Why Buddhism Is True
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Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment
Author Robert Wright
Country United States
Language English
Subject Buddhism
Publisher Simon & Schuster
Publication date August 8, 2017
Media type Print (hardcover and paperback)
Pages 336 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4391-9545-1 (Hardcover)
Preceded by The Evolution of God
Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment is a 2017 book by Robert Wright.
Contents
1Content
2Reception
3See also
4References
5External links
Content[edit]
- In Why Buddhism is True, Wright advocates a secular, Westernized form of Buddhism focusing on the practice of mindfulness meditation and stripped of supernatural beliefs such as reincarnation.[2]
- He further argues that more widespread practice of meditation could lead to a more reflective and empathetic population and reduce political tribalism.[2]
- In line with his background, Wright draws heavily on evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology to defend Buddhism's diagnosis of the causes of human suffering.[3]
- He argues the modern psychological idea of the modularity of mind resonates with the Buddhist teaching of no-self (anatman).[3]
Reception[edit]
Why Buddhism is True received a number of positive reviews from major publications.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, reviewing the book in The New York Times, wrote, "Wright's book is provocative, informative and, in many respects, deeply rewarding."[5]
The Washington Post gave a more mixed review, writing that "while [Wright] does not make a fully convincing case for some of his more grandiose claims about truth and freedom, his argument contains many interesting and illuminating points."[7]
In 2020, Evan Thompson questioned what he called Buddhist exceptionalism, "the belief that Buddhism is superior to other religions... or that Buddhism isn't really a religion but rather is a kind of 'mind science,' therapy, philosophy, or a way of life based on meditation."[8]
See also[edit]
- Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris
- Zen and the Art of Consciousness by Susan Blackmore
- Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson
- Stephen Batchelor (author)
- Joseph Goldstein (writer)
- Sharon Salzberg
- Shinzen Young
- Jon Kabat-Zinn
- Judson A. Brewer
- Bhikkhu Bodhi
- Secular Buddhism
References[edit]
- ^ Cowles, Gregory (18 August 2017). "A Science Writer Embraces Buddhism as a Path to Enlightenment". The New York Times. Retrieved 3 February 2018.
- ^ Jump up to:a b Illing, Sean (12 October 2014). "Why Buddhism is true". Vox. Retrieved 30 October 2017.
- ^ Jump up to:a b c "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation | Kirkus Review". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved 14 December 2017.
- ^ Gopnik, Adam. "What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can't". The New Yorker. Retrieved 30 October 2017.
- ^ Damasio, Antonio (7 August 2017). "Assessing the Value of Buddhism, for Individuals and for the World". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 December 2017.
- ^ Frank, Adam. "Why 'Why Buddhism is True' is True". National Public Radio. Retrieved 15 December 2017.
- ^ Romeo, Nick (25 August 2017). "Meditation can make us happy, but can it also make us good?". The Washington Post. Retrieved 14 December 2017.
- ^ Jump up to:a b Thompson, Evan (2020). Why I am Not a Buddhist. Yale University Press.
External links[edit]
Interview about the book with Wright by Vox
Categories:
2017 non-fiction books
Books about Buddhism
Books by Robert Wright (journalist)
- Cowles, Gregory (18 August 2017). "A Science Writer Embraces Buddhism as a Path to Enlightenment". The New York Times. Retrieved 3 February 2018.
- Illing, Sean (12 October 2014). "Why Buddhism is true". Vox. Retrieved 30 October 2017.
- Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation | Kirkus Review". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved 14 December 2017.
- Gopnik, Adam. "What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can't". The New Yorker. Retrieved 30 October 2017.
- Damasio, Antonio (7 August 2017). "Assessing the Value of Buddhism, for Individuals and for the World". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 December 2017.
- Frank, Adam. "Why 'Why Buddhism is True' is True". National Public Radio. Retrieved 15 December 2017.
- Romeo, Nick (25 August 2017). "Meditation can make us happy, but can it also make us good?". The Washington Post. Retrieved 14 December 2017.
- Thompson, Evan (2020). Why I am Not a Buddhist. Yale University Press.
At the heart of Buddhism is a simple claim: The reason we suffer—and the reason we make other people suffer—is that we don’t see the world clearly. At the heart of Buddhist meditative practice is a radical promise: We can learn to see the world, including ourselves, more clearly and so gain a deep and morally valid happiness.
In this “sublime” (The New Yorker), pathbreaking book, Robert Wright shows how taking this promise seriously can change your life—how it can loosen the grip of anxiety, regret, and hatred, and how it can deepen your appreciation of beauty and of other people. He also shows why this transformation works, drawing on the latest in neuroscience and psychology, and armed with an acute understanding of human evolution.
This book is the culmination of a personal journey that began with Wright’s landmark book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal, and deepened as he immersed himself in meditative practice and conversed with some of the world’s most skilled meditators. The result is a story that is “provocative, informative and...deeply rewarding” (The New York Times Book Review), and as entertaining as it is illuminating. Written with the wit, clarity, and grace for which Wright is famous,
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Taking the Red Pill
At the risk of overdramatizing the human condition: Have you ever seen the movie The Matrix?
It’s about a guy named Neo (played by Keanu Reeves), who discovers that he’s been inhabiting a dream world. The life he thought he was living is actually an elaborate hallucination. He’s having that hallucination while, unbeknownst to him, his actual physical body is inside a gooey, coffin-size pod—one among many pods, rows and rows of pods, each pod containing a human being absorbed in a dream. These people have been put in their pods by robot overlords and given dream lives as pacifiers.
The choice faced by Neo—to keep living a delusion or wake up to reality—is famously captured in the movie’s “red pill” scene. Neo has been contacted by rebels who have entered his dream (or, strictly speaking, whose avatars have entered his dream). Their leader, Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne), explains the situation to Neo: “You are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch—a prison for your mind.” The prison is called the Matrix, but there’s no way to explain to Neo what the Matrix ultimately is. The only way to get the whole picture, says Morpheus, is “to see it for yourself.” He offers Neo two pills, a red one and a blue one. Neo can take the blue pill and return to his dream world, or take the red pill and break through the shroud of delusion. Neo chooses the red pill.
That’s a pretty stark choice: a life of delusion and bondage or a life of insight and freedom. In fact, it’s a choice so dramatic that you’d think a Hollywood movie is exactly where it belongs—that the choices we really get to make about how to live our lives are less momentous than this, more pedestrian. Yet when that movie came out, a number of people saw it as mirroring a choice they had actually made.
The people I’m thinking about are what you might call Western Buddhists, people in the United States and other Western countries who, for the most part, didn’t grow up Buddhist but at some point adopted Buddhism. At least they adopted a version of Buddhism, a version that had been stripped of some supernatural elements typically found in Asian Buddhism, such as belief in reincarnation and in various deities. This Western Buddhism centers on a part of Buddhist practice that in Asia is more common among monks than among laypeople: meditation, along with immersion in Buddhist philosophy. (Two of the most common Western conceptions of Buddhism—that it’s atheistic and that it revolves around meditation—are wrong; most Asian Buddhists do believe in gods, though not an omnipotent creator God, and don’t meditate.)
