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Yes, meditation may help you lengthen your attention span, dampen your rage, and view your fellow human beings less judgmentally. Unfortunately, a short attention span, a hot temper, and a penchant for harsh judgment may slow your progress along the meditative path.
Technologies of distraction have made attention deficits more common. And there’s something about the modern environment—something technological or cultural or political or all of the above—that seems conducive to harsh judgment and ready rage. Just look at all the tribalism—the discord and even open conflict along religious, ethnic, national, and ideological lines.
More and more, it seems, groups of people define their identity in terms of sharp opposition to other groups of people. I consider this tribalism the biggest problem of our time.
You don’t have to share my apocalyptic fears to think that it would be good for the world if meditation could help more people overcome the mental tendencies that sustain the more belligerent forms of tribalism.
I had decided that meditation was worth exploring, but I had learned that casual experimentation wouldn’t get a person like me very far. Boot camp was in order. So I signed up for a seven-day retreat at the Insight Meditation Society,
Early in the retreat, I could go a whole forty-five-minute meditation session without ever sustaining focus for ten consecutive breaths. And I know, because I was counting!
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.
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 just experiencing them straightforwardly and observing them.
This altered perspective can be the beginning of a fundamental and enduring change in your relationship to your feelings; you can, if all goes well, cease to be their slave.
This is something that can happen again and again via meditation: accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness.
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.
Then he lit a match. The journalist David Halberstam, who witnessed the event, wrote, “As he burned he never moved a muscle, never uttered a sound, his outward composure in sharp contrast to the wailing people around him.”
The question I’m circling around—which of our “normal” feelings, thoughts, and perceptions are in some sense illusions—is important for two reasons. One reason is simple and practical: obviously, if many unpleasant feelings—feelings of anxiety, fear, self-loathing, melancholy, and so on—are in some sense illusions, and we can use meditation to dispel them or at least weaken their grip on us, that’s news you can use.
Using meditation this way, as a purely therapeutic device that doesn’t deeply change your view of reality, is a perfectly fine thing to do. It’s good for you, and it will probably be good for the world.
Still, using meditation this way isn’t, by itself, taking the red pill. Taking the red pill means asking basic questions about the relationship of the perceiver to the perceived and examining the underpinnings of our normal view of reality.
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.
But first a word of caution. Strictly speaking, there is no “Buddhist view of the world.” Buddhism began to split into different schools of interpretation not long after it arose, around the middle of the first millennium BCE.
The most basic division in Buddhism is between the Theravada school and the Mahayana school. My own meditative tradition, Vipassana, derives from the Theravada lineage.
But even mainstream Buddhist thinkers accept some version of the concept of emptiness, a subtle idea that is hard to capture in a few words (or in many words) but certainly holds, at a minimum, that the things we see when we look out on the world have less in the way of distinct and substantial existence than they seem to have.
And then there is the famous Buddhist idea that the self—you know, your self, my self—is an illusion.
If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together—the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness—you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems. Both of these ideas would strike most people as dubious, if not crazy.
Both our natural view of the world “out there” and our natural view of the world “in here”—the world inside our heads—are deeply misleading. What’s more, failing to see these two worlds clearly does lead, as Buddhism holds, to a lot of suffering. And meditation can help us see them more clearly.
The first step in this epic inquiry is to take a closer look at our feelings: pain, pleasure, fear, anxiety, love, lust, and so on. Feelings play a very big role in shaping our perceptions and guiding us through life—bigger than most people realize. Are they reliable guides?
In fact, one of the take-home lessons of Buddhist philosophy is that feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we’d often be better off. Learning to do that is a big part of what mindfulness meditation is about.
So we need to try to get a handle on this admittedly unwieldy question: Are our feelings in some sense “false”? Or “true”? Are some false and some true? And which are which?
To approach or to avoid is the most elemental behavioral decision there is, and feelings seem to be the tool natural selection used to get organisms to make what, by natural selection’s lights, was the right decision.
