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

by Robert Wright

implications of staying awake pondering grave implications, 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

feeling it and watching it. I can’t say that the feeling felt great, but the more I accepted it, observing it nonjudgmentally,

might look at an abstract sculpture in a museum. It looked like a kind of thick, knotted rope of tightness, occupying the part of my abdomen where anxiety is felt, but it didn’t feel like tightness anymore. 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. After a few minutes of this pleasant relief from suffering, I lay down and went to sleep. The next day my talk went—I’ll pause here to let the suspense build—fine. 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

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.

that with cognitive-behavioral therapy, the questioning is more literal. By the way, if you’re thinking about combining these two approaches and becoming famous as the founder of a whole new school of therapy, I have bad news: mindfulness-based cognitive-behavioral therapy—MCBT—already exists.

designed to depict reality accurately even in our “natural” environment.

our hunter-gatherer ancestors into the next generation. If that meant deluding our ancestors—making them so fearful that they “see” a snake

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.

“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.

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.

source. We were built by natural selection, and natural selection works to maximize genetic proliferation, period. 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

fact, natural selection doesn’t even care about our short-term happiness. Just look at the price of all those false positives: b...

Still, we are the heirs of this tendency toward false positives—not just in the realm of snakes but in the realm of other fears and everyday anxieties. 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.” Or, as the Buddha would have put it, a lifetime of dukkha. And the Buddha might have added: But this cost is avoidable, if you address the psychological causes of it head-on.

keep us alive and flourishing. My attraction to apples, my aversion to grasping knife blades and scaling skyscrapers—all to the good. Still, I hope you can see the virtue of subjecting your feelings to investigation—inspecting them to see which ones deserve

reliable from the misleading. 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.

immersion approach and went on a one-week silent meditation retreat. But it’s not the only reason. There are other things about the way feelings influence us that make it hard to turn the tables on them and reverse the servant-master relationship. And there are other things about the way the mind works that make it hard to sink into a meditative state in the first place. Indeed, it was only after I went on

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. There are other dimensions of mindfulness, and there are insights much deeper and subtler than the realization that maybe surrendering to road rage isn’t such a great idea.

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.

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.

terminology: I was beginning to observe the workings of what psychologists call the “default mode network.” This is a network in the brain that, according t...

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; you may ponder recent events or distant, strong memories; you may dread upcoming events or eagerly

anticipate them; you may strategize about how to head off some looming crisis or fantasize about romancing the attractive person in the cubicle next to yours. What you’re generally not doing when your mind is wandering is directly experiencing the present moment.

it’s not hard to quiet your default mode network: just do something that requires concentration. Do a crossword puzzle or try to juggle three tennis balls. Until you get to a point where juggling is second nature, you probably won’t be fantasizing about the attractive person in the cubicle next to yours. What’s hard is to abandon the d...

try to focus on the breath: the mind needs some object of focus to wean it from ...

you’ve been carried away, it’s tempting to feel frustration or anger or (my personal favorite) self-loathing. But the standard instruction is to not waste time on that; instead just note the fact that your mind was wandering, and perhaps even note what

teacher, in highlighting the silver lining surrounding my cloud of diffuse attention, was no doubt trying to encourage me to do just that. This turned out to be good guidance. By interrupting

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,

active. At least, that’s a pretty fair guess. Brain-scan studies have shown this happening in novice meditators. Such studies have also shown that highly adept meditators, people who have meditated for tens of thousands of hours and are in a whole ’nother league from m...

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. You may ...

inducements to get back on the cushion the next day, part of the positive reinforcement t...

used your breath to gain some measure of escape from your wandering mind, you’re at a crossroads. There are two different paths you can follow, correspon...

a long, long time; and try to tighten and deepen the focus, becoming more immersed in the breath. Then just keep going. You may find yourself feeling better and better and better. 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

referred to as serenity meditation—which makes sense, because the concentration can bring serenity. Indeed, the concentration can bring more than serenity. Sometimes, if sustained for long enough, it can bring powerful feelings of bliss or ecstasy.

assume—was chanting loudly. As I meditated I got more tightly focused on my breath and the chanting, both of which seemed to grow in intensity as they absorbed my attention more and more fully. 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. In fact, I’d like to add another “very” to

that gave me this peak experience—concentration meditation—isn’t the kind of meditation this book is about. And it’s not the kind of meditation that the retreat I was on was supposed to be about. When, at the end of the retreat, I proudly told Michael Grady, one of the retreat’s two teachers, about my peak experience, he said, with a nonchalance that I found a bit dispiriting, “Sounds nice. But don’t get attached to it.” 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

fact, they are the seventh and eighth parts, respectively. But that doesn’t mean they are the culminating parts, because the term Eightfold Path is misleading in its suggestion of sequence. The idea isn’t that you completely master the first of these eight factors, “right view,” and then move on to the second and third—“right intention” and “right speech”—and so on. There is too much interdependence among the eight factors for such linear progress.

this chapter—although right mindfulness comes before right concentration on the Eightfold Path, cultivating mindfulness may require first cultivating concentration. That’s why the early part of a

Mustering some concentration is what liberates you from the default mode network and stops the mental chatter that normally preoccupies you.

be mindful of—usually things that are happening inside you, such as emotions or bodily sensations, though you can also focus on things in the outside world, such as sounds. Meanwhile the breath recedes to the background, though it may remain your “anchor,” something you’re fuzzily aware of even as you examine other things, and something you

experience it mindfully, with that ironic combination of closeness and critical distance that I mentioned in describing how I had viewed the feeling of overcaffeination.

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. You spend

your kids or your spouse or yourself or whoever you’re inclined to yell at; less time pointlessly resenting indignities inflicted on you; less time having revenge

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

got the picture: shuttering the visual field brought absorption in taste closer to 100 percent. The result was sublime. A single bite of salad—chewed slowly, savored not just for flavor but for texture—could bring fifteen seconds of near bliss. So imagine the buttered cornbread! On retreat, common visual experiences can

that in everyday life might visit you, and even revisit you, but not settle in for a long stay. 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

on them. Still, the working-through part can take a while and can get intense. I sometimes tell people that going on a long meditation retreat is like doing extreme sports for the mind: it features both the sublime and the harrowing. I’m happy to say

sense, to mislead you about the heart of Buddhist teaching. As I suggested in the first chapter, the Satipatthana Sutta—the ancient text known as The Four Foundations of Mindfulness—contains no injunction to live in the now. In fact, there is no term in the entire text that is translated as “now” or “the present.”† This doesn’t mean that “staying in the present”

on your breathing or on bodily sensations, as prescribed in ancient mindfulness texts, the present is where you will be. 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.