These Western Buddhists, long before they watched The Matrix, had become convinced that the world as they had once seen it was a kind of illusion—not an out-and-out hallucination but a seriously warped picture of reality that in turn warped their approach to life, with bad consequences for them and the people around them. Now they felt that, thanks to meditation and Buddhist philosophy, they were seeing things more clearly. Among these people, The Matrix seemed an apt allegory of the transition they’d undergone, and so became known as a “dharma movie.” The word dharma has several meanings, including the Buddha’s teachings and the path that Buddhists should tread in response to those teachings. In the wake of The Matrix, a new shorthand for “I follow the dharma” came into currency: “I took the red pill.”
I saw The Matrix in 1999, right after it came out, and some months later I learned that I had a kind of connection to it. The movie’s directors, the Wachowski siblings, had given Keanu Reeves three books to read in preparation for playing Neo. One of them was a book I had written a few years earlier, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life.
I’m not sure what kind of link the directors saw between my book and The Matrix. But I know what kind of link I see. Evolutionary psychology can be described in various ways, and here’s one way I had described it in my book: It is the study of how the human brain was designed—by natural selection—to mislead us, even enslave us.
Don’t get me wrong: natural selection has its virtues, and I’d rather be created by it than not be created at all—which, so far as I can tell, are the two options this universe offers. Being a product of evolution is by no means entirely a story of enslavement and delusion. Our evolved brains empower us in many ways, and they often bless us with a basically accurate view of reality.
Still, ultimately, natural selection cares about only one thing (or, I should say, “cares”—in quotes—about only one thing, since natural selection is just a blind process, not a conscious designer). And that one thing is getting genes into the next generation. Genetically based traits that in the past contributed to genetic proliferation have flourished, while traits that didn’t have fallen by the wayside. And the traits that have survived this test include mental traits—structures and algorithms that are built into the brain and shape our everyday experience. So if you ask the question “What kinds of perceptions and thoughts and feelings guide us through life each day?” the answer, at the most basic level, isn’t “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that give us an accurate picture of reality.” No, at the most basic level the answer is “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation.” Whether those thoughts and feelings and perceptions give us a true view of reality is, strictly speaking, beside the point. As a result, they sometimes don’t. Our brains are designed to, among other things, delude us.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Some of my happiest moments have come from delusion—believing, for example, that the Tooth Fairy would pay me a visit after I lost a tooth. But delusion can also produce bad moments. And I don’t just mean moments that, in retrospect, are obviously delusional, like horrible nightmares. I also mean moments that you might not think of as delusional, such as lying awake at night with anxiety. Or feeling hopeless, even depressed, for days on end. Or feeling bursts of hatred toward people, bursts that may actually feel good for a moment but slowly corrode your character. Or feeling bursts of hatred toward yourself. Or feeling greedy, feeling a compulsion to buy things or eat things or drink things well beyond the point where your well-being is served.
Though these feelings—anxiety, despair, hatred, greed—aren’t delusional the way a nightmare is delusional, if you examine them closely, you’ll see that they have elements of delusion, elements you’d be better off without.
And if you think you would be better off, imagine how the whole world would be. After all, feelings like despair and hatred and greed can foster wars and atrocities. So if what I’m saying is true—if these basic sources of human suffering and human cruelty are indeed in large part the product of delusion—there is value in exposing this delusion to the light.
Sounds logical, right? But here’s a problem that I started to appreciate shortly after I wrote my book about evolutionary psychology: the exact value of exposing a delusion to the light depends on what kind of light you’re talking about. Sometimes understanding the ultimate source of your suffering doesn’t, by itself, help very much.
An Everyday Delusion
Let’s take a simple but fundamental example: eating some junk food, feeling briefly satisfied, and then, only minutes later, feeling a kind of crash and maybe a hunger for more junk food. This is a good example to start with for two reasons.
First, it illustrates how subtle our delusions can be. There’s no point in the course of eating a six-pack of small powdered-sugar doughnuts when you’re believing that you’re the messiah or that foreign agents are conspiring to assassinate you. And that’s true of many sources of delusion that I’ll discuss in this book: they’re more about illusion—about things not being quite what they seem—than about delusion in the more dramatic sense of that word. Still, by the end of the book, I’ll have argued that all of these illusions do add up to a very large-scale warping of reality, a disorientation that is as significant and consequential as out-and-out delusion.
The second reason junk food is a good example to start with is that it’s fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings. Okay, it can’t be literally fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings, because 2,500 years ago, when the Buddha taught, junk food as we know it didn’t exist. What’s fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings is the general dynamic of being powerfully drawn to sensory pleasure that winds up being fleeting at best. 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.”
So what exactly is the illusory part of pursuing doughnuts or sex or consumer goods or a promotion? There are different illusions associated with different pursuits, but for now we can focus on one illusion that’s common to these things: the overestimation of how much happiness they’ll bring. Again, by itself this is delusional only in a subtle sense. If I asked you whether you thought that getting that next promotion, or getting an A on that next exam, or eating that next powdered-sugar doughnut would bring you eternal bliss, you’d say no, obviously not. On the other hand, we do often pursue such things with, at the very least, an unbalanced view of the future. We spend more time envisioning the perks that a promotion will bring than envisioning the headaches it will bring. And there may be an unspoken sense that once we’ve achieved this long-sought goal, once we’ve reached the summit, we’ll be able to relax, or at least things will be enduringly better. Similarly, when we see that doughnut sitting there, we immediately imagine how good it tastes, not how intensely we’ll want another doughnut only moments after eating it, or how we’ll feel a bit tired or agitated later, when the sugar rush subsides.
Why Pleasure Fades
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to explain why this sort of distortion would be built into human anticipation. It just takes an evolutionary biologist—or, for that matter, anyone willing to spend a little time thinking about how evolution works.
Here’s the basic logic. We were “designed” by natural selection to do certain things that helped our ancestors get their genes into the next generation—things like eating, having sex, earning the esteem of other people, and outdoing rivals. I put “designed” in quotation marks because, again, natural selection isn’t a conscious, intelligent designer but an unconscious process. Still, natural selection does create organisms that look as if they’re the product of a conscious designer, a designer who kept fiddling with them to make them effective gene propagators. So, as a kind of thought experiment, it’s legitimate to think of natural selection as a “designer” and put yourself in its shoes and ask: If you were designing organisms to be good at spreading their genes, how would you get them to pursue the goals that further this cause? In other words, granted that eating, having sex, impressing peers, and besting rivals helped our ancestors spread their genes, how exactly would you design their brains to get them to pursue these goals? I submit that at least three basic principles of design would make sense:
1. Achieving these goals should bring pleasure, since animals, including humans, tend to pursue things that bring pleasure.
2. The pleasure shouldn’t last forever. After all, if the pleasure didn’t subside, we’d never seek it again; our first meal would be our last, because hunger would never return. So too with sex: a single act of intercourse, and then a lifetime of lying there basking in the afterglow. That’s no way to get lots of genes into the next generation!
3. The animal’s brain should focus more on (1), the fact that pleasure will accompany the reaching of a goal, than on (2), the fact that the pleasure will dissipate shortly thereafter. After all, if you focus on (1), you’ll pursue things like food and sex and social status with unalloyed gusto, whereas if you focus on (2), you could start feeling ambivalence. You might, for example, start asking what the point is of so fiercely pursuing pleasure if the pleasure will wear off shortly after you get it and leave you hungering for more. Before you know it, you’ll be full of ennui and wishing you’d majored in philosophy.
