Hiking Naked: A Quaker Woman’s Search for Balance - Friends Journal

Hiking Naked: A Quaker Woman’s Search for Balance - Friends Journal



Hiking Naked: A Quaker Woman’s Search for Balance


Reviewed by Beth Taylor

November 1, 2017

By Iris Graville. Homebound Publications, 2017. 260 pages. $17.95/paperback; eBook coming December 2017.
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This wonderful memoir tells the story of a Quaker woman and her family as they leave city life behind and seek a simpler life deep in the mountains east of Seattle, Wash. Burned out after years of nursing and seemingly fruitless public health interventions, Iris Graville retreats with her husband, Jerry, and their 13-year-old twin son and daughter to an isolated lake deep in the North Cascade Mountains. Her family looks for adventure. She finds solace in the lush landscape, quiet dirt roads, baking, and writing.

The “hiking naked” part of the story does not refer to the like-minded sporting groups you can find online, but to the moment a year earlier when Graville realized she needed to change her life. Hot and exhausted as she and Jerry hike high into the mountains on their yearly getaway alone together, their twins happily staying with a grandmother, Graville stops and wonders if she can walk another step. Slowly she rounds a bend and sees her husband standing there, waiting for her, naked and grinning. It is her sign, and the metaphor for her journey to come—to lighten up, count her blessings, let go of heavy baggage, and hold on to what really matters.

Stehekin—a Salish word that means “the way through”—becomes their next stop together. A tiny community of 85 residents, the village is accessible only by boat, floatplane, or hiking. The kids become the seventh-graders of the one-room schoolhouse. Jerry becomes the bus driver. Iris becomes a baker, bicycling to work in the early morning darkness on the dirt road down to the village. Hours off fill with chores—chopping wood, repairing plumbing, and cooking—punctuated by trail hikes and cross-country skiing.

Food is planned a week ahead, the handwritten list sent by ferry down the lake to the friendly grocer, who sends the boxes back in a day or two. Occasionally a black bear wanders into the backyard; winter snow piles up against the windows; a forest fire threatens to sweep down into the valley; and a spring flood strands them for three days—nature’s way of reminding them of their powerlessness. Trees fall onto power lines, leaving some evenings brightened only by candles and kerosene lamps. With no phone, no TV, no Internet, the family embraces old entertainments anew. They read books, play board games, learn to juggle, make block prints for Christmas, and write letters to friends and family.

Graville embraces this rustic life as a way to simplify—leave behind the noise of highways, crowded urban streets, and schools with hundreds of students. Most important, though, she knows she needs to let go of 20 years of anxieties about her job, in particular, her fears of inadequacy in the face of the overwhelming human needs of her patients.

A practicing Quaker, she feels at home in the deep quiet of the woods. When the summer tourists leave and the bakery closes for the winter, she uses the silent days to write in her journal, waiting for “the still, small voice” as in Quaker meeting, seeking insight into the past that had tied her in knots, and writing her way into a calling to come. As she “attends to what is important”—the tasks of family life in a small, close-knit community and her times alone—she discovers that “the smallest touch, the briefest contact, the quietest diligence can make a difference—can change the course of a river.”

In the end, through solitude amidst the pines, family support, and deep friendships old and new, she finds a spiritual footing to carry her into her next chapter. Their family will move to Lopez Island off the coast of Washington state, larger and more developed than Stehekin but offering similar kinds of quiet and leadings through natural beauty.

And Graville will continue to write. Her essay “Seeking Clearness with Work Transitions” was published in the February 2015 issue of Friends Journal. She has also published the award-winning Hands at Work: Portraits and Profiles of People Who Work with Their Hands; and Bounty: Lopez Island Farmers, Food, and Community. Now, she publishes Shark Reef literary magazine. This eloquent memoir shows the move to Stehekin was indeed her “way through” to her new calling as a writer.


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Hiking Naked: A Quaker Woman's Search for Balance

by Iris Graville (Goodreads Author)

 4.15  ·   Rating details ·  144 ratings  ·  49 reviews

Knocked off her feet after twenty years in public health nursing, Iris Graville quit her job and convinced her husband and their thirteen-year-old twin son and daughter to move to Stehekin, a remote mountain village in Washington State’s North Cascades. They sought adventure; she yearned for the quiet and respite of this community of eighty-five residents accessible only by boat, float plane, or hiking. Hiking Naked chronicles Graville’s journey through questions about work and calling as well as how she coped with ordering groceries by mail, black bears outside her kitchen window, a forest fire that threatened the valley, and a flood that left her and her family stranded for three days. (less)

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Paperback, 260 pages

Published September 12th 2017 by Homebound Publications

ISBN1938846842 (ISBN13: 9781938846847)

