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

by Robert Wright

Don’t get hung up on whether something called a “self” exists. Just use the parts of the not-self doctrine that are useful, in particular the idea that none of your feelings—the urge for cigarettes, the urge to research smartphones, the urge to hate—is intrinsically a part of you.

According to Buddhist philosophy, both the problems we call therapeutic and the problems we call spiritual are a product of not seeing things clearly. What’s more, in both cases 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.

Still, the point is that, strictly speaking, this is a matter of construction. 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.

And in fact the meditation teacher who explained early on that we’d be hearing construction noises all week did so with an apologetic tone. But, as the teacher reminded us, a big part of mindfulness meditation is to accept the reality you face. Normally if you heard the abrasive, annoying sounds of construction, you might close your window or do something else to tune them out. But here the idea was to accept the sounds themselves while not buying into the idea that they’re abrasive and annoying.

Remember Ajahn Chah, the Thai monk who said that if you try to understand the idea of not-self by “intellectualizing” alone, your head will explode? He once recounted a time when he was trying to meditate and kept getting interrupted by sounds from a festival in a nearby village. Then, as he recalls it, he had a realization: “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.”

With this in mind, let’s look at the two key claims Rodney is making: (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.

that the stories we tell about things, and thus the beliefs we have about their history and their nature, shape our experience of them, and thus our sense of their essence.

“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.

This experiment suggests that it’s also a part of the brain that’s influenced by the story you’ve been told about the pleasure you’re feeling and by the preconceptions this story gives you. The $90 story gets this part of the brain more excited than the $10 story.

But fellow human beings were a more complicated part of our environment than, say, shelter or tools, and they were a very, very important part. So it stands to reason that we would possess specialized mental machinery for sizing people up and then assigning them an essence.

once someone is firmly placed in the enemy box, our attribution mechanisms make escaping the box very hard.

They showed films of the game to Princeton students and Dartmouth students and found sharp differences of perspective. For example, while Princeton students, on average, saw Dartmouth commit 9.8 infractions of the rules, Dartmouth students, on average, saw 4.3 Dartmouth infractions. These findings may not shock you; that tribal affiliation can skew perception is common knowledge. But this study took a real-world example of this bias and carried it from the realm of anecdote into the realm of data. That’s how it became a classic.

“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.”

And I think this was the key: breaking down the old essence-of-Larry allowed me to then conceive a new version of Larry that was closer to the truth.

The thirteenth-century Sufi poet 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.”

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.

“Yes, if you meditate a whole, whole lot, there’s a chance that the actual magnitude of your love for your offspring will drop a bit.”

How much difference is there, really, between feeling my foot tingle and hearing a bird sing? In both cases, the perception seems to register somewhere inside my head, at some kind of center of consciousness—which means that in both cases, the perception requires that information be transmitted to my head from a remote location. My foot transmits information about a tingling; the bird transmits information about a song. What’s the difference?

The great American psychologist William James wrote, “Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw.” In that sense, he observed, “our immediate family is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone.”

So if I routinely consider signals that are ultimately traceable to bacteria part of me, why can’t I consider signals sent by a bird part of me?

In one case you’re questioning your intuition that you should identify with pretty much everything “inside” you—such as feelings of pointless anxiety—and in the other case you’re questioning your intuition that you shouldn’t identify with much of anything “outside” you.

In other words: nothing possesses inherent existence; nothing contains all the ingredients of ongoing existence within itself; nothing is self-sufficient. Hence the idea of emptiness: all things are empty of inherent, independent existence.

To put a finer point on it, the problem is the unquenchability of tanha, the fact that attaining our desires always leaves us unsatisfied, thirsting for more of the same or thirsting for something new.

And wanting to create distance between yourself and something means having an idea of the place where your self ends.

From a Darwinian perspective, tanha was engineered into us so that we would take care of ourselves—which is to say, so that each of us would take care of the vehicle that contains our genes.

The refrain warns people to avoid the “three poisons” of raga, dvesha, and moha. Those three words are typically translated as “greed, hatred, and delusion,”

Things that are conditioned in the Buddhist sense are things that are subject to causes.

But if you observe those feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can in some measure escape the control; the causes that ordinarily shape your behavior can be defied, and you can get closer to the unconditioned.