If you put these three principles of design together, you get a pretty plausible explanation of the human predicament as diagnosed by the Buddha. Yes, as he said, pleasure is fleeting, and, yes, this leaves us recurrently dissatisfied. And the reason is that pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure. 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.
Scientists can watch this logic play out at the biochemical level by observing dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is correlated with pleasure and the anticipation of pleasure. In one seminal study, they took monkeys and monitored dopamine-generating neurons as drops of sweet juice fell onto the monkeys’ tongues. Predictably, dopamine was released right after the juice touched the tongue. But then the monkeys were trained to expect drops of juice after a light turned on. As the trials proceeded, more and more of the dopamine came when the light turned on, and less and less came after the juice hit the tongue.
We have no way of knowing for sure what it felt like to be one of those monkeys, but it would seem that, as time passed, there was more in the way of anticipating the pleasure that would come from the sweetness, yet less in the way of pleasure actually coming from the sweetness.I,† To translate this conjecture into everyday human terms:
If you encounter a new kind of pleasure—if, say, you’ve somehow gone your whole life without eating a powdered-sugar doughnut, and somebody hands you one and suggests you try it—you’ll get a big blast of dopamine after the taste of the doughnut sinks in. But later, once you’re a confirmed powdered-sugar-doughnut eater, the lion’s share of the dopamine spike comes before you actually bite into the doughnut, as you’re staring longingly at it; the amount that comes after the bite is much less than the amount you got after that first, blissful bite into a powdered-sugar doughnut. The pre-bite dopamine blast you’re now getting is the promise of more bliss, and the post-bite drop in dopamine is, in a way, the breaking of the promise—or, at least, it’s a kind of biochemical acknowledgment that there was some overpromising. To the extent that you bought the promise—anticipated greater pleasure than would be delivered by the consumption itself—you have been, if not deluded in the strong sense of that term, at least misled.
Kind of cruel, in a way—but what do you expect from natural selection? Its job is to build machines that spread genes, and if that means programming some measure of illusion into the machines, then illusion there will be.
Unhelpful Insights
So this is one kind of light science can shed on an illusion. Call it “Darwinian light.” By looking at things from the point of view of natural selection, we see why the illusion would be built into us, and we have more reason than ever to see that it is an illusion. But—and this is the main point of this little digression—this kind of light is of limited value if your goal is to actually liberate yourself from the illusion.
Don’t believe me? Try this simple experiment: (1) Reflect on the fact that our lust for doughnuts and other sweet things is a kind of illusion—that the lust implicitly promises more enduring pleasure than will result from succumbing to it, while blinding us to the letdown that may ensue. (2) As you’re reflecting on this fact, hold a powdered-sugar doughnut six inches from your face. Do you feel the lust for it magically weakening? Not if you’re like me, no.
This is what I discovered after immersing myself in evolutionary psychology: knowing the truth about your situation, at least in the form that evolutionary psychology provides it, doesn’t necessarily make your life any better. In fact, it can actually make it worse. You’re still stuck in the natural human cycle of ultimately futile pleasure-seeking—what psychologists sometimes call “the hedonic treadmill”—but now you have new reason to see the absurdity of it. In other words, now you see that it’s a treadmill, a treadmill specifically designed to keep you running, often without really getting anywhere—yet you keep running!
And powdered-sugar doughnuts are just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, the truth is, it’s not all that uncomfortable to be aware of the Darwinian logic behind your lack of dietary self-discipline. In fact, you may find in this logic a comforting excuse: it’s hard to fight Mother Nature, right? But evolutionary psychology also made me more aware of how illusion shapes other kinds of behavior, such as the way I treat other people and the way I, in various senses, treat myself. In these realms, Darwinian self-consciousness was sometimes very uncomfortable.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a meditation teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, has said, “Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.” What he meant is that if you want to liberate yourself from the parts of the mind that keep you from realizing true happiness, you have to first become aware of them, which can be unpleasant.
Okay, fine; that’s a form of painful self-consciousness that would be worthwhile—the kind that leads ultimately to deep happiness. But the kind I got from evolutionary psychology was the worst of both worlds: the painful self-consciousness without the deep happiness. I had both the discomfort of being aware of my mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.
Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” Well, with evolutionary psychology I felt I had found the truth. But, manifestly, I had not found the way. Which was enough to make me wonder about another thing Jesus said: that the truth will set you free. I felt I had seen the basic truth about human nature, and I saw more clearly than ever how various illusions imprisoned me, but this truth wasn’t amounting to a Get Out of Jail Free card.
So is there another version of the truth out there that would set me free? No, I don’t think so. At least, I don’t think there’s an alternative to the truth presented by science; natural selection, like it or not, is the process that created us. But some years after writing The Moral Animal, I did start to wonder if there was a way to operationalize the truth—a way to put the actual, scientific truth about human nature and the human condition into a form that would not just identify and explain the illusions we labor under but would also help us liberate ourselves from them. I started wondering if this Western Buddhism I was hearing about might be that way. Maybe many of the Buddha’s teachings were saying essentially the same thing modern psychological science says. And maybe meditation was in large part a different way of appreciating these truths—and, in addition, a way of actually doing something about them.
So in August 2003 I headed to rural Massachusetts for my first silent meditation retreat—a whole week devoted to meditation and devoid of such distractions as email, news from the outside world, and speaking to other human beings.
The Truth about Mindfulness
You could be excused for doubting that a retreat like this would yield anything very dramatic or profound. The retreat was, broadly speaking, in the tradition of “mindfulness meditation,” the kind of meditation that was starting to catch on in the West and that in the years since has gone mainstream. As commonly described, mindfulness—the thing mindfulness meditation aims to cultivate—isn’t very deep or exotic. To live mindfully is to pay attention to, to be “mindful of” what’s happening in the here and now and to experience it in a clear, direct way, unclouded by various mental obfuscations. Stop and smell the roses.
This is an accurate description of mindfulness as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far. “Mindfulness,” as popularly conceived, is just the beginning of mindfulness.
And it’s in some ways a misleading beginning. If you delve into ancient Buddhist writings, you won’t find a lot of exhortations to stop and smell the roses—and that’s true even if you focus on those writings that feature the word sati, the word that’s translated as “mindfulness.” Indeed, sometimes these writings seem to carry a very different message. The ancient Buddhist text known as The Four Foundations of Mindfulness—the closest thing there is to a Bible of Mindfulness—reminds us that our bodies are “full of various kinds of unclean things” and instructs us to meditate on such bodily ingredients as “feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, skin-oil, saliva, mucus, fluid in the joints, urine.” It also calls for us to imagine our bodies “one day, two days, three days dead—bloated, livid, and festering.”
I’m not aware of any bestselling books on mindfulness meditation called Stop and Smell the Feces. And I’ve never heard a meditation teacher recommend that I meditate on my bile, phlegm, and pus or on the rotting corpse that I will someday be. What is presented today as an ancient meditative tradition is actually a selective rendering of an ancient meditative tradition, in some cases carefully manicured.