Edition LanguageEnglish

URLhttp://homeboundpublications.com/hiking-naked-by-iris-graville/

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 Average rating4.15  ·  Rating details ·  144 ratings  ·  49 reviews

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Gretchen Wing

Oct 12, 2017Gretchen Wing rated it it was amazing

If you are making or contemplating a major life transition, you will love this book. If you are yearning for more spiritual depth in your life, you will love this book. If you love the mountains and the feeling of being transported to the banks of a clear, rushing creek simply by turning pages, you will love this book. If you love finding your own family conflicts, joys, heartbreak, and sweet daily celebrations reflected in someone else's experience, you will love this book. Get the picture? Iris writes with unpretentious skill, making the ordinary extraordinary. (less)

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Brynnen Ford

Jul 16, 2018Brynnen Ford rated it it was amazing

Loved the stories, the insight, and just the writing was a joy to experience. It was fun to listen for Quaker themes, but it really was a universal story of a woman's search for work-life-spirit-balance and exploring ideas of calling and meaningful work.

Thank you for the opportunity! I hightly recommend it to all readers who enjoy memoir-type stories. (less)

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Yi_Shun

Oct 15, 2017Yi_Shun rated it it was amazing

Deepy satisfying, on a storytelling level and a spiritual level. Yes, even for those of us who don’t read “spiritual” books. This is the story of one family’s transition from city to rural life to their own brand of equilibrium. It’s worth every page.

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Julene

Oct 23, 2020Julene rated it really liked it

Shelves: memoir

This was a good memoir to read during covid time. I found it in a Free Book Library and the title drew me to take a look. Iris Graville, a white woman and a Quaker, in her 40s asks questions about her work, life, and purpose. She is in a stable, secure attached, relationship with two children who are twins. She has a good job in Bellingham, Wa, working in Public Health, but she's burnt out and questioning her path. I related to her questioning immediately.

Her family has started the tradition of ...more

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Leigh Anne

Apr 06, 2018Leigh Anne rated it liked it

Burn out, or fade away?

Iris Graville was completely done with being a nurse. Although it had been her dream to help improve public health, she just couldn't anymore with the long hours, endless policy debates, and difficult patients (people are not always at their kindest when they are sick, and nurses bear the brunt of it). She needed a break from her life and some time to think through her next move, hopefully with some guidance from the still small voice inside her (as Quakers do). With her family's blessing and help, they decided to spend a year in a remote village in northern Washington State, only accessible by ferry, and with a grand total of 85 residents. Will stepping out of the rat race bring clarity? Or will it just make the Graville's slightly less stressed rats?

Anybody who's ever had a customer service job wlil relate to the burnout aspects, though you could make the argument that being able to up and change directions like this is a pretty privileged thing to do. Luckily Iris is aware of this, and remarks on it often. Life in the village is both beautiful and rough, as flooding, forest fires, and LOTS OF SNOW are concerns. The book's greatest strengths are its descriptions of nature, and how complicated a "simple" life can really be, with all the adjustments you have to make.

Still, it's beautiful, even if it's tough, and even if the soul-searching starts to get a bit wearying (it didn't for me, but I could see it happening), it's a good read for folks who like "people vs nature" and "what the hell should I do with my life?" as themes. Recommended for medium to large libraries, esp. in the Pacific Northwest. (less)

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Lin

Oct 19, 2017Lin rated it really liked it

Looking for a book to peacefully settle into? Iris Graville's Hiking Naked: A Quaker Woman's Search for Balance, then, is your perfect companion.

Finding only stress and unanswered questions after 20 years in nursing, she convinces her husband and 13-year old twins to make a bold move -- to literally move the family from Bellingham to the remote community of Stehekin at the far northwest end of Lake Chelan where there are 85 year-round residents. The village is accessible only by a ferry, float plane, or a long hike.

What follows is a peacefully unfolding journey of discovery. She questions whether she has "stayed in nursing because it serves my own need to feel valued rather than out of compassion for those I care for?" Couple that with new-found solitude and unforeseen realities such as a forest fire that threatens the entire village, ordering groceries by U.S. Mail to be delivered a few days later by boat, and a snowfall that is measured in feet.

Described as a blend of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Graville’s memoir chronicles her spiritual search for meaningful work as she lands a job at the local bakery, gently urging dough into delicious treats for villagers and tourists. She pursues a life-long interest in writing and finds time to just "be."

