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

by Robert Wright

In its ordinary form—the form with which all of us unenlightened beings are familiar—consciousness is “engaged” with the other four aggregates, the Buddha says; it is engaged with feeling, with mental

anything, for enlightened beings to be conscious of. “Engagement” refers, rather, to a stronger connection between consciousness and the other aggregates. Engagement is the product of a “lust,” as the Buddha puts it, that people have for the aggregates; there is a clinging to them, a possessive relationship to them. In other words, the “engagement” persists so long as the person fails to realize that the aggregates are “not-self.” The person clings to emotions,

engagement—suggests an appealingly simple model: liberation consists of changing the relationship between your consciousness and the things you normally think of as its “contents”—your feelings,

consciousness to them becomes more like contemplation than engagement, and your consciousness is liberated. And the “you” that remains—the you that, in that

there’s no denying that the Buddha repeatedly, in that first not-self discourse and elsewhere, does say that consciousness is not-self, something that “you” have to let go of for liberation to happen—which seems quite at odds with the prospect that “you” can happily inhabit the consciousness aggregate once it is disengaged from the other four aggregates.

is deeply entangled with—fully engaged with—the contents of the other aggregates, and the second kind is a more objective awareness of those contents, a more contemplative consciousness that persists after the engagement has been broken.

to roughly fit this description of the second kind of consciousness, and some of them experience it for a long time. Maybe if it lasted forever they could claim to be enlightened. Maybe this “witness consciousness” is where the “you” that is left over after liberation resides.†

self. But be open to the radical possibility that your self, at the deepest level, is not at all what you’ve always thought of it as being. If you followed the Buddha’s guidance and abandoned the massive chunks of psychological landscape you’ve always thought of as belonging to you, you would undergo a breathtaking shift in what it means to be a human. If you

to all feelings, as the Buddha recommends, but I had let go of my attachment to this one feeling. I had realized, you might say, that this feeling didn’t have to be part of my self; I had redefined my self in a way that excluded it.

to the tooth is bound to affect me, a certain disturbance of thought is likely to result.” In that sense, “the belief in a ‘self’ is considered by all Buddhists as an indispensable condition to the emergence of suffering.” In other words, pain in your tooth can hurt you only if you own the tooth in the first place.

tooth pain so objectively as to take much of the suffering out of it. Still, this experience was testament to the fact that ownership of even serious pain is, strictly speaking, optional.

dentistry. What is a big problem is anxiety. And, as I noted earlier, I did manage to disown some of that the night before the talk I gave in Camden, Maine. The anxiety came to seem like something I was observing as much as feeling, something I was experiencing with dispassion. Maybe the Buddha would say that my consciousness had ceased to be “engaged”

this from a slightly different angle: the key to letting go of a chunk or two of my self was to separate the act of observation from the act of evaluation.

anxiety, but I no longer experienced it as either...

natural selection to represent judgments about things, evaluations of them; natural selection “wants” you to experience things as either good or bad. The Buddha believed that the less you judge things—including the contents of your mind—t...

lack of control over them in turn proved that they were not part of my self. But once I followed that logic—quit seeing these things I couldn’t control as part of my self—I was liberated from them and, in a certain sense, back in control. Or maybe it would

perhaps, of how far I am from realizing not-self. At no time, either in the course of having these experiences or in the course of thinking about them later, did I come close to abandoning the concept of self altogether. But hanging on to some notion of self didn’t keep me from experiencing a pretty significant redefinition of my self—a redefinition that, who knows, may be the first step toward someday experiencing full-on not-self!

hanging on to it could help you get to the point where you no longer believe it exists. The scholar Peter Harvey has written, “One can, then, perhaps see the Self idea as fulfilling a role akin to a rocket which boosts a payload into space, against the force of gravity. It provides the force to drive the mind out of the ‘gravity field’ of attachment to the personality-factors [the aggregates]. Having done so, it then ‘falls away and is burnt up,’ as itself a baseless concept.”

the Buddha’s view of the matter. Maybe he wasn’t really trying to articulate a doctrine but rather to draw you down a path. And that path involves showing you how many things there are that you think of as part of your self but that don’t have to be thought of that way. In this view, the Buddha, in that first discourse on the not-self, wasn’t delivering a lecture about metaphysics or the mind-body problem

discourse that people who think of the self as a CEO find odd: that the Buddha’s criterion for labeling a part of you not-self is that it’s not under control rather than that it’s not in control. Maybe by not-self the Buddha just meant something like “not usefully considered part of your self” or “not to be identified with.”

which case he was basically saying, “Look, if there’s part of you that isn’t under your control and therefore makes you suffer, then do yourself a favor and quit identifying with it!” This interpretation

the end of the discourse, when he says that the proper attitude toward each of the five aggregates is “This is not mine, t...