There’s no scandal here. There’s nothing wrong with modern interpreters of Buddhism being selective—even, sometimes, creative—in what they present as Buddhism. All spiritual traditions evolve, adapting to time and place, and the Buddhist teachings that find an audience today in the United States and Europe are a product of such evolution.
The main thing, for our purposes, is that this evolution—the evolution that has produced a distinctively Western, twenty-first-century version of Buddhism—hasn’t severed the connection between current practice and ancient thought. Modern mindfulness meditation isn’t exactly the same as ancient mindfulness meditation, but the two share a common philosophical foundation. If you follow the underlying logic of either of them far enough, you will find a dramatic claim: that we are, metaphorically speaking, living in the Matrix. However mundane mindfulness meditation may sometimes sound, it is a practice that, if pursued rigorously, can let you see what Morpheus says the red pill will let you see. Namely, “how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
On that first meditation retreat, I had some pretty powerful experiences—powerful enough to make me want to see just how deep the rabbit hole goes. So I read more about Buddhist philosophy, and talked to experts on Buddhism, and eventually went on more meditation retreats, and established a daily meditation practice.
All of this made it clearer to me why The Matrix had come to be known as a “dharma movie.” Though evolutionary psychology had already convinced me that people are by nature pretty deluded, Buddhism, it turned out, painted an even more dramatic picture. In the Buddhist view, the delusion touches everyday perceptions and thoughts in ways subtler and more pervasive than I had imagined. And in ways that made sense to me. In other words, this kind of delusion, it seemed to me, could be explained as the natural product of a brain that had been engineered by natural selection. The more I looked into Buddhism, the more radical it seemed, but the more I examined it in the light of modern psychology, the more plausible it seemed. The real-life Matrix, the one in which we’re actually embedded, came to seem more like the one in the movie—not quite as mind-bending, maybe, but profoundly deceiving and ultimately oppressive, and something that humanity urgently needs to escape.
The good news is the other thing I came to believe: if you want to escape from the Matrix, Buddhist practice and philosophy offer powerful hope. Buddhism isn’t alone in this promise. There are other spiritual traditions that address the human predicament with insight and wisdom. But Buddhist meditation, along with its underlying philosophy, addresses that predicament in a strikingly direct and comprehensive way. Buddhism offers an explicit diagnosis of the problem and a cure. And the cure, when it works, brings not just happiness but clarity of vision: the actual truth about things, or at least something way, way closer to that than our everyday view of them.
Some people who have taken up meditation in recent years have done so for essentially therapeutic reasons. They practice mindfulness-based stress reduction or focus on some specific personal problem. They may have no idea that the kind of meditation they’re practicing can be a deeply spiritual endeavor and can transform their view of the world. They are, without knowing it, near the threshold of a basic choice, a choice that only they can make. As Morpheus says to Neo, “I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.” This book is an attempt to show people the door, give them some idea of what lies beyond it, and explain, from a scientific standpoint, why what lies beyond it has a stronger claim to being real than the world they’re familiar with.
I. This and all subsequent daggers refer to elaborative notes that can be found in the Notes section at the end of the book. --This text refers to the paperback edition.
Wright’s essential message is that the evolutionary process that shaped the human brain did not adequately program us for life in the modern world; and that mindfulness meditation can help to correct this bad programming.
The first of these claims is fairly uncontroversial. To give an obvious example, our love of salt, beneficial when sodium was hard to come by in natural products, has become maladaptive in the modern world where salt is cheap and plentiful. Our emotions, too, can misfire nowadays. Caring deeply that people have a high opinion of you makes sense when you are, say, living in a small village full of people you know and interact with daily; but it makes little sense when you are surrounded by strangers on a bus.
This mismatch between our emotional setup and the newly complex social world is one reason for rampant stress and anxiety. Something like a job interview—trying to impress a perfect stranger to earn a livelihood—simply didn’t exist for our ancestors. This can also explain tribalism, which Wright sees as the most pressing danger of the modern world. It makes evolutionary sense to care deeply for oneself and one’s kin, with some close friends thrown in; and those who fall outside of this circle should, following evolutionary logic, be treated with suspicion—which explains why humans are so prone to dividing themselves into mutually antagonistic groups.
But how can mindfulness meditation help? Most obviously, it is a practice designed to give us some distance from our emotions. This is done by separating the feeling from its narrative. In daily life, for example, anger is never experienced “purely”; we always get angry about something; and the thought of this event is a huge component of its experience. But the meditator does her best to focus on the feeling itself, to examine its manifestation in her body and brain, while letting go of the corresponding narrative. Stripped of the provoking incident, the feeling itself ceases to be provocative; and the anger may even disappear completely.
Explained in this way, mindfulness meditation is the mirror image of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). In CBT the anger is attacked from the opposite side: by focusing on the narrative and subjecting it to logical criticism. In my experience, at least, the things one tells oneself while angry rarely stand up to cool analysis. And when one ceases to believe in the thought, the feeling disappears. The efficacy of both mindfulness meditation and CBT, then, is based on the interdependence of feeling and thought. If separated—either by focusing on the feeling during meditation, or the thought through analysis—the emotion disappears.
This, in a nutshell, is how mindfulness meditation can be therapeutic. But Wright wants to make a far more grandiose claim: that mindfulness meditation can reveal truths about the nature of mind, the world, and morality.
One of the central ideas of Buddhism is that of “emptiness”: that the enlightened meditator sees the world as empty of essential form. The first time I encountered this idea in a Buddhist text it made no sense to me; but Wright gives it an intriguing interpretation. Our brain, designed to survive, naturally assigns value to things in our environment based on how useful or harmful they are to us. These evaluations are, according to Wright’s theory, experienced as emotional reactions. I have quite warm and fuzzy feelings about my laptop, for example; and even the communal computers where I work evoke in me a comforting sense of familiarity and utility.
These emotions, which are sometimes very tiny indeed, are what give experiential reality a sense of essence. The emotions, in other words, help us to quickly identify and use objects: I don’t have to closely examine the computers, for example, since the emotion brings their instrumental qualities quickly to my attention. The advantages of this are obvious to anyone in a hurry. Likewise, this emotional registering is equally advantageous in avoiding danger, since taking time to ponder a rattlesnake isn’t advisable.
But the downside is that we can look at the world quite narrowly, ignoring the sensuous qualities of objects in favor of an instrumental view. Visual art actively works against this tendency, I think, by creating images that thwart our normal registering system, thus prompting us into a sensuous examination of the work. Good paintings make us into children again, exploring the world without worrying about making use of things. Mindfulness meditation is supposed to engender this same attitude, not just with regards to a painting, but to everything. Stripped of these identifying emotional reactions, the world might indeed seem “empty”—empty of distinctions, though full of rich sensation.
With objects, it is hard to see why this state of emptiness would be very desirable. (Also it should be said that this idea of micro-emotions serving as registers of essential distinctions is Wright’s interpretation of the psychological data, and is rather speculative.) But with regards to humans, this mindset might have its advantages. Instead of attributing essential qualities of good and bad to somebody we might see that their behavior can vary quite a bit depending on circumstances, and this can make us less judgmental and more forgiving.
Wright also has a go at the traditional Buddhist idea that the self is a delusion. According to what we know about the brain, he says, there is no executive seat of consciousness. He cites the famous split-brain experiments, and others like it, to argue that consciousness is not the powerful decision-maker we once assumed, but is more like a publicity agent: making our actions seem more cogent to others.