Her book should come with its own quilt to wrap up in while reading. Oh, wait...it is its own quilt, comforting and comfortable. (less)

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Jan Crossen

Sep 17, 2017Jan Crossen rated it it was amazing

Author, Iris Graville, bares her soul in this memoir. Iris was a successful wife and mother of twins, juggling a hectic career in public health, when she hit a major life roadblock. Her passion for nursing, the career she had worked so hard to perfect, had fizzled. Iris suffered from a nearly terminal case of professional ‘burn out.” Searching for answers and spiritual guidance as to her life’s purpose, she and her family moved to an extremely remote community. The family members agreed to experience the peace and solitude of a simple, less encumbered life for two years. Iris and her family grow and evolve as they overcome challenges with grit and determination. Iris is a talented and beautiful writer. She is a master of descriptions and has perfected the art of word selection. She uses humor, honesty and wit to share her journey of discovery in this inspirational story. I celebrated her victories and shared her tears of loss. Iris has found her calling, and thrives in her chosen vocation, community, and spiritual path. I highly recommend this book!

(less)

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Pat

Sep 16, 2019Pat rated it it was amazing

I actually picked up two books about Quakerism, this one and another by Phillip Gulley the author of the Harmony series. He is a Quaker minister so I figured he knows what he is talking about. But this book was the first one I was going to skim thru before I sat down to read. Just skimming made me stop and start reading instantly. I was sucked into the story and loved every moment of it.

Iris is having doubts about the direction her life is taking. Her husband is super understanding and even her kids get onboard when they decide to pack up their lives and move to a very remote area in Washington. What was suppose to be a one year experience turns into a two year life change. Everyone gets so much out of their time there so I think it was life changing for the entire family.

I just loved this book. I have recommended it to a couple friends already and really hope they give it a chance. (less)

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Heidi Barr

Aug 13, 2017Heidi Barr rated it it was amazing

I loved this book. Reading about the author's time living in a remote village made me reflect on my own choices, reminded me that community is essential for a full life, and reassured me that even though the human experience is peppered with loss, pain, and uncertainty, when it is grounded in nature and steeped in faith, any storm can be weathered. Taking stock of one’s life choices while raising a family can leave one feeling bare to the bone, and Iris tells her story with grace, humor, and humility. Highly recommended. (less)

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Barb

Sep 27, 2018Barb rated it it was amazing  ·  review of another edition

A story by a Quaker about getting away from our “typical” US life of consumerism and living closer to nature and in community? Yes please. Iris did a terrific job describing her life in this removed community, how it affected her family, and ultimately how it really didn’t make her discernment that much easier or clearer. Enjoyed this very much.

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Sarah Ewald

Jul 11, 2018Sarah Ewald rated it really liked it

I was a bit taken aback by the title. In fact, someone saw it on my coffee table, and laughed. This is memoir by Iris Graville, who, like many, had become fed up with her job as a public health administrator. She started out as a nurse, which she loved, and over the years graduated into administration. Not always what it seems, she wanted something different. She quit her job and convinced her husband, Jerry, and 13 year old twins, to move to Stehekin, a remote mountain village in Washington state in the Northern Cascade Mountains. Seeking adventure and solitude, they researched their move and landed in a community of 85 residents, and a completely new reality, where they thrived. Kids took classes in a one-room school, Jerry drove transportation for a summer adventure resort and did odd jobs, and Iris took a job at the local bakery. Telephoning someone meant going into town to use the community phone by the dock; groceries came by boat (after having been 'mail-ordered'); forest fires were a reality, and floods could leave you stranded. Despite that, there were hikes to peaks and views seen by few, adventures of white water rafting, and moments of solitude in a cathedral of trees. Sounds like heaven to me.

I tried to figure out the title, and I came up with the vulnerabilities you experience when all conveniences are stripped away, and you become one with your small community. (less)

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Jennifer

Aug 30, 2018Jennifer rated it really liked it

Shelves: bookgroup

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I was not sure what to expect from this book - I give it a high rating because a lot of what the author was going through sounded like me - I quit my job 3 yrs ago to try to figure out what to do...now I find myself still doing a little bit of it on the side. I, too, wanted less of a rat race of 'career advancement' - but I did not go quite so extreme as move nearly off the grid!

Also makes me wonder if I would have been a good Quaker. Meeting to sit in silence for an hour sounds better than many of the sermons I've heard in my lifetime. And sounds a lot like meditation. Plus, their activism has historically been amazing -several suffrage and abolitionist leaders were Quakers, for example.