have not just thought about it but done it—someone who says that, after abandoning ownership of larger and larger chunks of what we traditionally think of as the self, he finally let go of all of it. But for now my advice to beginning meditators is this: Don’t take the idea of not-self too seriously. Maybe the contemplative path will eventually lead you to

discourse. Think of yourself as having, in principle, the power to establish a different relationship with your feelings and thoughts and impulses and perceptions—the power to disengage from some of them; the

disown them, to define the bounds of your self in a way that excludes them. Think of some degree of liberation as being possible

By the way, at the risk of draining this whole subject of some drama, in my own view these arguments over what the Buddha actually believed about the self are in one sense pointless. There’s roughly no chance that all the sayings attributed to him in Buddhist texts were uttered by him. In fact, some scholars will tell you that there is little or nothing in these texts that we can confidently attribute to him. Like the “historical Jesus,” the “historical Buddha” is hard to discern through the mists of history.

are products of evolution, of oral and textual accretion over time, so are ancient accounts of the Buddha’s utterances. Even assuming that most of these accounts were originally grounded in things he actually said, they were subject to amendment, intentional or not, as they passed through the generations.

there are some themes that everyone agrees are part of the Buddhist tradition from early on. And one of these is that our conception of our selves is, at best, wildly off the mark. We associate the self with control and with firm persistence through time, but on close inspection we turn out to be much less under control, and much more fluid, with a much

modern psychology has to say about all of this. Does psychology tend to corroborate the Buddhist view? Does it suggest that our commonsense conception of the self—as a solid, enduring core that keeps the

scripture, he runs into a man named Aggivessana, a braggart

think, Aggivessana? When you say, ‘Form is my self,’ do you wield power over that form: ‘May my form be thus, may my form not be thus’?” Aggivessana says nothing. The Buddha repeats the question.

the “you” that experiences feelings and perceptions and entertains thoughts—isn’t really in complete control of these things. If you think that somewhere inside your head there’s a kind of supreme ruler, a chief executive, well, there’s some question as to where exactly you would find it. Twenty-five hundred years later, the science of psychology is talking the Buddha’s language. Well, not exactly his language; psychologists don’t often assert that you’re not the king of your personal

as the Buddha was known to ask, why would they cause so much suffering? Modern psychology is making a stronger point. It’s basically saying: You know how, on reflection, you conclude, along with Aggivessana, that you’re not in total control? Well, you’re actually in even less control than you conclude on reflection. Unless, maybe, by “on reflection” you mean

yourself as generating seem to be getting generated by something other than you. More than once I’ve heard a meditation teacher say, “Thoughts think themselves.” By the end of a retreat, oddly, that

control? As we’ll see, the answer may be: nothing in particular. The closer we look at the mind, the more

like a great thing to be. It’s because we feel like we’re king; we feel that our conscious self is in charge of our behavior, deciding what to do and when. But a number of experiments over the past few decades have cast doubt on this intuition.

had been separated via surgery that severed the bundle of fibers connecting them. (Typically, the purpose of the surgery was to control seizures in cases of severe epilepsy.) It turns out that this surgery has little effect on behavior; under normal circumstances,

hemisphere at all, since the hemispheres have been surgically separated. It’s the left hemisphere that, in most people, controls language.

demonstrated the capacity of the conscious self to convince itself that it’s calling the shots when it’s not. However, this demonstration was done with people who don’t have normal brains. How about the rest of us, whose two hemispheres aren’t separated? Do our brains actually make use of this capacity

answer is yes. In one much-cited experiment, the psychologists

to get people to do things without being aware of why they’re doing them. A common technique is to present information subliminally—for example, to flash a word or an image on a screen for a small fraction of a second, not long enough for conscious

These subjects were having their brains scanned. The scientists paid special attention to a brain region that is associated with motivation and emotion and is thought to encode information about rewards.

This part of the brain was more active when the monetary reward was higher—and that was true regardless

consciousness. The scientists wrote, “Consistently, the same basal forebrain region underpinned subliminal and conscious motivation.”

you’re consciously aware of the incentive and consciously experiencing the translation; so maybe the conscious awareness doesn’t really add anything to the process. In other words, maybe it’s not so much “conscious motivation” as “consciousness of motivation.”

machinery seems to be doing the heavy lifting.† Sure, you might feel as if your awareness of the incentive is what led you to strengthen your grip. But what this experiment suggests is that

is an illusion. That’s not the only possible interpretation, but it’s a salient one, and it’s one the Buddha would probably warm to: you think you’re directing the movie, but you’re actually just watching it. Or, at the risk of turning this into a metaphor that’s impossible to wrap your mind around, the movie is directing you—unless you manage to liberate yourself from it. Questions about how in control the conscious mind...

subjects while they “chose” to initiate an action. The researchers concluded that the brain was initiating the action before the person became aware of “deciding” to initiate it. This body of research is still coalescing. Not all the findings will hold up in the l...

seems fair to say that the role of our conscious selves in guiding behavior is not nearly as big as was long

is that the conscious mind feels so powerful; in other words, the conscious mind is naturally deluded about