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

by Robert Wright

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life.

Evolutionary psychology can be described in various ways, and here’s one way I had described it in my book: It is the study of how the human brain was designed—by natural selection—to mislead us, even enslave us.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a meditation teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, has said, “Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.” What he meant is that if you want to liberate yourself from the parts of the mind that keep you from realizing true happiness, you have to first become aware of them, which can be unpleasant.

Feelings just are. If we feel them, then they’re feelings—real feelings, not imagined feelings. End of story.

Just because being less reactive to some of your feelings makes you happier doesn’t mean it brings a truer apprehension of the world. Maybe this less reactive stance is like a narcotic: it dulls the pain by insulating you from the real-world feedback that your feelings provide. Maybe it’s meditation, not your ordinary consciousness, that puts you in a dream world.

Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment. Typically these judgments are about whether these things are good or bad for the survival of the organism doing the feeling (though sometimes they’re about whether these things are good or bad for close kin—notably offspring—since close kin share so many of our genes).

though there’s something unpleasant about being made angry, there’s something pleasing about the feeling of anger itself—the feeling that you’re rightfully enraged. The Buddha said anger has a “poisoned root and honeyed tip.”

In one discourse the Buddha listed as one of the “five fears” the “fear of embarrassment in assemblies.” This fear remains in the top five today; some polls, in fact, show public speaking to be the most dreaded activity of all.

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?)

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.

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, it can be followed by “worse”—an unsettled feeling, a thirst for more. Long before psychologists were describing the hedonic treadmill, the Buddha saw it.

One path is to sustain the focus on your breath, the focus it felt good to establish in the first place, for a long, long time; and try to tighten and deepen the focus, becoming more immersed in the breath. Then just keep going. You may find yourself feeling better and better and better. This is called concentration meditation, and the object of concentration doesn’t have to be breath.

Concentration meditation is sometimes referred to as serenity meditation—which makes sense, because the concentration can bring serenity.

Listen to how dramatically Walpola Rahula, a Buddhist monk who in 1959 published an influential book called What the Buddha Taught, put the matter: “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.”

There’s a second, related scenario that might explain where we find the “you” that is liberated after the aggregates have been abandoned: 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.

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-self, the Buddha depicts as liberated—is this liberated consciousness.

Some philosophers of Buddhism have suggested that maybe there are two kinds of consciousness—or two modes of consciousness,

One is the kind of consciousness you’re liberated from, and the other is the kind of consciousness that stays with “you”—that is you—after the liberation.

The first kind of consciousness is deeply entangled with—fully engaged with—the contents of the other aggregates, and the second kind is a more objective awareness of those contents, a more contemplative consciou...

There’s roughly no chance that all the sayings attributed to him in Buddhist texts were uttered by him. In fact, some scholars will tell you that there is little or nothing in these texts that we can confidently attribute to him. Like the “historical Jesus,” the “historical Buddha” is hard to discern through the mists of history. Just as the gospel accounts of Jesus are products of evolution, of oral and textual accretion over time, so are ancient accounts of the Buddha’s utterances. Even assuming that most of these accounts were originally grounded in things he actually said, they were subject to amendment, intentional or not, as they passed through the generations. In this light, it’s hardly surprising that there should be inconsistencies and outright contradictions within the Buddhist canon.

In 1980 the psychologist Anthony Greenwald invented the term beneffectance to describe the way people naturally present themselves to the world—as beneficial and effective.

In one study, people who ranked high on an extroversion scale and people who ranked high on a neuroticism scale both kept diaries about their everyday emotional experiences. Later the extroverts recalled more positive experiences than they had in fact had, and the neurotics recalled more negative experiences than they had in fact had. This is proof that self-inflation, though the norm in our species, isn’t an iron law. But note that both kinds of people were wrong; their particular personalities had steered them toward different kinds of illusions, but in both cases illusion is the operative word.

But in fact, of course, we change. And we don’t just change in the sense of changing from children into adults. We change on a moment-by-moment basis. And sometimes we change along dimensions that are commonly thought to be constants.

So we have three things that can change about people who sense a mating opportunity: they can become crowd-averse, suddenly partial to intimate environments; their intertemporal utility function can get recalibrated; and their career goals, at least for the time being, can become more materialistic.† These three changes hardly exhaust the list of things that can happen to a person’s mind in mating mode. But already you can see why it’s tempting to think that a module—or a “subself,” as Kenrick and Griskevicius put it—takes control of the mind when people are in the presence of a potential mate who strikes them as attractive.

If, in light of the misleading neatness of the module metaphor, you prefer the phrase I just used—“state of mind”—to “module that’s taken control,” that’s fine. Either way, two take-home lessons hold: (1) This isn’t a state of mind that the conscious “self” “chooses” to enter; rather, the state is triggered by a feeling, and the conscious “self,” though it in principle has access to the feeling, may not notice it or notice that a new state has been entered. (So much for the idea of the conscious you as CEO.) (2) You can see why the Buddha emphasized how fluid, how impermanent, the various parts of the mind are, and why he considered this flux relevant to the not-self argument; if the self is supposed to be some unchanging essence, it’s pretty hard to imagine where exactly that self would be amid the ongoing transitions from state of mind to state of mind.

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.