Science, in its displacement of traditionally religious worldviews, is sometimes said to have brought on the “disenchantment” of the world, draining it of magic. And you would think that a meditative discipline devoted, in some sense, to tamping down the influence of feelings on perception, to fostering a view of sober clarity, would only abet that tendency. But Batchelor says meditative practice can lead to the “re-enchantment” of the world, and I know what he means. After that first retreat, I felt like I was living in a zone of enchantment, a place of wonder and preternatural beauty.

Its agenda being, of course, to get genes into the next generation. This is the core of natural selection’s value system, the criterion that guided the engineering of our brains. And we have every right to decide, like Neo, that our values differ from those of the force that controls us and that we want liberation from it.

And that means these genes will build into my brain the idea that taking care of this body is much more important than taking care of other bodies (except, perhaps, when those other bodies belong to close kin). In other words, I’m special. My specialness lies very near the heart of natural selection’s values system.

yet it can’t be the case that everybody is more important than everybody else. So a core tenet of natural selection’s value system is internally contradictory. Rejecting it, then, would pretty much have to move you closer to the truth.

Emptiness, you may recall, is, roughly speaking, the idea that things don’t have essence.

Witness road rage, rampant anxiety, and various other kinds of feelings that don’t serve the interests of the typical twenty-first-century human being.

What happens to essence when we let go of our particular perspective—the perspective that the feelings that shape the perceived essences of things were designed to serve? I think the answer is that essence disappears.

Actually, I’m not so sure about that. I’ve seen people argue about what constitutes great wine, or great art, as if convinced they were really right and the other person was wrong. That’s the thing about feelings, a thing that is particularly true when we talk about their role in shaping essence: they can render judgment so subtly that we don’t realize that it’s the feelings that are rendering the judgment; we think the judgment is objective.

You’d want to view reality with none of the feelings that evolved in our species or any other species as a way to get genes into the next generation. You’d want, like Einstein, the view from nowhere in particular.

That is why the specialness of self is such a strong intuition. For our ancestors, it was often either them or the other guy, and genes that encouraged them to think the other guy was as important as they were wouldn’t have gone anywhere. 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.

But here’s the unfortunate paradox: we’ve gotten to a point in human history when the sense of specialness could actually endanger the continued flourishing of sentient life.

What causes all the hatred? At some level, it’s always the same thing: human beings operating under the influence of human brains whose design presupposed their specialness. That is, human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields that control us in many and subtle ways, convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it’s not a reflection of the “real us”; whereas they and theirs aren’t in the right and aren’t by nature good, and when they do the occasional good thing, it’s not a reflection of the “real them.” And it doesn’t help matters that these reality-distortion fields often magnify, even out-and-out fabricate, the threat posed by them and theirs.

So, yes, we need to reject the core evolutionary value of the specialness of self. Indeed, there’s probably never been a time in human history when this rejection was more vital.

When you’re on a silent meditation retreat, songs can stay in your head for a really long time, because there’s not much input to displace them.

One common and not-so-subtle conception of this relationship is that you see the truth in a flash of insight, and then you are free. Sounds great! And what a time-saver! But I don’t think it happens very often that the truth sets you free, period. Sometimes it’s the other way around: freedom lets you see the truth.

the more you do the things that bring liberation from suffering, the more clearly you see; and the more clearly you see, the easier it is to do the things that bring liberation from suffering. Which allows even more clarity of vision. And so on.

both Buddhism and Christianity say that at birth we inherit a kind of moral confusion, the dispelling of which is one object of the game.

Jesus said that our perception of the world is distorted and that we should work on correcting our blind spots rather than complain about the blind spots of others: “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” Amen to that.

James said that, in the broadest sense, religion can be thought of as “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”

Dharma thus denotes the reality that lies beyond our delusions and, for that matter, the reality about how those delusions give rise to suffering; and it denotes the implications of all this for our conduct. In other words, the dharma is at once the truth about the way things are and the truth about how it makes sense to behave in light of the way things are. It is both description and prescription. It is the truth and the way.

Human beings often fail to see the world clearly, and this can lead them to suffer and to make others suffer.