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

by Robert Wright

One of the Buddha’s main messages was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly and leave us thirsting for more. We spend our time looking for the next gratifying thing—the next powdered-sugar doughnut, the next sexual encounter, the next status-enhancing promotion, the next online purchase. But the thrill always fades, and it always leaves us wanting more. The old Rolling Stones lyric “I can’t get no satisfaction” is, according to Buddhism, the human condition. Indeed, though the Buddha is famous for asserting that life is pervaded by suffering, some scholars say that’s an incomplete rendering of his message and that the word translated as “suffering,” dukkha, could, for some purposes, be translated as “unsatisfactoriness.”

Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.

“Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.”

And then there is the famous Buddhist idea that the self—you know, your self, my self—is an illusion. In this view, the “you” that you think of as thinking your thoughts, feeling your feelings, and making your decisions doesn’t really exist.I

The Buddha said anger has a “poisoned root and honeyed tip.”

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.

But I’ve since come to realize that this first bit of feedback I ever got from a meditation teacher wasn’t just strained encouragement. 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. Now I was following it for only short stretches before breaking free—at least, briefly free, free for long enough to realize it had been leading me, a realization that would then give way to its leading me some more.

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. As I got better at focusing on my breath for longer periods, this network would become less and less active.

Another virtue of mindfulness meditation is that it can make you more attuned to beauty. This effect is especially dramatic on a retreat, when you’re doing so much meditating and when your isolation from the “real world” is limiting the number of things for you to worry about, eagerly anticipate, or bitterly regret. With your default mode network deprived of fresh fuel, it’s easier to stay in experiential mode.

Mindfulness meditation, the main vehicle of Vipassana, is a good way to study the human mind. At least, it’s a good way to study one human’s mind: yours. You sit down, let the mental dust settle, and then watch your mind work.

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.

So if you’re walking out of a store jamming a 3.5-ounce chocolate bar into your mouth and a passerby looks at you quizzically, you can say, “This is so I can get more work done this afternoon.” Presumably the passerby will then think more highly of you than if you’d said, “I’m out of control, okay?”

You may have noticed a trend in this chapter: the more we ponder the connection between reason and feeling, the dimmer the prospects seem for keeping our behavior under truly rational control.

But another module may say something like “You’ll do more work if you eat the chocolate”—even if history shows that what you’ll actually do is peruse social media with unusual fervor.

It just means you don’t try to push the urge out of your mind. Rather, you follow the same mindfulness technique that you’d apply to other bothersome feelings—anxiety, resentment, melancholy, hatred. You just calmly (or as calmly as possible, under the circumstances) examine the feeling. What part of your body is the urge felt in? What is the texture of the urge?

The more you do that, the less the urge seems a part of you; you’ve exploited the basic irony of mindfulness meditation: getting close enough to feelings to take a good look at them winds up giving you a kind of critical distance from them. Their grip on you loosens; if it loosens enough, they’re no longer a part of you.

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...

my old smartphone has developed this weird problem where it thinks the headphones are plugged in even when they’re not. So if somebody calls me, I can’t hear what they’re saying unless I either plug in the headphones or switch the speakerphone on. Can you imagine trying to go through life with such a burden? Don’t you think I should spend the next few minutes researching smartphones? Well, whether you do or not, I am a gadget freak, so the thought of doing that feels good—way, way better than the thought of figuring out what sentence should go next.

“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.”

One such context is when we’re attributing essence not to tape measures or houses or any other inanimate object but to other human beings.

It turns out that the fundamental attribution error—the tendency to overestimate the role of disposition and underestimate the role of situation—isn’t quite as simple as psychologists originally thought. Sometimes we actually downplay the role of disposition and amplify the role of situation.

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.”

“There is no such thing as the unconditioned, only the possibility of not being conditioned by something.”

you can pay attention to what they actually feel like.

Too bad that in Buddhism there’s no evil perpetrator of delusion to fight!

In traditional Buddhism, actually, there is: the Satan-like supernatural being named Mara, who unsuccessfully tempted the Buddha during the epic meditation session that led to his great awakening. Mara, though, has no place in the Western, more secular Buddhism that is the backdrop of this book. Kind of disappointing.

At least, that’s one way you could put it. Another way you could put it is that I am pursuing enlightenment—it’s just that, rather than think of enlightenment as a state, I think of it as a process. And I think of liberation—liberation from dukkha—in the same way. The object of the game isn’t to reach Liberation and Enlightenment—with a capital L and E—on some distant day, but rather to become a bit more liberated and a bit more enlightened on a not-so-distant day. Like today! Or, failing that, tomorrow. Or the next day. Or whenever.