This is necessary because, underneath the apparent unity of conscious experience, there are several domain-specific “modules”—such as for sexual jealousy, romantic wooing, and so on—that fight amongst themselves in the brain for power and attention. Each module governs our behavior in different ways; and environmental stimuli determine which module is in control. Our consciousness gives a sense of continuity and coherence to this shifting control, which makes us look better in the eyes of our peers—or that’s how the theory goes, which Wright says is well-supported.
In any case, the upshot of this theory still would not be that the self doesn’t exist; only that the self is more fragmented and less executive than we once supposed. Unfortunately, the book steeply declines in quality in the last few chapters—where Wright tackles the most mystical propositions of Buddhism—when the final stage of the no-self argument is given. This leads him into the following speculations:
If our thoughts are generated by a variety of modules, which use emotion to get our attention; and if we can learn to dissociate ourselves from these emotions and see the world as “empty”; if, in short, we can reach a certain level of detachment from our thoughts and emotions: then, perhaps, we can see sensations arising in our body as equivalent to sensations arising from without. And maybe, too, this state of detachment will allow us to experience other people’s emotions as equivalent to our own, like how we feel pain from seeing a loved one in pain. In this case, can we not be said to have seen the true oneness of reality and the corresponding unreality of personal identity?
These lofty considerations aside, when I am struck by a car they better not take the driver to the emergency room; and when Robert Wright gets a book deal he would be upset if they gave me the money. My point is that this experience of oneness in no way undermines the reality of distinct personal identity, without which we could hardly go a day. And this state of perfect detachment is arguably, contra Wright, a far less realistic way of seeing things, since being genuinely unconcerned as to whom a pain belonged, for example, would make us unable to help. (Also in this way, contra Wright, it would make us obviously less moral.)
More generally, I think Wright is wrong in insisting that meditation can help us to experience reality more “truly.” Admittedly, I know from experience that meditation can be a great aid to introspection and can allow us to deal with our emotions more effectively. But the notion that a meditative experience can allow us to see a metaphysical truth—the unreality of self or the oneness of the cosmos—I reject completely. An essentially private experience cannot confirm or deny anything, as Wright himself says earlier on.
I also reject Wright’s claim that meditation can help us to see moral reality more clearly. By this he means that the detachment engendered by meditation can allow us to see every person as equally valuable rather than selfishly considering one’s own desires more important.
Now, I do not doubt that meditation can make people calmer and even nicer. But detachment does not lead logically to any moral clarity. Detachment is just that—detachment, which means unconcern; and morality is impossible without concern. Indeed, it seems to me that an enlightened person would be even less likely to improve the world, since they can accept any situation with perfect equanimity. Granted, if everyone were perfectly enlightened there would be no reason to improve anything—but I believe the expression about hell freezing over applies here.
Aside from the intellectual weakness of these later chapters, full as they are of vague hand-waving, the book has other flaws. I often got the sense that Wright was presenting the psychological evidence very selectively, emphasizing the studies and theories that accorded with his interpretations of Buddhism, without taking nearly enough time to give the contrasting views. On the other hand, he interprets the Buddhist doctrines quite freely—so in the end, when he says that modern science is confirming Buddhism, I wonder what is confirming what, exactly. And the writing, while usually quite clear, was too hokey and jokey for me.
Last, I found his framing of meditation as a way to save humanity from destructive tribalism as both naïve and misguided. In brief, I think that we ought to try to create a society in which the selfish interests of the greatest number of people are aligned. Selfish attachment, while potentially narrow, need not be if these selves are in enmeshed in mutually beneficial relationships; and some amount of attachment, with its concomitant dissatisfactions, seems necessary for people to exert great effort in improving their station and thus changing our world.
Encouraging people to become selflessly detached, on the other hand, besides being unrealistic, also strikes me as generally undesirable. For all the suffering caused by attachment—of which I am well aware—I am not convinced that life is better without it. As Orwell said: “Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.” (less)
― Philip K. Dick
For years I've told people I was a Zen Mormon. More as a way to squirm into the edges of LDS cosmology, and less because I was practicing anything really approaching a hybrid of Buddhism and Mormonism. But I've always been attracted to Buddhism, like many Westerners before me. I'm thinking of Herman Hesse, W. Somerset Maugham, Jack Kerouac, and Peter Matthiessen. I've always been attracted to the intersection of cultures, philosophies, etc. So, I guess it is natural for me to be attracted (if somewhat lazily) to Western Buddhism, Zen gardens, and the potential of mediation.
I'm also a big, nerdy fan of Robert Wright. I've read most of his books. It is probably easier to just post the one book of his I haven't read, rather than list the ones I have.* I enjoy Wright's evolution from Evolutionary Psychology to Buddhist writings. I think the premise of Wright's book is mostly correct. There is something that evolution has burdoned us with, that meditation (specifically Mindfulness Meditation) and Buddhism can help us with.
The books title, I should note here, IS a little off putting. I think Wright almost meant it as a joke (with a hook of truth). It comes across like some Mormon, Southern Baptist or Jehovah's Witness tract; a bit evangelical. But Wright is not just trying to convert the reader (and he's not exactly NOT trying to convert the reader either). He lays out pretty good arguments about how Evolutionary Psychology and behavioral psychology show (lots of caveats, obviously the mind is complex and not everyone agrees with everything) that a lot of our feelings, motives, choices are built on genetic coding which might actually make us unhappy, unhealthy, etc. The Buddhists seemed to have climbed that mountain before us. Wright seems less of a philosophical or religious Buddhist and more of a pragmatic Buddhist. I think his time studying how religion, the mind, behaviors, etc., have evolved over time has also provided him with ample evidence about how these traits that were evolved to help our more primitive selves reproduce, survive, etc., don't always help us in a modern age that includes HR departments, Facebook, politics, etc. Buddhism, Wright would argue, can help untangle some of these evolutionary knots.
So? What does this book mean for me? Someone who calls himself (mostly in jest) a Zen Mormon who has spent exactly 10 minutes mediating in a half-assed way? Well, I'm thinking of hooking up with a local Buddhist/Meditation group and giving Mindful Mediation a try. I'm pretty chill, but I think mindfulness can only help. I'm also not above exploring truth beyond my own familiar cosmology. When I told my wife and kids of my plan, they did laugh however. My wife suggested meditation might not be easy for me, given my competitive nature.
Wife: "You can't win at meditation."
D8u: "Sure you can, isn't enlightenment basically winning?"
Daughter: "Yeah Mom, the Buddha definitely won."
D8U: "See?"
My daughter, laughing, said the closest I've come to meditating was my nightly scalding bath, with headphones in my ears, a cold diet Dr. Pepper, and candy. She thinks anything that would help me unplug one or two of my sensory addictions might not be a bad thing. I agree. It is worth a shot.
* I haven't read Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information. (less)
A few examples: Someone working hard and achieving amazing results after decades of training and exercising to become a leading expert, master, maybe even a prodigy, world elite. People bursting full of enthusiasm, charisma and happiness, spreading it as if it was a renewable energy source they could never run short of. A classical, stereotypical Buddhistic monk or a kung-fu master. A surgeon, soldier or emergency doctor, staying cool and focused for hours. Etc.