Since the book was written (or at least published) 20+ years after they embarked on adventure - it was interesting to see how she returned a bit - was still doing some health consulting, they moved to Lopez (and remain there), her husband did return to his teaching career, too. I wonder if their experience would be the same (how has the town of Stehekin changed?) with the internet, wi-fi, cell phones, etc. (less)

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Heather Durham

Apr 30, 2019Heather Durham rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction, personal-essay-and-memoir

Iris Graville recently wrote an article for Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog on Writing the Quotidian, on the beauty and resonance to be found in everyday life. And that’s exactly what she explores in Hiking Naked, it’s just that her stories of work, family, friendship, interpersonal challenges, life and death just happen to take place in a remote village only accessible by boat, trail, or seaplane, where the everyday also might include bears in the yard, days without power, a flood that leaves you stranded, and literal and figurative nudity. In this beautiful memoir, Graville takes us with her as she experiences real life in the wilderness beyond the romantic honeymoon period in paradise. With a balance of levity and depth, contemplation and questioning, Hiking Naked may inspire you to reexamine your own choices, and to ponder the difference between seeking and escape.

(less)

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Claire

Jan 05, 2018Claire rated it it was amazing

Author Iris Graville's love for her family, her community, and the North Cascades wilderness shines through every page of this thoughtful memoir. In making the choice to be unplugged in the wilderness in the modern age, the Graville family discovers more joy, and more hardship, than they bargained for. Through fire and flood, deep snow and "roof-alanches," Graville and her husband and two children face it all with admirable openness and strength. In the practice of her Quaker faith, Graville allows the spirit lead her where it may, through ups and downs and logistics galore, in the end discovering a physical sense of place, and a creative, spiritual interior life as well. A unique, insightful journey. (less)

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Gloria

Jan 23, 2018Gloria rated it liked it

Shelves: for-the-spirit

Decent recounting of one woman's experience in stepping away from a frenetic lifestyle and living alternatively in a remote region of Washington state. Graville tells of her stressful nursing career as well as some family stressors. She is very open about financial concerns, family opinions, spiritual considerations, and just the cultural change of living in a seriously different environment.

This is not gripping in any way, but rather meanders through her thought process and the practical steps the family took to make this change. She seems like any middle-class mother and professional woman who recognizes being overwhelmed and is thinking out of the box to remedy the situation. (less)

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Hiking Naked: A Quaker Woman's Search for Balance Paperback – Illustrated, 19 September 2017

by Iris Graville  (Author)

4.4 out of 5 stars    13 ratings

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Product details

Publisher : Homebound Publications; Illustrated edition (19 September 2017)

Language : English

Paperback : 262 pages

ISBN-10 : 1938846842

ISBN-13 : 978-1938846847

Dimensions : 13.97 x 2.03 x 21.59 cm

Customer Reviews: 4.4 out of 5 stars    13 ratings

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Review

"Hiking Naked shows us the possibilities that appear if we take the risk." -- Margery Post Abbott, author of To Be Broken and Tender

"This memoir of 'seeking, not escaping' speaks to the hearts of those longing to be free from modern constraints--work, money, ambition, stress of all sorts--to find their bliss, wherever it might be. For Graville, in 1993, that means listening to the urgings of her heart and leaving her job as a public health nurse in Bellingham, WA, and moving her family to Stehekin, a remote village near North Cascades National Park. What resonates throughout is her deep connection to Quakerism; here a gentle, quiet spirituality that encourages places and periods of silence rather than imposing rigid external demands. As her husband and children agree to this experiment, over the two years, all come in their own way to say, 'I thought I knew about powerlessness, ' only to find that the rigors of living life simply require letting go of much more than they ever could have imagined. Graville concludes that 'Far from feeling deprived, we found over and over again the riches of attending to what's truly important.' VERDICT: Reading this expressive and beautifully written memoir is to experience one's own quest toward self-discovery." -- Library Journal, *Starred Review!

About the Author

Iris Graville is the author of Hands at Work: Portraits and Profiles of People Who Work with Their Hands, recipient of numerous accolades including a Nautilus Gold Book Award, and BOUNTY: Lopez Island Farmers, Food, and Community. She also serves as publisher of SHARK REEF Literary Magazine. Iris lives and writes on Lopez Island, Washington.

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Lynda Bennion

3.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected.

Reviewed in Canada on 5 December 2020

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I was less than intrigued with this story. The book seemed to be based more on the author's trials and tribulations of her career choices more than the 'magic' of living a different life style in the boonies. I wanted to be charmed and enthralled with more grit about living 'off grid' per se.

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Freeman

4.0 out of 5 stars Clean mountain air and a calm Quaker mind.

Reviewed in the United States on 1 November 2017

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This thoughtful quiet book is filled with the scent of pine trees, ceanothus and baking bread, the sparkle of sunlight on blue mountain water, the busy hum of squabbling teenagers, the bustle of family and visitors coming and going, the taste of homemade pizza and the comfort of a steaming cup of mint tea. Above all it is a book about the sustaining comfort and richness of a happy and loving marriage, and how deep love and compassion can allow a couple to support each other as they change and grow as individuals. I enjoyed reading about places I’ve also been and lived, about Quakers, and about a family negotiating changes in their lives with skill, grace and good humor.

