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

by Robert Wright

the entire infrastructure of feelings should be viewed with a certain suspicion, given that it was built by natural selection, whose ultimate aim isn’t to foster clear perceptions and thoughts but rather to foster the kinds of perceptions and thoughts that have gotten genes spread in the past.

(1) The apprehension of formlessness or emptiness is a truer perception of things than our ordinary view, and (2) the feelings we normally experience in reaction to these things aren’t appropriate in light of the truth about them.

There’s one other thing that essence seems to be intertwined with: stories. The stories we are told about things, and the stories we tell ourselves about things, influence how we feel about those things and, presumably, thus shape the essence that we sense in them.

He says his experience involves very little in the way of the self-referential thoughts that dominate the consciousness of most of us: Why did I say that stupid thing yesterday? How can I impress these people tomorrow? Can’t wait to eat that chocolate bar! And so on. He calls these the “emotionally laden, I-me-my thoughts.”

Maybe the reason babies get so immersed in shapes and textures is because they haven’t yet developed their filing system, their sense of essence. In other words, they don’t yet “know” what the “things” surrounding them are, so the world is a wonderland of exploration. And maybe this helps explain how Weber could say that “emptiness” is actually “full”: sometimes not seeing essence lets you get drawn into the richness of things.

Maybe essences can be labels that discourage experience altogether, or labels that encourage experience but in some sense distort it.

general illusion: that the “essences” we sense in things really exist, that they inhabit the things we perceive, when in fact they are constructions of our minds, with no necessary correspondence to reality. Things come with stories, and the stories, whether true or false, shape how we feel about the things and thus shape the things themselves, giving them the full form we perceive.

It now lacked the essence-of-weed that had previously made it stand out from the other plants and seem uglier than they seemed. So essence matters! One minute you see a certain essence in something and you want to kill it, and the next minute the essence has vanished and you don’t want to kill it.

At the root of the way we treat people, I think, is the essence we see them as having.

judging is what we’re designed to do.

Our judgments can rest on evidence that may seem laughably superficial. For example, people considered attractive are more likely to be rated as

competent. But this makes a certain kind of sense; attractive people do seem to have an easier time getting their way socially, and being able to pull soc...

Consider what, for my money, is one of the more ridiculous kinds of arguments people have. It typically starts with the assertion “She’s a really nice person” or “He’s a good guy.” Then someone will beg to differ: “No, she’s not so nice” or “No, he’s actually a bad guy.” These arguments can go on forever without either party saying, “Well, maybe she’s nice to me but not nice to you” or “Maybe he’s good in the context in which I tend to encounter him and bad in the context in which you encounter him.”

Conveniently, our friends and allies will have essence-of-good, and our rivals and enemies will have essence-of-bad.

Hastorf and Cantril wrote, “It is inaccurate and misleading to say that different people have different ‘attitudes’ concerning the same ‘thing.’ . . . The data here indicate that there is no such ‘thing’ as a ‘game’ existing ‘out there’ in its own right which people merely ‘observe.’ The ‘game’ ‘exists’ for a person and is experienced by him only in so far as certain happenings have significances in terms of his purpose. Out of all the occurrences going on in the environment, a person selects those that have some significance for him from his own egocentric position in the total matrix.”

“domain-specific psychological mechanisms.”

“There’s always some psychological mechanism doing something,” she said. “It’s creating our world, it’s creating our perception of the world. That’s why I wouldn’t say domain-specific mechanisms color our perceptions—I’d say they create our perceptions. There’s no way of perceiving the world that doesn’t involve carving it conceptually into pieces.”

“An ‘occurrence’ on the football field or in any other social situation does not become an experiential ‘event’ unless and until some significance is given to it.” And this significance, they said, comes from a kind of database of significances, a database that resides “in what we have called a person’s assumptive form-world.”

This is a reminder that specifically tribal psychology is in one sense not all that different from psychology generally. We go through each day attaching positive and negative tags to things we see.

The really heavy-duty weaponry is reserved for human beings. And yet the line across which the weaponry is deployed—the line between “good” humans and “bad” humans—is often no less arbitrary than the line separating weeds from other plants.

Rumi is said to have written, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

On the same meditation retreat that led me to see a weed that lacked essence-of-weed, I also had an interesting encounter with a reptile. I was walking through the woods and, looking down, saw a lizard frozen in its tracks, presumably by the sight of me. As I watched it look around nervously and calculate its next move, my first thought was that this lizard’s behavior was governed by a relatively simple algorithm: see large creature, freeze; if creature approaches, run. But then I realized that, though my own behavioral algorithms are much more complicated than that, there could well be a being so intelligent that, to it, I look as simple-minded as the lizard looks to me. The more I thought about it, the more that lizard and I seemed to have in common. We were both thrown into a world we didn’t choose, under the guidance of behavioral algorithms we didn’t choose, and were trying to make the best of the situation. I felt a kind of kinship with the lizard

that I’d never felt with a lizard.

As with my burst of compassion for Larry, my sense of kinship with this lizard didn’t require loving-kindness meditation. Mindfulness meditation itself, practiced diligently, tends to expand your understanding of other organisms. And I mean “understanding” not just in the mushy sense of peace, love, and understanding but also—in fact, mainly—in the sense of having a clearer comprehension of the organism. I was looking at that lizard the way a visitor from Mars might look at it: with interest and curiosity and fewer distorting preconceptions than I normally bring to such things. I think the reason I could look at that lizard with so little in the way of preconceptions is because I didn’t see essence-of-lizard—or, at least, didn’t see as much of it as I usually see...

into our brain. These preconceptions typically get us to react to things in ways that are in some sense expedient, but not necessarily in ways th...

meditative practice won’t negate your love or even subdue it, but may change its nature. Maybe, for example, parental love will become less possessive. And, who knows, maybe that will produce a happier parent and a happier child than a more anxious, more controlling kind

of love would produce.

experiencing your feelings with care and clarity, rather than following them reflexively and uncritically, lets you choose which ones to follow—like, say, joy, delight, and love. And this selective engagement with feelings, this weakened obedience to them, can in principle include the feelings that shape the essence we see in things and people.