprives the module that generated the ...

In principle, you can describe much of mindfulness meditation this way—as depriving modules of the positive reinforcement that has given them power. Because often when you mindfully observe feelings, you’re keeping the module that generated them from getting some sort of reward.

this failure to see things clearly is in part a product of being misled by feelings. And the first step toward seeing through these feelings is seeing them in the first place—becoming aware of how pervasively and subtly feelings influence our thought and behavior.

Perception is an active, not a passive, process, a process of constantly building models of the world. That’s one reason different people see different things in the abstract ink blots used in Rorschach tests: our minds try to turn even the most ambiguous patterns into something that makes sense. We like to have a story about what things are and what they mean.

In fact, sometimes at a meditation retreat, a teacher will devote a whole session to sound meditation. If you sink deeply enough into this practice, the structure you “impose” on

sounds can start to dissolve. For example, an airplane may fly overhead, and you hear an airplane-flying-overhead sound. Except you don’t necessarily think, “Oh, an airplane.” You’re so immersed in the texture of the sound that you may not immediately think, “Oh, an anything.” It’s just pure sound, unattached to the idea of a particular, concrete object. I guess it’s what an airplane would sound like to somebody from a culture that didn’t have airplanes or to an alien from a civilization so advanced that its aircraft didn’t make noise. It would just be sound—not the sound of anything.

Doing this isn’t easy, but it’s straightforward in principle. The key is to meet the abrasiveness head-on—to, in a sense, examine the abrasions. You pay attention to the discomfort the noises create. Where in your body does annoyance or even revulsion reside? What is the texture of the feeling? The more fine-grained your examination, the more complete your acceptance of the feeling, the more its negative energy drains away.

It may be obvious where I’m headed: If we can turn literal noise into music, can’t we turn figurative noise—all kinds of unwelcome perceptions and thoughts and feelings—into figurative music? Or at least take the harshness out of them? And it may be obvious how I’m going to answer that question: Yes, we can (with sufficiently diligent practice).

“The sound is just the sound. It’s me who is going out to annoy it. If I leave the sound alone, it won’t annoy me. . . . If I don’t go out and bother the sound, it’s not going to bother me.” I wouldn’t take that anecdote too literally; it’s not as if sound bothers you in retaliation for your bothering it. The point is just that a sound by itself is a passive, not an active, thing, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. So to make it unpleasant,

you have to go out and, in a sense, do something to it.

Look again at the final line of that passage from the Samadhiraja Sutra. It says that all things are “without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.” This sutra isn’t denying the reality of the buzz-saw sound waves that were hitting my ear, the “qualities” I was observing, but it seems to be saying that the “essence” I normally see beneath the qualities—essence of buzz saw—is a matter of interpretation; it’s something I’m choosing to construct, or not, from the qualities. Essences don’t exist independent of human perception. This is the version of the emptiness doctrine that makes sense to me, and it’s the version most widely accepted by Buddhist scholars: not the absence of everything, but the absence of essence. To perc...

sense of e...

Yes, the buzz saw exists. It consists of things like a power cord, a blade, and a trigger. These, you might say, are among the buzz saw’s “qualities.” But when I talk about the “essence” of the buzz saw, I’m talking about something we perceive in a buzz saw that is more than the sum of such qualities, something that carries distinctive connotations and emotional resonance. And if I manage to divorce myself from some of those connotations and that resonance—enough that I can actually enjoy the sounds of a buzz saw—then that essence has started to erode. To put it another way, before this particular meditation retreat I might have said, “It is part of the essence of buzz saws that they make unpleasant sounds.” But it turns out that making unpleasant sounds isn’t actually inherent in buzz saws. And if it isn’t inherent in them, how can it be part of their essence?

In the next chapter I’ll argue that the “essence” of lots of things—like, maybe, all of them—is not, in fact, inherent in them.

Besides, she seemed to think that nothing does more good for the world than a truly liberated being—not even an unliberated author who steers others in the general direction of liberation.

“So the idea is that everything meaningful about the world is something we impose on it?” She answered, “Exactly.”

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 narratives assume large form. We decide that somet...

we had done something else instead, everything would be wonderful. Or we decide that we must have some particular possession or achievement, and if we don’t get it, everything will be horrible. Underlying these narratives, at their foundation, are elementary narr...

simple perceptual judgments

such as “This buzz-saw sound I hear while trying to meditate is bad.” And this kind of meaning, which seems so firmly embedded in the texture of things, isn’t, in fact, an inherent feature of reality; it is something we impose on reality, a story we tell about reality. 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.

The idea of emptiness is that, while the things we perceive out there in the world do in some sense exist, they

lack this thing called “essence.”

Identifying human beings is something we normally think of as a straightforward act of visual perception. It seems like the kind of thing a computer could do. In fact, computers do a good job of it, just by scanning faces. But apparently human beings have a more complicated way of identifying things: not just by how they look but by how they make you feel. At least—to judge by Capgras delusion—that seems to be the case when we’re identifying friends and relatives. Is it the case with lots of other things? Is our recognition of the house we live in and the car

we drive, even the computer we use, dependent on our feelings about these things? Or, even if the absence of those feelings didn’t impede recognition per se, would it overhaul our view of what these things are and what they mean? Does the meaning of the word ocean—not the dictionary meaning but the actual meaning of the word to you—depend on a mélange of feelings that you’ve come to associate with oceans? If you were suddenly cut off from those associations, would the ocean seem, well, empty? I suspect so. And I suspect that this can help explain how the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness arose. Meditation can weaken the link between perceptions and thoughts, on the one hand, and the feelings, the affective resonances, that typically accompany them on the other. Well, if you do a really thorough job of that weakening, and perceptions become increasingly free of affective associations, this could change your view of the world. It could leave things looking the same on

the outside but seeming as if they lack some ...

In the words of the Samadhiraja Sutra, they would seem “without essence, but with qua...

But that conjecture isn’t the main point of this exercise. The main point is to explore more deeply the mechanics of this experiential apprehension—to get a clearer idea of what’s going on in the brains of those committed contemplatives who see emptiness, as opposed to what goes on in the brains of the much larger number of people who see essences everywhere they look. This, in turn, will help us ask whether that second group of people—which is to say, pretty much all of us—

is chronically deluded, and, if so, how grave the consequences of the delusion are. Plot spoiler: in some respects, I think, the consequences are pretty grave.

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.”

human beings are automatic evaluators.

We are designed to

judge things and to encode those judgments in feelings.

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.

feelings infuse things with essence.

At least, that’s my hypothesis—that the dampened sense of essence some meditators feel has a lot to do with dampened feelings.