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By the way, this mismatch between our evolved nature and the environment in which we find ourselves isn’t just a modern phenomenon. For thousands of years, there have been human social environments that weren’t the ones we were designed for.
the environment of our evolution—featured lots of social interaction, and this interaction had great consequence for our genes. If you had low social status and few friends, that cut your chances of spreading your genes, so impressing people mattered,
In this sense our social anxieties can be considered “natural.” But they’re operating in a very different environment from the environment they were “designed” for, and this fact may explain why they’re often unproductive, sponsoring illusions that are of no value at all.
If you accept the idea that many of our most troublesome feelings are in one sense or another illusions, then meditation can be seen as, among other things, a process of dispelling illusions.
I decided to sit up in my bed and meditate. I focused on my breathing for a while, but I also focused on the anxiety itself: the tight feeling in my gut. I tried to look at it, as I’d been taught to do at my meditation retreat, nonjudgmentally. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, and there was no reason to run away from it. It was just a feeling, so I sat there feeling it and watching it.
And then something happened that was much like my big overcaffeination breakthrough at the meditation retreat. The anxiety now seemed like something removed from me, something I was just looking at, in my mind’s eye, the way I might look at an abstract sculpture in a museum.
My anxiety, which had been painful only minutes earlier, now felt neither good nor bad. And not long after it attained this neutral status, it dissolved entirely.
It’s possible, in principle, to attack anxiety from another angle. Rather than focus on the feeling itself, as I did that night, you investigate the thoughts associated with it. This is the way cognitive-behavioral therapy works: your therapist asks questions like “Is there much likelihood of screwing up that presentation, judging by your history of giving presentations?” and “If you did screw it up, would your career really vaporize on the spot?” Then, if you see that the thoughts are lacking in logic, the attendant feelings may weaken.
So cognitive-behavioral therapy is very much in the spirit of mindfulness meditation. Both in some sense question the validity of feelings. It’s just that with cognitive-behavioral therapy, the questioning is more literal.
1. 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,
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. Violent rage and the yearnings of a sweet tooth are good examples.
3. 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.
In addition to not caring about the truth per se, it doesn’t care about our long-term happiness. It will readily delude us about what does and doesn’t bring lasting happiness if that delusion has propelled our ancestors’ genes forward. In fact, natural selection doesn’t even care about our short-term happiness. Just look at the price of all those false positives: being terrified by a snake that isn’t there ninety-nine times in a row could take a toll on a person’s psychological well-being.
As Aaron Beck, who is sometimes called the founder of cognitive-behavioral therapy, has written, “The cost of survival of the lineage may be a lifetime of discomfort.”
Obviously, this chapter hasn’t been a blanket indictment of human feelings. Some, maybe most, of our feelings serve us reasonably well;
Still, I hope you can see the virtue of subjecting your feelings to investigation—inspecting them to see which ones deserve obedience and which ones don’t, and trying to free yourself from the grip of the ones that don’t.
One thing all feelings have in common is that they were originally “designed” to convince you to follow them. They feel right and true almost by definition. They actively discourage you from viewing them objectively.
rewarding things often require work. And another thing I started to realize on that retreat is how great the rewards of mindfulness meditation can be.
Sure, starting to get a grip on a few of your more troublesome feelings is great—and if knowing that these feelings are in one sense or another “false” helps you do that, so much the better. But the taming of troublesome feelings can be just the beginning.
The ensuing dialogue with my teacher went something like this: So you notice that your mind keeps wandering? Yes. That’s good. It’s good that my mind keeps wandering? No. It’s good that you notice that your mind keeps wandering. But it happens, like, all the time. That’s even better. It means you’re noticing a lot.
My teacher was right: by frequently noticing that my mind was wandering, I was breaking new ground. In my ordinary, workaday life, when my mind wandered I would follow it over hill and dale, not even aware that I was being led.
I was beginning to observe the workings of what psychologists call the “default mode network.” This is a network in the brain that, according to brain- scan studies, is active when we’re doing nothing in particular—not talking to people, not focusing on our work or any other task, not playing a sport or reading a book or watching a movie. It is the network along which our mind wanders when it’s wandering.