They all have what all others are desperately searching for, control over their minds. Be it innate, epigenetic or just regular practice, guess what way could work for nearly everyone? By starting practicing right now and never stop being mindful again many of personal, unreachable seeming goals can become possible. But that´s just about controlling the mad monkey in one´s single brain.
Where other books about the topic end, Wright begins to dissect the functioning of all aspects of a human mind and how a loss of objective serenity just always leads to problems, no matter if it is a family of 4 or a state of hundreds of millions or humankind. All those group dynamics, ego, being right or wrong, getting angry, sad, etc. were really fancy vehicles as long as we were nothing more than animals, but in highly developed civilizations, where uncontrolled emotions are no evolutionary advantage anymore, they just bring pain and sadness. Of course, it´s about the bad, negative emotions, not cutting love and joy out of one's soul.
Wright has the idea of a new, real-life based Buddhism without focus on afterlife, reincarnation, heaven, hell, etc. and instead a basis on the philosophical and scientific ideas that help everyone to become a better human by integrating the knowledge of psychology and evolutionary biology/psychology at a purely scientific base without any faith or potential for extremism.
Happiness and joy is a free choice and everyone can freely choose between it and neutral or pessimistic, but both the neurological and Buddhistic approach show that it might just hurt oneself. It is much healthier and makes one stronger, because we are social animals that are functioning better, be it as extroverted people lovers or as introverted stay at homers, when we enjoy what we do. It´s a shield against any harm and it´s an armor that is easy to wear and impossible to permeate, because if someone is cool about everything and takes everything negative, even provocations, positive, she/he is indestructible. In contrast, someone who protects her/himself by anger and hate, is permanently boiling her/himself in everything negative the biochemistry of the body can provide and is much easier to attack or be provoked to overreact.
As long as we were even more primitive and hairier apes (how I love calling everyone a monkey, hey, chimpanzee over there, yea, looking at you, do you want a banana? Don´t forget, anger is your enemy, I am just helping you, don´t throw sh** at me please.) many of those mental dysfunctions were helpful. Find oneself great and think that everyone else is an idiot. Check. Prone to group dynamics, opportunism and hierarchies to build mighty tribes. Done. Building a conscience, ego and higher intelligence by repeatedly believing and thinking the same things to shape the wetware. Bingo. And then, well, it quickly escalated, because narcissistic, cognitive dissonant, psycho primates (ha, got you again!) are a true pain in the gluteus maximus for themselves, all other groups and those poor, innocent planet under their swift paws.
A short utopia: Out of calm and mindful minds grow more when they reproduce and the more they get the more influence they have on the state and if everyone would be enlightened and realized how destructive ego and negative emotions are world peace and a sustainable economic system would come and, but wait, stop, dystopia just called, saying humans are humans. The sad end of the story.
No, just joking, forget the misguided and deluded ones who aren´t guilty, just had no chance and are impossible to heal, focus on the next generation instead. With each kid, able to control her/his emotions, self-reflection, self-criticism, stay objective, believe nothing, stay evolving and adapting and always curious, you make Buddha laugh.
And questioning and changing anything may bring us away from many self-destructive paths we are currently on as humankind, to realize that there may be the too objective, too easy and egoistic and wrong Buddhistic approach to say that there is no right and wrong, nothing matters, no true or false, the mind is empty, total objectivity is king, all is an illusion, etc. That´s a sophisticated way to say that one's own peace of mind and easy, stressless life is more important than to stay motivated, positive, neutral and engaged in both civil society and politics to make a change happen.
Not all that seems bad is just evil and not all that seems good is pure gold, instead the wrong, destructive, dangerous and misleading ideas out of all ideas humans ever had, have to be eliminated because there is just a collective way in the middle of the road together, not with everyone walking angrily, sulky and offended as far at each side of this metaphorical entity that is our all lives.
But all compromises have to be evidence-based, no soft science, no mumbo jumbo humanities, just real, hard-science based long term, reproducible studies, not funded by anyone interested in a certain outcome. This is also how this amazing author wrote a must-read book and how we as a society can overcome our animalistic roots, urges and instincts to something more worthy of the Latin name sapiens in the article description.
A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindful...
Look, in a nutshell made a video too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPPPF... (less)
True happiness is exceedingly hard to find in this life. And when I hit hard times I always find myself drawn to Buddhist teachings as a way to detach myself from my thoughts, feelings and desires in order to become mindful and live in the moment.
Whilst not a miracle cure, the strongest benefit gained by Buddhist practice is the ability to gain perspective and understand that often it is our own reactions that cause us to suffer internally. The wisdom gained through achieving contentment with our life can lead to the emptiness Buddhist's strive for. But these are just words. Achieving them is an entirely different matter.
This is what Wright discusses here, the philosophy of Buddhism and the truth and positiveness behind it. Because it is true if we can embrace it. If we can learn to live it everyday we can achieve some small sense of internal happiness. Initially this is all marginal and preoccupied with the self; however, once we learnt to transform the self we can transform the world and others around us.
So I believe in the truth of Buddhism and this book provides a deep, stimulating and intellectual discussion behind exactly why the truth is such a potent one.
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You can connect with me on social media via My Linktree.
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Meditation is a subject that is interesting to me because of how many smart/successful people that I've talked to or read about highly recommend it. I wanted to better understand it, but I didn't predict all the directions this book would take.
One of the main interesting takeaways was how strongly the book ties the theory of natural selection with meditation.
"So if you ask the question “What kinds of perceptions and thoughts and feelings guide us through life each day?” the answer, at the most basic level, isn’t “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that give us an accurate picture of reality.” No, at the most basic level the answer is “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation."
This makes sense, we evolved over millions of years according to an algorithm that simply said: the ones who live pass on their genes. This has a lot of implications however, the foremost being that our ancestors - the ones that passed their genes on to us - evolved to be particularly good at finding food, mating and having kids, being alert to and surviving various dangers, and being positive contributors of their tribe (as outcasts don't survive). They did NOT evolve to be "happy".
"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."
This to me was a huge insight. I am constantly seeking new experiences, and am fortunate to have experienced many amazing things. But each thrill quickly fades and I find myself worrying about whatever is next remarkably quickly. To know that we were evolved that way on purpose - because our ancestors who killed a mammoth would only survive if they killed another one next week - is both fascinating and illuminating. This is why it is true that money doesn't make you happy, nor do successes in career.
The book delved into our emotions around human relationships a lot, which I found very interesting. Because as much as I would love to say "I don't care what others think of me", it's simply not true. In fact, random encounters with people I don't know and will never see again - can bother me. Also, encounters with people I do know can worry me quite a lot too. So it's somewhat comforting to realize that we evolved to be this way. Interestingly, interactions with strangers is a newer thing to us and has likely added to our modern day stress. The book also talks a lot about essence, as many of us have impressions of others (eg nice, not nice, helpful, jerk, selfish, weird, etc) that aren't really "accurate" - they are just our perceptions, and by being aware of this, it can better help us interact with such people.
"We're designed by natural selection to care—and care a lot—about what other people think of us. During evolution, people who were liked, admired, and respected would have been more effective gene propagators than people who were the opposite. But in a hunter-gatherer village, your neighbors would have had a vast database on your behavior, so you’d be unlikely, on any given day, to do anything that radically revised their opinion of you, for better or worse. Social encounters wouldn’t typically have been high-pressure events."