Vipassana, with its emphasis on mindfulness; Tibetan, which often steers the mind toward visual imagery; and Zen, which sometimes involves pondering those cryptic lines known as koans. Here’s the saying: Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.

the “theory of mind network”—the part of the brain involved in thinking about what other people are thinking.

For now I’d just make two points: (1) Psychologists who adhere to the modular model of the mind tend toward the second view—the idea that the conscious you isn’t choosing modules so much as being commandeered by modules that have prevailed over competing modules and thus, as Gazzaniga put it in chapter 6, “won the prize of conscious recognition.” (2) If you do go on a Vipassana meditation retreat and slowly, haltingly, get better at focusing on your breath, you will probably lean increasingly toward the second hypothesis: it will seem more and more like your mind isn’t wandering within its own terrain so much as being hijacked by intruders.

Though weighing the pros and cons of a purchase sounds like a purely rational, even mechanical act, this experiment suggests that the way the brain actually does the weighing is through a contest of conflicting feelings. Even the factor of price—a purely quantitative index, the kind of thing that is easily fed into a computer’s decision-making algorithm—ultimately enters the equation in the form of a feeling, a degree of aversion. And the stronger feeling—attraction or aversion—wins.

Self-control has often been described as a matter of reason prevailing over feelings. Plato invoked the metaphor of a charioteer (the rational self) keeping horses (the unruly passions) under control.

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.

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 perceive emptiness is to perceive raw sensory data without doing what we’re naturally inclined to do: build a theory about what is at the heart of the data and then encapsulate that theory in a sense of essence.

But you could look at it the other way around. Given that our experience of a bottle of wine can be influenced by slapping a fake label on it, you might say that, actually, there is a superficiality to our pleasure, and that a deeper pleasure would come if we could somehow taste the wine itself, unencumbered by beliefs about it that may or may not be true. That is closer to the Buddhist view of the matter.

From natural selection’s point of view, there’s no reason for people to give much weight to such a possibility—the possibility that niceness and goodness are largely situational, not dispositional, properties.

War offers a good example of how essence can spread from one level to another. You start out with the idea that a nation’s leader is essentially bad. From this you move to the idea that an entire nation—the nation of Iraq or Germany or Japan—is your enemy. This then translates into the idea that all the soldiers of that country—or even all the people in that country—are essentially bad. And if people are bad, that means you can kill them without feeling the sting of conscience. The United States dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities—cities, not military bases—and drew virtually no protest from Americans.

In fact, you might say that not seeing essence and not having preconceptions are one and the same, because the essence we perceive in things is a preconception about them that has been programmed 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 that involve a true understanding of them.

Bhikkhu Bodhi

In Hindu thought, specifically within a Hindu school of thought known as Advaita Vedanta, there is the idea that the individual self or soul is actually just a part of what you might call a universal soul. To put the proposition in Hindu terminology: atman (the self or soul) is brahman (the universal soul). Now, to say that atman is anything at all—brahman, whatever—is to say that atman exists in the first place. And the very birth of Buddhism, its distinct emergence within an otherwise Hindu milieu, is thought to lie largely in the denial that atman exists.

This suggests an interesting possibility: maybe the deepest meditative experiences had by Buddhists and the deepest meditative experiences had by Hindus in the Advaita Vedanta tradition are basically the same experience. There is a sense of dissolution of the bounds of self and an ensuing sense of continuity with the world out there. If you’re Buddhist (at least, a Buddhist of the mainstream type), you’re encouraged to think of that as a continuity of emptiness; and if you’re a Hindu, you’re encouraged to think of it as a continuity of soul or spirit.

Anyway, my basic view of religious beliefs is that the ultimate question isn’t their specific content, but rather: What kind of person do the beliefs make you? How do they lead you to behave? There is reason to think that this basic Buddhist-Hindu idea—that the bounds of self aren’t really bounds—can lead to good behavior.

Bhikkhu Bodhi, the prolific translator of Buddhist texts, including many that characterize nirvana, described it as “a state of perfect happiness, complete peace, complete inner freedom, and full awakening and understanding.”

But there’s good news on this front. If you would like to think of meditation practice as being a rebellion against an oppressive overlord, we can arrange that: just think of yourself as fighting your creator, natural selection. After all, natural selection, like the robot overlords, engineered the delusions that control us; it built them into our brains. If you’re willing to personify natural selection, you can carry the comparison with robot overlords a bit further: natural selection perpetrated the delusion in order to get us to adhere slavishly to its agenda.

In the absence of a particular point of view—yours or someone else’s—the whole idea of an affective judgment, a feeling, makes no sense. If you truly and completely adopt the vantage point Einstein adopted—if you transcend the perspective of the self, any self, and view things from nowhere in particular—essence disappears, along with the feelings that created it in the first place.

In any event, the view from nowhere may be the pithiest way of describing what Buddhist enlightenment would be like: the view that carries none of my selfish biases, or yours, and that in a certain sense isn’t even a particularly human perspective, or the perspective of any other species.

So, yes, we can think of natural selection as somewhat like those robot overlords in The Matrix, perpetrating a pervasive and oppressive illusion on behalf of an agenda that we have every right to reject. If looking at things this way helps give you the determination it takes to sustain a serious meditation practice, by all means look at things this way.

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.