This suggests one way to think about whether feelings are true or false. 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
We could say feelings are “false” or perhaps “illusory” if they lead the organism astray—if following the feelings leads to things that are bad for the organism.
Shouldn’t our feelings direct us toward things that are good for the organism? They should, yes. But here’s the thing: natural selection designed our feelings in a particular environment—an environment with no junk food, an environment in which the sweetest thing available was fruit. So a sweet tooth served us well;
But in a modern environment, which features the achievement of culinary science known as “empty calories,” these feelings become “false,” or at least not reliably true; they sometimes tell us something is good when it’s not good for us.
There are quite a few feelings like this—feelings that, back when they entered our lineage, served our ancestors’ interests but that don’t always serve our interests now.
And you can see why natural selection would have made righteous rage attractive: in a small hunter-gatherer village, if someone took advantage of you—stole your food, stole your mate, or just generally treated you like dirt—you needed to teach him a lesson. After all, if he learns he can get away with abusing you, he may do it again and again. Worse still, others in your social universe will see that you can be thus exploited,
You may already be pondering the absurdity of the way this feeling can play out on a modern highway. The disrespectful driver you feel like punishing is someone you’ll never see again, and so are all the drivers who might witness any revenge you wreak.
So you could call road rage “false.” It feels good, but the aura of goodness is illusory, because succumbing to its attraction leads to behavior that will not, on average, be good for the organism.
So if meditation did liberate you from obedience to these feelings, it would be, in a certain sense, dispelling an illusion
So that’s one way to define true and false as they apply to feelings: if they feel good but lead us to do things that aren’t really good for us, then they’re false feelings.
Suppose you’re hiking through what you know to be rattlesnake terrain, and suppose you know that only a year ago, someone hiking alone in this vicinity was bitten by a rattlesnake and died. Now suppose there’s a stirring in the brush next to your feet.
you may be so clearly envisioning a rattlesnake that, if the culprit turns out to be a lizard, there will be a fraction of a second when the lizard looks like a snake. This is an illusion in a literal sense: you actually believe there is something there that isn’t there; in fact, you actually “see” it.
Though your brief conviction that you’ve seen a rattlesnake may be wrong ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the conviction could be lifesaving the other one time in a hundred.
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.
The feeling itself—the concern that you’ve offended someone—is perfectly natural; staying on good terms with people boosted our ancestors’ chances of surviving and reproducing.
In a hunter-gatherer village, the person you feared you’d offended would live, oh, fifty feet away from you and you’d see her again in, oh, twenty minutes or so. At that point you could gauge her demeanor and perhaps be reassured that no offense was taken or conclude that she was in fact miffed and try to rectify the situation.
What’s not natural are features of the modern world that make it hard to find out whether the feeling was or wasn’t an illusion. So the feeling lasts longer than is likely to be of any practical value.
Another unpleasant product of environmental mismatch is painful self-consciousness. 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. But in a hunter-gatherer village, your neighbors would have had a vast database on your behavior,
In the modern world, we often find ourselves in the unnatural position of meeting someone who knows little or nothing about us. That can add a little pressure to the occasion,
You may be haunted for hours by some embarrassing thing you did on a public bus or an airplane, even though you’ll never again see the people who witnessed it and their opinions of you therefore have no consequence.
in the environment of our ancestors it wouldn’t have been pointless; in a hunter-gatherer society, you’re pretty much always performing in front of people you’ll see again and whose opinions therefore matter.
My mother used to say, “We wouldn’t spend so much time worrying about what other people think of us if we realized how seldom they do.” She was right; our assumption that people give much thought to us one way or the other is often an illusion,
let’s face it: though anxiety is sometimes productive in this sense, people do a lot of worrying that serves no good purpose.
Our ancestral environment didn’t feature cocktail parties, slumber parties, or PowerPoint. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t have to navigate roomfuls of people they’d never met, or send their children off to sleep in homes they’d never seen, or give presentations to an audience consisting largely of people they didn’t know very well, if at all.