5 people found this helpful

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Elaine

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully Written and Inspiring

Reviewed in the United States on 16 October 2017

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Disconnect the wifi router, put your cell phone on “do not disturb” and read Iris Graville’s memoir “Hiking Naked”. This is the story of one woman listening to the still small voice within and following her leading to leave a successful career and spend 2 years with her family in an isolated mountain town in Washington State. One satellite phone connects the entire Stehekin village to the outside world. Yet, there is a warm and lively community of hearty artists, talented bakers, resourceful nature lovers and even a “one room” school house in this “frozen in time” (forgive the pun) setting. Hiking Naked reads like sitting down with a good friend in front of a warm fire and finally hearing all the details of a heart felt adventure: including the inner deep struggle for meaning and purpose as well as the outer beauty and sheer magnificence and inspiration of the natural world. Iris Graville writes beautifully about both.

3 people found this helpful

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KBSeely

5.0 out of 5 stars A Journey Worth Sharing

Reviewed in the United States on 21 December 2017

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I loved this book! If you’ve ever fantasized about stepping out of a life you’ve outgrown and trying a new one, Graville’s story about the leap she and her family took moving to a small isolated community in the North Cascades will transport you there. What a pleasure to spend time with them as they adapt to the simple pleasures – and new challenges – of living in tiny Stehekin, WA. Graville’s clear prose and thoughtful voice hooked me from page one; reading her book is like sitting down with a wise friend.

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Aliopa

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspiring and beautifully written

Reviewed in the United States on 30 August 2018

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I loved this book! Iris writes beautifully about leaving a fast-paced and stressful life in te city and moving to a remote village among the nature. She shares the practical aspects of the experience but also her inner 'work' to achieve a more balanced life. This book is definitely inspiring for anyone who is dissatisfied with modern life and wishes to live a slower and more meaningful life.

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A Prophetic Voice: Thomas Berry | Center for Ecozoic Studies

A Prophetic Voice: Thomas Berry | Center for Ecozoic Studies

A Prophetic Voice: Thomas Berry

by Herman Greene

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A Prophetic Voice: Thomas Berry

By Marjorie Hope and James Young

Introduction

Whenever Thomas Berry looks out over the Hudson River from his home at the Riverdale Center for Religious Research, he experiences anew “the gorgeousness of the natural world.” The Earth brings forth a display of beauty in such unending profusion, a display so overwhelming to human consciousness, he says, that “we might very well speak of it as being dreamed into existence.”

But this Passionist priest and cultural historian—who calls himself a geologian—also reflects on the disastrous damage humans have wrought on the Earth. What is happening today is unprecedented, it is not just another change, he says. We are changing the very structure of the planet. We are even extinguishing many of the major life systems that have emerged in the 65 million years of this, the Cenozoic era—an era that has witnessed a spectrum of wonders, including the development of flowers, birds, and insects, the spreading of grasses and forests across the land, and the emergence of humans.

The Earth is changing, and we ourselves, integral aspects of the Earth, are being changed, he says. Religion must now function within this context, at this order of magnitude. But Western religion has been assuming little or no responsibility for the state or fate of the planet. Theology has become dysfunctional.

As a member of a Roman Catholic order, Berry directs much of his criticism at the tradition he knows best, Christianity. But his intention is to address people of any belief, and his searching mind and wide acquaintance with Chinese, Indian, Southeast Asian, Native American, and other cultures ‐ indeed, the entire pageant of cultural history ‐ make him catholic in the, non‐ sectarian sense of the term. His whole lifetime has been devoted to pursuing an understanding of the human condition and the condition of other beings on this planet.

Of course, he is thinking of present‐day human beings who live under the spell of Western culture when he writes: “We have lost our sense of courtesy toward the Earth and its inhabitants, our sense of gratitude, our willingness to recognize the sacred character of habitat, our capacity for the awesome, for the numinous quality of every earthly reality.” For Berry, the capacity for intensive sharing with the natural world lies deep within each of us, but has become submerged by an addiction to “progress.” Arrogantly we have placed ourselves above other creatures, deluding ourselves with the notion that we always know best what is good for the Earth and good for ourselves. Ultimately, custody of the Earth belongs to the Earth.

In the past, the story of the universe has been told in many ways by the peoples of the Earth, but today we are without one that is comprehensive. What is needed is nothing short of a new creation story, a new story of the universe, he asserts. Creation must be perceived and experienced as the emergence of the universe as both a psychic‐spiritual and material‐physical reality from the very beginning.