As for where the mind wanders to: well, lots of places, obviously, but studies have shown that these places are usually in the past or the future;
What you’re generally not doing when your mind is wandering is directly experiencing the present moment.
That’s why you try to focus on the breath: the mind needs some object of focus to wean it from its habitual meandering.
instead just note the fact that your mind was wandering, and perhaps even note what kind of wandering it was doing (dreading work, looking forward to lunch, lamenting a bad golf shot),
By interrupting the workings of my default mode network, by “snapping out of it” and realizing that my mind was wandering and then returning to my breath, I was diluting the network’s dominance.
people who have meditated for tens of thousands of hours and are in a whole ’nother league from me, exhibit dramatically subdued default mode networks while meditating.
When the default mode network subsides—when the mind stops wandering—it can be a good feeling. There can be a sense of liberation from your chattering mind, a sense of peace, even deep peace.
This is called concentration meditation, and the object of concentration doesn’t have to be breath. Depending on the meditation tradition, the object can be a mantra, an imagined visual image, a recurring sound, whatever. Concentration meditation is sometimes referred to as serenity meditation
At some point, after twenty-five or thirty minutes of meditation, I had a dramatic and powerful experience that’s hard to describe. Later in this book I’ll do my best to describe it, but for now I’ll just say that it was very, very vivid.
don’t know from firsthand experience what it would be like to take LSD and follow it with a heroin chaser, but I’d guess it’s something like the experience I had that night: intensely visual, bordering on hallucinatory, and intensely blissful.
The kind of meditation that gave me this peak experience—concentration meditation—isn’t the kind of meditation this book is about.
This retreat was supposed to be about mindfulness meditation, the second of the two basic meditative paths you can take.
Mindfulness and concentration are such important Buddhist aspirations that each constitutes one of the eight parts of the Eightfold Path that a deeply committed Buddhist is supposed to tread.
Mustering some concentration is what liberates you from the default mode network and stops the mental chatter that normally preoccupies you.
Then, having used concentration meditation to stabilize your attention, you can shift your attention to whatever it is you’re now going to be mindful of
I realize that mindfully viewing some feeling you’re having—anxiety or restlessness, for example—may not sound as exotically appealing as the psychedelic ecstasy that concentration meditation brought me on that summer night in Massachusetts. But there are several consolations of pursuing mindfulness meditation,
First, mindfulness meditation is good training. Viewing your feelings mindfully while on a meditation cushion can make you better at viewing them mindfully in everyday life, which means your life will be less governed by misleading or unproductive feelings.
Another virtue of mindfulness meditation is that it can make you more attuned to beauty.
With your default mode network deprived of fresh fuel, it’s easier to stay in experiential mode.
On retreat, common visual experiences can assume a kind of drama. I remember reaching to open an aged screen door and suddenly feeling as if I were watching a movie
What’s more, being in closer-than-usual contact with the actual workings of your mind can lead you to confront issues with a new and perhaps unsettling honesty. Which is just as well, when you think about it. Isn’t much of the point of Buddhism to confront suffering rather than evade it, and by confronting it, by looking at it unflinchingly, undermine it?
Still, so long as I keep up my daily meditation, I am more likely to stop while walking my dogs and look at the bark of a tree.
Still, if you want to go full-on Buddhist—if you want to take the red pill—you need to understand that staying in the present, though an inherent part of mindfulness meditation, isn’t the point of the exercise. It is the means to an end, not the end itself.
Which brings us to the subject of enlightenment. Becoming enlightened, in the Buddhist sense of the term, would entail wholly ridding yourself of the twin illusions from which people tend to suffer: the illusion about what’s “in here”—inside your mind—and about what’s “out there” in the rest of the world.
I should add that another term used to describe it is liberation, as in liberation from suffering
How many people there are who have attained enlightenment, and for that matter whether there are any, are questions I’m not qualified to answer.
They attain and then more or less sustain a state of consciousness that is radically different from ordinary consciousness—and that, by their account, is exceedingly pleasant. Which leads to the obvious question: How did they do it? How exactly would you go about getting enlightened
But since that first retreat, I’ve come to believe that, as dramatic and profound as that experience felt, and as unspectacular as mindfulness meditation may sound by comparison, mindfulness meditation can in fact lead to the same kind of place, a place of sharply and vividly altered perspective.