So meditation can help us by recognizing that our mind is running these "algorithms", which come in the form of emotions, and cause us to "worry" about things, instead of focusing on being present in the moment. By observing which emotions and worries pop up, we can become more aware of them, and somewhat strangely - worry a lot less about them.
"The routine business of mindfulness—observing the world inside you and outside you with inordinate care—can do more than tone down troublesome feelings and enhance your sense of beauty. It can, in a slow, incremental, often uneven yet ultimately systematic way, transform your view of what’s really “out there” and what’s really “in here.” What begins as a modest pursuit—a way to relieve stress or anxiety, cool anger, or dial down self-loathing just a notch—can lead to profound realizations about the nature of things, and commensurately profound feelings of freedom and happiness. An essentially therapeutic endeavor can turn into a deeply philosophical and spiritual endeavor. This is the third virtue of mindfulness meditation: it offers a path to liberation from the Matrix."
The book had an interesting section on "the self". Most of us think there is an "I" inside of us that is calling the shots in our lives, or as the book calls it, our internal "CEO". But in Buddhism, one of the key concepts as you advance is you are supposed to learn that there is no self. But we aren't really in control of ourselves - if we were we wouldn't have all kinds of thoughts all day worrying about or contemplating all kinds of random things. The book proposes that what is really going on is that there are a number of "modules" (or algorithms as I prefer to think) that are competing for our attention. There is the "mating" module, the "get food" module, the "look good socially" module, etc. Any thought or anything we see or hear or smell can easily trigger the emotion that starts any of these modules.
"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."
So, to summarize, humans suffer from "dukkha" or unsatisfactoriness, which means we have a constant craving or thirst or desire, which can't be quenched because if we attain our desire we will just have a new one. The only solution is to be mindful of the desires we have. To notice when we have a feeling, to examine the feeling, turn it over until you understand its root. By doing this, it loses its power over you. You can also start to recognize patterns in your thoughts if you do this a lot. The book says meditating 20min a day is a great start, but the difference between 30min a day and 50min is huge, as is the difference between 30min and 90min. But it also seems to imply that a weeklong retreat is likely also required if you really want to see benefits.
"You might say that the path of meditative progress consists largely of becoming aware of the causes impinging on you, aware of the way things manipulate you—and aware that a key link in that manipulation lies in the space where feelings can give rise to tanha, to a craving for pleasant feelings and an aversion to unpleasant feelings. This is the space where mindfulness can critically intervene."
This all leads to a question that is interesting to ponder but the book only touches lightly on, which is that: is the way we evolved the way we need to behave to be happy and thrive in modern times? The answer is likely not as humans over the past 1000 years have changed a lot - even the past 100 years. So how could we help a lot more people be aware of this and what impacts could that have? A good question!
"There’s a lot to dislike about the world we’re born into. It’s a world in which, as the Buddha noted, our natural way of seeing, and of being, leads us to suffer and to inflict suffering on others. And it’s a world that, as we now know, was bound to be that way, given that life on this planet was created by natural selection. Still, it may also be a world in which metaphysical truth, moral truth, and happiness can align, and a world that, as you start to realize that alignment, appears more and more beautiful." (less)
The author goes through the many self-delusions evolution instills in us as a means of making our genes more viable in a hunter-gatherer society. These include our ability to generate fundamentally baseless feel good stories about ourselves as a means of instilling confidence in others; our tendency to convince ourselves that we are more valuable than the average team member.
Our egocentric biases are aided and abetted by the way memory works. Those certain painful events get seared into our memories—perhaps so we can avoid repeating the mistakes that led to them—we are on balance more likely to remember events that reflect favorably on us than those that don’t. . . which presumably makes it easier to convince others that our story is true. (p. 84)
We are in short a species of hustlers. No wonder the one percent is flourishing. (!) Overall the book is too colloquial, too chatty, to be genuinely engaging. I like the evolutionary biology angle but it’s buried among too much padding. Meh. Stopped reading at p. 109. The prose being dull as dishwater. (I say this not really knowing how or why dishwater is dull, just that the simile seems apposite.) (less)
And that's just scratching the surface. The deeper details, duly contemplated, will leave readers enchanted (head often spinning, occasionally agitated). Robert Wright has always had a keen ability to integrate disparate ideas in science and philosophy (stepping back to view things in wider perspective than the original scientists whose work he builds upon) and this book is a gem that will not disappoint those who enjoyed his earlier books (e.g. The Moral Animal, Nonzero, The Evolution of God), especially his dry wit, everyday-guy accessibility, pragmatic reasoning, and clear writing.
As a psychology professor who teaches courses in evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and psychology of religion, I'm in something of a unique position to review the work. Certainly I can say that Wright's command of the subject matter, ranging from evolutionary psychology to abstruse Buddhist philosophy, is excellent. (Experts in those fields will find details to quibble about, of course, but Wright does his homework and--to his credit--modestly concedes that his interpretations are his own best renderings. And they are good renderings.)
I think everyone should read this wonderful and important book. I worry that many will be put off by the title alone. I worry that those conversant with the subtleties of Buddhist thought will not invest the time and effort to grapple with the subtleties of psychological science and evolutionary biology (and vice versa). It IS a book that, I think, requires more of a cognitive commitment from readers than others. But it will reward all who do. Whether readers come away in general agreement with Wright or not, I don't think it is possible to read the book and come away WITHOUT a better understanding of yourself and a better appreciation what it means to be human. That alone makes it an engine of insight.
(Thank you to NetGalley for the advance review copy!) (less)
I imagine the author at a diner party, demanding complete attention from those present, while he describes at length being at an intense macho meditation retreat in the Maine woods, having the unfortunate luck of sitting next to a fat flatulent person. Telling all present very seriously that he's not the sort of person who is OK with flatulence, especially from other people, especially if they are fat, but because of his very serious (but also very modest) attempts at mediation he was able to step-back from his intense hatred of the person sitting next to him, and was able to experience the beauty of each particular fart in turn, smelling different notes, and if not loving them, at least seeing their beauty for what they are. He also felt some sort of oneness with the farter next too him. Now he tells us how some super-meditator, that he (blush) could never be, was put in a brain scanner, and showed almost no brain response when smelling evil odours. Imagine that! Now throw in some random passage from either Buddhist scripture or some other pre-20th C source to make some sort of weak point. Now repeat for another +300 pages.
I would have been much happier if it had either (1) been a serious attempt at accessing the science and philosophy of meditation and enlightenment; or (2) been offered a serious discussion of Buddhism. The book offers neither. It's a shame because I think the topic itself is worthy of a serious book. (less)
Instead, he often takes the easy route by focusing on his own personality, his own anxieties & insecurities. This might have been okay if he had come across as a more likable person, but I felt trapped in a room with an uptight, narcissistic, falsely-modest bloviator. I'm glad to finally be liberated. (less)
The book traces through the core teachings of Buddhism and how they relate to evolutionary biology, which is Wright's area of expertise. Many of our ingrained yet seemingly irrational social behaviors (i.e. flying into a rage while driving, gorging on sweets past the point of hunger) are evolutionary remnants from the time we lived as hunter-gatherers or in small tribes. While once useful these behaviors and feelings are not actually good for us today living in a modern society, nor are they good for what evolutionary biology gears us towards: protecting and spreading our own genes. Since feelings are in some sense a means of getting us to do what's good for us, these behaviors and emotions could be said to correspond to what Buddhists call "false" feelings. This was an interesting hypothesis and is clearly a product of Wright's own expertise in this field.