Human beings are integral with this emergent process. Indeed, the human is that being in whom the universe reflects on and celebrates itself in the deep mysteries of its existence in a special mode of conscious self‐awareness.

Everything tells the story of the universe ‐ the wind, trees, birds, stones. They are our cousins. Today it is harder to hear them. Berry has concentrated over the years on listening to the story told by the physical sciences, the story narrated by human cultures, the story recounted through cave paintings, visions of shamans, the pyramids of the Egyptians and Mayans. Each narrative is unique. But ultimately, they all tell the same story too.

We need a narrative that will demonstrate that every aspect of the universe is integral with a single organic whole, he insists. Its primary basis is the account of the emergent universe as communicated through our observational sciences. The universe as we know it today not only has cyclical modes of functioning, but also irreversible sequential modes of transformations. From the beginning of human consciousness, all cultures experienced the cyclical modes: the ever‐renewing sequence of seasons, of life and death. But today scientists and some others have begun to move from that dominant spatial mode of consciousness to a dominant time‐ developmental mode, time as an evolutionary sequence of irreversible transformations. We are beginning to recognize that our might can do temporal damage that is also eternal damage.

The new narrative will encompass a new type of history, a new type of science, a new type of economics, a new mode of awareness of the divine—in the very widest sense, a new kind of religious sensitivity. Such ideas as these do not always sit well with traditional Christians, nor with the followers of some other religions.

We realized on our first meeting with him at the Riverdale Center that Berry does not fit the common image of a nonconformist. A man with a gentle smile, bright eyes, and tousled whitening hair opened the door of the three story brown house and introduced himself simply as “Tom Berry.” It was a little hard to imagine that this retiring man, dressed in an old shirt and subdued in his speech could write so passionately of the dance, song, poetry, and drumbeats through which human beings have expressed their exultation and sense of participating in the universe as a single community. He led us through the inside of the house, which appeared to be one vast library with special collections of books, many in original languages, on Hindu, Confucian, Buddhist, Shinto, and Native American cultures. He then seated us on the plant‐ filled sun‐veranda overlooking the Hudson. Despite his shy manner, he responded easily to our questions, and sometimes took the initiative.

Noticing that our eyes had been drawn to the majestic red oak outside the window, he told us that it had endured more than four hundred years of nature’s buffets, and had withstood even human‐made disasters, like the massive tremors from a gas tank explosion that uprooted its fellow oak several years ago. To him it stood as a symbol of hope. Indeed, it was to this tree that he had dedicated The Dream of the Earth: “To the Great Red Oak, beneath whose sheltering branches this book was written.”

As we listened, occasionally looking across the river at the Palisades, we sensed that the Riverdale Center, set in the valley that had witnessed a story that included the emergence of the Palisades, the appearance of trees and birds and bears, then the long habitation by Native Americans, is a fitting place to contemplate the fate of Earth. It seemed fitting, too, that scientists, educators, environmentalists, and people of many faiths from all over the world would gather here, in small groups, to dream a new vision of the Earth into being.

Although clearly reticent about personal matters, he told us that his own life story began in 1914 in Greensboro, North Carolina. The third of thirteen children in a middle‐class Catholic family, he managed to develop a congenial relationship with his parents, but at the same time a certain distance.

This trait of distance, combined with a growing attachment to the land, surfaced often as he talked of his boyhood. The family had a horse, cow, chickens, and dogs; he felt close to the animal world. He often roamed the hills alone, except for the companionship of a collie, sensing the freedom of the woodlands and delighting in the clear streams, the songs of the birds, the subtle smells of the meadows. “But even at the age of eight,” he recalled, “I saw that development was damaging nature. At nine, I was collecting catalogues for camping equipment, canoes, knives, all the things I’d need to live in the Northwest forest. I felt the confrontation between civilization and wilderness, and I was acting on it.”

At nineteen, Berry went on, he decided to enter a religious community that would offer the best opportunity for contemplation and writing. He wanted to “get away from the trivial.” Sometimes he has wondered how he got through religious life, but he did, and yet managed to maintain that certain distance between himself and the establishment all the way.

