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

by Robert Wright

In one sense 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 default mode network when you’re not doing much of anything—like, say, when you’re sitting in a meditation hall with your eyes closed. That’s why you try to focus on the breath: the mind needs some object of focus to wean it from its habitual meandering.

Noticing that your mind is wandering doesn’t seem like a very profound insight; and in fact it isn’t one, notwithstanding my teacher’s kind insistence on giving it a standing ovation. But it’s not without significance. What I was saying in that session with my teacher was that I—that is, my “self,” the thing I had thought was in control—don’t readily control the most fundamental aspect of my mental life: what I’m thinking about.

The alternative way of describing the situation—saying that “I” act differently when in different “moods”—is just a way of evading the question he seems to have been asking: If you have different preferences from one moment to the next, then in what sense is it the same “you” from moment to moment? Isn’t this image of you exchanging one mood for another just a way of covering up the fact that today’s you and tomorrow’s you aren’t really the same you?

Observing feelings without attachment is the way you keep modules from seizing control of your consciousness. Easier said than done, I know.

Buddhist thought and modern psychology converge on this point: in human life as it’s ordinarily lived, there is no one self, no conscious CEO, that runs the show; rather, there seem to be a series of selves that take turns running the show—and, in a sense, seizing control of the show. If the way they seize control of the show is through feelings, it stands to reason that one way to change the show is to change the role feelings play in everyday life. I’m not aware of a better way to do that than mindfulness meditation.

For now I’ll finesse that question by repeating what I said earlier: Don’t get hung up on whether something called a “self” exists. Just use the parts of the not-self doctrine that are useful, in particular the idea that none of your feelings—the urge for cigarettes, the urge to research smartphones, the urge to hate—is intrinsically a part of you. You can observe these feelings for what they are: things that some module is trying to give force to. The more you observe them this way—observe them mindfully—the less force they will have, and the less a part of “you” they will be.

For example, an airplane may fly overhead, and you hear an airplane-flying-overhead sound. Except you don’t necessarily think, “Oh, an airplane.” You’re so immersed in the texture of the sound that you may not immediately think, “Oh, an anything.” It’s just pure sound, unattached to the idea of a particular, concrete object. I guess it’s what an airplane would sound like to somebody from a culture that didn’t have airplanes or to an alien from a civilization so advanced that its aircraft didn’t make noise. It would just be sound—not the sound of anything.

So too, he said, with “the simplest of sensations: an orgasm, drinking water when you’re thirsty, stretching, anything. It’s always under some sort of description. It’s always viewed as an instance of some sort of category.” There is always, in other words, an implied narrative.

But you could look at it the other way around. Given that our experience of a bottle of wine can be influenced by slapping a fake label on it, you might say that, actually, there is a superficiality to our pleasure, and that a deeper pleasure would come if we could somehow taste the wine itself, unencumbered by beliefs about it that may or may not be true. That is closer to the Buddhist view of the matter.

Maybe the reason babies get so immersed in shapes and textures is because they haven’t yet developed their filing system, their sense of essence. In other words, they don’t yet “know” what the “things” surrounding them are, so the world is a wonderland of exploration. And maybe this helps explain how Weber could say that “emptiness” is actually “full”: sometimes not seeing essence lets you get drawn into the richness of things.

This experiment fits into a large body of psychological literature about something called “the fundamental attribution error.” The word attribution refers to the tendency to explain people’s behavior in terms of either “dispositional” factors—in other words, the kind of person they are—or “situational” factors, like whether they happen to be late for a talk. The word error refers to the fact that these attributions are often wrong, that we tend to underestimate the role of situation and overestimate the role of disposition. In other words, we’re biased in favor of essence.