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November 19 - November 22, 2020
In other words, this kind of delusion, it seemed to me, could be explained as the natural product of a brain that had been engineered by natural selection. The more I looked into Buddhism, the more radical it seemed, but the more I examined it in the light of modern psychology, the more plausible it seemed.
Some people who have taken up meditation in recent years have done so for essentially therapeutic reasons. They practice mindfulness-based stress reduction or focus on some specific personal problem. They may have no idea that the kind of meditation they’re practicing can be a deeply spiritual endeavor and can transform their view of the world.
Hence another paradox of meditation: the problems that meditation can help you overcome often make it hard to meditate in the first place.
More and more, it seems, groups of people define their identity in terms of sharp opposition to other groups of people.
In mindfulness meditation as it’s typically taught, the point of focusing on your breath isn’t just to focus on your breath. It’s to stabilize your mind, to free it of its normal preoccupations so you can observe things that are happening in a clear, unhurried, less reactive way. And “things that are happening” emphatically includes things happening inside your mind. Feelings arise within you—sadness, anxiety, annoyance, relief, joy—and you try to experience them from a different vantage point than is usual, neither clinging to the good feelings nor running away from the bad ones, but rather
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To put it another way: Was the initial unpleasantness in any sense an illusion? Certainly, by adopting another perspective, I made it disappear—and that’s something that’s often true of what we call illusions: shifting your perspective dispels them.
Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.
Does this Buddhist perspective, with its seemingly topsy-turvy conception of what’s real and what’s not, make any sense in light of modern science? That’s the question I’ll take up in the next chapter—and, indeed, in much of the rest of this book.
I mean “scientific foundation” in the sense of using all the tools of modern psychology to look at such questions as these: Why, and in what particular ways, are human beings naturally deluded? How exactly does the delusion work? How does delusion make us suffer? How does it make us make other
people suffer?
And admit it: 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.”
Rather, natural selection designed this feeling to be almost always illusory in a literal sense; the feeling fills you with a conviction—a judgment about what’s in your immediate environment—that is pretty reliably untrue. This is a reminder that natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.
We’re designed by natural selection to care—and care a lot—about what other people think of us. During evolution, people who were liked, admired, and respected would have been more effective gene propagators than people who were the opposite.
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.
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.
The basic idea is that the self—your self, my self—in some sense doesn’t exist.
There’s a big difference between seeing the not-self doctrine in the abstract and really seeing—or, in a way, feeling—what it means firsthand.
“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.”
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. This is the core of the argument the Buddha makes in this first and most famous discourse on not-self, and it’s commonly taken as the core Buddhist argument that the self doesn’t exist.
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,
In any event, Harvey believes, the not-self teaching “is not so much a thing to be thought about as to be done.”
Think of yourself as having, in principle, the power to establish a different relationship with your feelings and thoughts and impulses and perceptions—the power to disengage from some of them; the power to, in a sense, disown them, to define the bounds of your self in a way that excludes them.
You—the “you” that experiences feelings and perceptions and entertains thoughts—isn’t really in complete control of these things.
The split-brain experiments powerfully demonstrated the capacity of the conscious self to convince itself that it’s calling the shots when it’s not.
Do our brains actually make use of this capacity for self-deception? There is good reason to believe the answer is yes.
During human evolution, the answers to such questions mattered: if you were thought unworthy of collaboration and friendship, your genes were in trouble.
Yet study after study has shown that most people do think they’re above average along various dimensions, ranging from athletic ability to social skills. And this sort of self-appraisal can firmly resist evidence. One study of fifty people found that on average they rated their driving skill toward the “expert” end of the spectrum—which would be less notable were it not for the fact that all fifty had recently been in car accidents, and two-thirds of them had been deemed responsible for the accidents by police.
“It’s a dog-eat-dog world going on in your brain, with different systems competing to make it to the surface to win the prize of conscious recognition.”
Psychologists have found that if you show men pictures of women they find attractive, their intertemporal utility function, the rate at which they discount the future, changes. They become less willing to forgo cash in the near term—yes, the experimenters offered them real money—for a bigger amount of cash farther down the road.
accepting that your self isn’t in control, and may in some sense not even exist, can put your self—or something like it—in control.
In this view, if you built a robot whose brain worked like the human brain, and then asked computer scientists to describe its workings, they’d say that its brain consists of lots of partly overlapping modules, and modules within modules, and the robot’s circumstances determine which modules are, for the moment, running the show.
This idea—that modules are triggered by feelings—sheds new light on the connection between two fundamental parts of Buddhism: the idea of nonattachment to feelings and the idea of not-self.
Again, jealousy is a particularly dramatic example of a module’s seizing control of the mind. Whenever people are throwing things and screaming, that’s a tipoff that the brain is under new management.
There is good reason to believe that during evolution men with access to resources (such as food) and with high social status were better able to attract mates.
So this experiment is, among other things, another reminder that modules can get triggered not only without the conscious self doing the triggering but also without it having a clue as to the Darwinian logic behind the triggering.
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.
Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.
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.”
“imagine that every thought that’s arising in your mind is coming from the person next to you.”
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 your self, you clarify your view of the world and become a better and happier person.
The guiding teacher for those two weeks was a psychotherapist and former Buddhist monk named Akincano Marc Weber. One night during a dharma talk, he said, “Every thought has a propellant, and that propellant is emotional.”
In a famous sutra called The Greater Discourse on the Destruction of Craving, the Buddha says that a “mind object”—a category that includes thoughts—is just like a taste or a smell: whether a person is “tasting a flavor with the tongue” or “smelling an odor with the nose” or “cognizing a mind object with the mind,” the person “lusts after it if it is pleasing” and “dislikes it if it is unpleasing.”
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.
As Hume put it, “Reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will.”
Natural selection being the thrifty thing it is, the biology behind those feelings and thoughts was a straightforward extension of the biology embodying those original values. Brain-scan studies have shown that the same parts of the brain that mediate physical pain also mediate the pain of social rejection. Which helps explain why opiates and other painkillers can take the sting out of social setbacks. Even extended doses of Tylenol, one study showed, can dull the pain of social rejection.
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.
High school football coaches have a way of describing this dynamic. They say that self-discipline is like a muscle. If you use it, it gets stronger, and if you don’t, it gets weaker.
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.
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 not being attached to things was the Buddha’s all-purpose prescription for what ails us.
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 impulse of the positive reinforcement that would give it more power next time around.