After ten years in various monasteries, he pursued a doctorate in history at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., then spent a year studying Chinese in Beijing. After teaching at the Passionist seminary college, he became a chaplain with NATO in Germany; traveled in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; and went to England to meet the distinguished historian of cultures, Christopher Dawson, who had helped awaken him to the role of religion as a powerful factor in shaping culture. Later he taught Japanese history at Seton Hall University, helped found a seminar on Oriental thought and religion at Columbia University and an Asian Institute at St. John’s University, built up Fordham University’s history of religions program, and for eleven years served as President of the American Teilhard Association. During these years he continued his search to discover how people find meaning in life. Always drawn to Native Americans because of their sense of integrity and freedom, their bond with the riches of nature, he came to know many, including Sioux chief Lame Deer, Onondagan leader Oren Lyons, and the poet Paula Gunn Allen. He continued his studies of history and philosophy, and aided by knowledge of Sanskrit and Chinese, deepened his exploration of Eastern religious traditions. Over the years he also published a large number of papers and books on subjects ranging from Buddhism to the religions of India, the creative role of the elderly, the spiritual transformation of Carl Jung, and the thought of Teilhard de Chardin. Philosophers ranging from Confucius to Thoreau and Bergson; poet/visionaries extending from Dante to Blake and Chief Seattle; ecologists and scientists from Rachel Carson and Ilya Prigogine to Anne and Paul Ehrlich, all came to influence his conception of the Earth Community.

“But Teilhard had the greatest influence on what might be called your ecological vision?”

“Yes. As a paleontologist as well as philosopher, he had a grasp of the need for healing the rift between science and religion. I would say that he appreciated the important role of science as a basic mystical discipline of the West. He was the first great thinker in the modern scientific tradition to describe the universe as having a psychic‐spiritual as well as a physical‐material dimension from the very beginning. Teilhard had a comprehensive vision of the universe in its evolutionary unfolding. He saw the human as inseparable from the history of the universe. Also, he was keenly aware of the need in Western religious thought to move from excessive concern with redemption to greater emphasis on the creation process.”

“And Teilhard’s thought inspired you to delve into science?”

He nodded. “I needed some general knowledge of geology, astronomy, physics, other sciences. But I must emphasize that in an ecological age, Teilhard’s framework has its limitations. Remember, he died in 1955. He believed in technological ‘progress,’ and saw the evolutionary process as concentrated in the human, which would ultimately achieve super‐human status. He could not understand humans’ destructive impact on the Earth. When others pointed it out, he could not see it. Science would discover other forms of life! Well, his work remains tremendously important. The challenge is to extend Teilhard’s principal concerns further, to help light the way toward an Ecozoic Age.”

“Teilhard posed the greatest challenge of our time: to move from the spatial mode of consciousness to the historical, from being to becoming. The Church finds difficulty in recognizing the evolution of the Earth. For a long time it wouldn’t accept even the evolution of animal forms. To this day there is no real acceptance of our modern story of the universe as sacred story. As a child I was taught by the catechism that Earth was created in seven days, 5000 years ago. There was no sense of developmental, transformative time in the natural world.”

“And the church, as so often, is behind the times instead of leading?”

He looked at us for a long moment. “There is some concern, of course, but it does not go far enough,” he said slowly. “The Vatican, for example, makes vague statements on being careful about the environment, but there is emphasis on making the natural world useful to human beings. So far, the most impressive Catholic bishops’ statement comes from the Philippines. It’s called ‘What is Happening to our Beautiful Land?’“ Over lunch we learned more about the ever‐widening scope of Thomas Berry’s activities and about some of the people who are helping to carry out his work. He told us that on occasion he spoke at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which has become the most ecologically‐ minded church that he knows of, largely because of the enthusiasm of its Dean, James Parks Morton. He speaks on occasion at gatherings at Genesis Farm, a religiously‐based center seeking to develop a model of bioregional community; at the California‐based Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality, headed by radical priest Matthew Fox; and at Grailville, an educational center and laywoman’s community stressing ecological living. He also has spoken at Au Sable Institute where practical and theoretical programs in ecology are integrated with biblical studies. He has participated in many conferences, including the seminal 1988 meeting of the North American Conference on Christianity and Ecology, the first (1988) Global Conference of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival, and international gatherings in Costa Rica at the United Nations University for Peace. He helped the Holy Cross Center in Port Burwell, Ontario build an institution for spirituality and ecology. In Puebla, Mexico, a Jesuit group has founded the Institute for Ecological Personalism based on his ideas. Letters come in continually from people in countries all over the world.

During the afternoon our talks continued, touching on animism, Taoism, and Buddhism, as well as Buddhist ideas for human habitats, which Berry considered models of ecological functioning because they disturb the natural world very little.

Pulling the Strands of Berry’s Thought Together

Since that day we have met Berry several times, studied his more recent writings, and gradually gained a clearer picture of the transforming vision he presents.