Much of the book also deals with Wright's own journey as a Buddhist, and he provides many helpful tips about both meditation and mindfulness. Among these are:
1) Consciously recognizing that your mind is wandering during meditation is actually a good thing, because it shows that you aware of the moment, which is the first step towards mindfulness.
2) Rather than you creating them, "thoughts think themselves" in your mind. They try to draw you into embracing them, but you are neither their slave or master. Once you become aware of that, it is easier to dismiss the ones you don't want or that are harmful to you. For example: frivolous thoughts during meditation or anxious ones when you have no reason to be unhappy.
3) Accepting and analyzing your feelings or temptations about something are a means of truly "owning" them and then deciding whether you want to accept them or not (again, you don't have to).
4) Declining to satisfy your temptations is a means of reducing their hold over you in the long term, as it gradually weakens the temptation-reward circuit in your brain.
Wright also briefly discusses some of the more blissful and you could say "supernatural" experiences that he has had while on the Buddhist path. Like writing about how a piece of cake tastes to someone who has never eaten one, this is a difficult thing to do and in a sense it is not really possible to convey in text to someone a thing that they just have to experience. He seems to be aware of this and the book is written in full humility about the limitations of text. It was interesting to me to contrast some of the teachings of Sufism, which I'm more familiar with, with the ideas that animate Buddhist meditation. While there are areas of crossover and perhaps the ending point is similar, I think that they are genuinely different paths.
All in all this was a rewarding book and the product of a deeply humane and thoughtful mind. (less)
I have read plenty about the overlaps of Buddhism and psychology and physics, but the evolutionary biology is a new perspective I hadn’t dwelled on before, I found the information provided by Wright fascinating. Biology, after all, affects our behavior, and the way Wright connects it to the Teachings makes an awful lot of sense. As does the way he explains the role of our conscious mind and the way our emotions often end up taking the wheel.
I liked the passages on fundamental attribution error, as this is something I try to remain very aware of; it goes back to the axiom of grandmotherly wisdom that you should be nice with everyone because you never know their story, and their rudeness might have nothing to do with you, but be part of a greater context you have no knowledge of. Cheesy, but nevertheless important to remember when faced with difficult people.
This book is written in a very accessible, conversational tone, and quite relatable to anyone who first came across Buddhism in the Western world. To anyone who isn’t familiar with the practice and philosophy, it is a clear book on how it all works, but it doesn’t contain any sutras, or anything like that. This is really a purely practical work on how the mind and brain work to defuse harmful habits and behavior when we engage in regular meditation practice.
There is no mysticism or superstition in this book, which I appreciate greatly, as it can be a really helpful resource even for the biggest skeptics. You don’t have to believe in anything supernatural to understand what Wright is saying, nor to understand how meditation works and its effects. I was practicing cognitive behavioral therapy, as recommended by a mental health professional, for a long time before I started practicing zazen; it has been a very important tool for dealing with anxiety, anger, self-confidence and abandonment issues, and when I started getting serious in my Zen practice, the parallels were quite obvious right away. But I was also aware that they had different goals: the first one was to help me function in my daily life without getting paralyzed by the tricks my mind was playing on me, and the second was about reaching a very different kind of clarity. While there are similarities between CBT and zazen, it’s crucial to remember that they do not have the same purpose. I am not 100% on board with blurring the lines between therapy and spiritual practices, even when they feel very similar – which is really the main bone I have to pick with this book. Mindfulness meditation is great tool, but Buddhism is not therapy and should not be sold as such.
I can see how it could have felt very fluffy to some people, but I really think this was meant as an introduction to Buddhist ideas: there are plenty of other books with which one can deepen their understanding of Buddhist philosophy, practice and history. Anyone curious as to how their brain works while they meditate will find this interesting, if occasionally a bit irritating. (less)
Especially the science. Or so it struck me, who at times grew impatient with the science aspect. Frankly, I was much more engaged by the Buddhism part of the book--Wright's experiences, chiefly, and his attempts (in Buddhism, there can be nothing but attempts) to explain the religion (which isn't a religion so much as a paradox).
Speaking of, if you read this book, prepare for the paradoxical. Not even Buddhists can agree on Buddhism--and I mean Buddhists from the same branch (be it Mahayana or Theravada or Zen or whatever other sub-categories there might be... and there might very well be).
But back to science, is it that important that Buddhism's precepts be "proven" by science or, more sketchily, by psychology (which, like Buddhism, can be pretty paradoxical itself)? Wright seems to think so. He is in argument mode here, out to show that the "weird" parts of Buddhism are a lot less weird than first glance would lead you to believe.
Me, I'm not worried about such truck when it comes to
And lots of talk of modules here, too. Good grief. Modules? Something to do with adopted behaviors. Somewhat like the lecture hall in Psych 101, I dozed a bit but kept hearing the word. Like a mantra, maybe. Om... module.
Happily, Wright sees Buddhism-style thinking as the only hope for an increasingly hopeless world. He never mentions He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Neither the one in Washington nor the one in Korea, but both could use a healthy dose of meditation and soul-searching, if there be one to search:
"...we're living in an age when information technologies make it easy for relatively small numbers of people bound by a common enmity to find each other, no matter where on earth they are, and then coordinate to deploy violence. Hatred, even when diffuse and far-flung, has increasingly lethal potential.
"What causes all the hatred? At some level it's always the same thing: human beings operating under the influence of human brains whose design presupposed their specialness. That is, human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields that control us in many and subtle ways, convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it's not a reflection of the 'real us'; whereas they and theirs aren't in the right and aren't by nature good, and when they do the occasional good thing, it's not a reflection of the 'real them.' And it doesn't help matters that these reality-distortion fields often magnify, even out-and-out fabricate, the threat posed by them and theirs.
"So, yes, we need to reject the core evolutionary value of the specialness of self. Indeed there's probably never been a time in human history when this rejection was more vital."
The poisonous tribalism Wright sees Buddhism as an antidote for works not only from an international standpoint but from an intranational one. I mean you, red state and blue state where never the purple shall meet. So here's one science quote I did like that might apply:
"[Einstein] said, if you want a deeper understanding of physics, you need to detach yourself from your particular perspective--from any particular perspective--and ask: Suppose I occupied no vantage point? Since I wouldn't be able to ask how fast things are moving relative to me, what exactly would it mean to ask how fast things are moving?"
The answer, of course, is it would change the question entirely, just as Buddhism does. "After all," Wright writes, "without a perspective to serve, there would be no feelings in the first place."
Hoo, boy. Giving up feelings is a hard thing to do. Which is why you best get meditating. Another hard thing to do. But look at how far we've come taking the easy way out by ignoring self-awareness and catering to our desires.
Kind of like the band playing on as the Titanic took on Atlantic, in its way. (less)
It is well complimented by wrights earlier book on evolutionary psychology, the moral animal . (less)