In 1988 Berry brought out a collection of his essays in a volume entitled The Dream of the Earth. In 1991 he and Jesuit priest Thomas Clarke published a dialogue, Befriending the Earth: a Theology of Reconciliation Between Humans and the Earth, which had appeared as a thirteen‐ part series on Canadian television. Years earlier, in 1982, he teamed up with Brian Swimme to begin a decade of work on a daring venture: The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era, which was published in 1992.

Their partnership has been an unusual one. Swimme, a physicist and a mathematical cosmologist, is younger, and lives thousands of miles away, on the West Coast. Brian Swimme’s early book is entitled The Universe is a Green Dragon. Now they have written the story of the universe as a single comprehensive narrative of the sequence of transformations that the universe has experienced. Grounded in present‐day scientific understanding, it parallels the mythic narratives of the past as they were told in poetry, music, painting, dance, and ritual. Nothing quite like this coupling of science and human history has been published before..

Planet Earth is surely a mysterious planet, say Swimme and Berry. One need only observe how much more brilliant it is than other planets of our solar system in the diversity of its manifestations and the complexity of the joy of its development. Earth appears to have developed with the simple aim of celebrating the joy of existence. Through this story, they hope that the human community will become present to the larger Earth community in a mutually enhancing way. Our role is to enable Earth and the entire universe to reflect on and celebrate itself in a special mode of conscious self awareness. We have become desensitized to the glories of the natural world and are making awesome decisions without the sense of awe and humility commensurate with their impact. We need a new mystique as we move into the Ecozoic era, and this process will need the participation of all members of the planetary community.

The various living and nonliving members of the Earth community have a common genetic line of development, the authors tell us. It begins with the Beginning: the primordial Flaring Forth of the universe some 15 billion years ago. It starts as stupendous energy, and evolves into gravitational, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and electromagnetic interactions. Before a millionth of a second has passed, the particles stabilize. From this point we are carried through the seeding of galaxies, and the appearance of galactic clouds, primal stars, the first elements, supernovas, and galaxies. These are magnificent spiraling moments, carrying the destiny of everything that followed. They are moments of grace. Some five billion years ago the solar system forms, and a billion years later, the living Earth. We travel through the Paleozoic Era (in which vertebrates, jawed fishes, and insects appear); the Mesozoic Era (witnessing the first dinosaurs, birds, and mammals), and the Cenozoic (beginning with the emergence of the first rodents and bats, and carrying through to the arrival of various orders of mammals and humans), up to today.

After the emergence of the first humans, Homo habilis, some 2.6 million years ago, the new species evolves to Homo erectus, and then to Homo sapiens, with its marvelous new gifts of expression—ritual burials at first, then language, musical instruments, cave paintings, and other skills and artifacts that we associate with human civilization. Homo sapiens evolved through periods of the Neolithic village, classical civilizations, the rise of nations, and the “modern revelation.”

The latter refers to a new awareness of how the ultimate mysteries of existence are being manifested in the universe. This revelation, a gradual change from a dominant spatial mode of consciousness to perception of the universe as an irreversible sequence of transformations, might be called a change from “cosmos” to ever‐evolving “cosmogenesis”. It can be seen as beginning with the discoveries of Copernicus, and embracing those of Kepler, Galileo, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Whitehead, Teilhard, Rachel Carson, and many other scientists and philosophers.

Throughout the book the two men write from a unified point of view as they present some cardinal principles. Among them, that the birth of the universe was not an event in time; time begins simultaneously with the birth of existence. There was no “before,” and there was no “outside.” All the energy that would ever exist erupted as a single existence. The stars that later would blaze, the lizards that would crawl on the land, the actions of the human species, would be powered by the same mysterious energy that burst forth at the first dawn. Another cardinal principle is that the universe holds all things together, and is itself the primary activating power in every activity. It is not a thing, but a mode of being of everything. Recent scientific work has shown that it is not workable to think of a particle or event as completely determined by its immediate vicinity. Although in practical terms their influence may be negligible, events taking place elsewhere in the universe are directly related to the physical parameters of the situation. It is beyond the scope of this summary to present the authors’ account of this phenomenon. However, it underlines their conclusion that “since the universe blossomed from a seed point, this means that a full understanding of a proton requires a full understanding of the universe.”

Articulating the new story so that humans can enter creatively into the web of relationships in the universe will require, to some degree, reinventing language and the meaning we attach to words. For example: what is gravitation? In classical mechanistic understanding, it is a particular attraction things have to each other. Newton called it force, and Einstein, the curvature of the space‐time manifold. But the bond holding each thing in the universe to everything else is simply the universe acting. Therefore, to say “The stone falls to Earth” misses the active quality of that event. To say that gravity pulls the stone to Earth implies a mechanism that does not exist. To say that Earth pulls the rock misses the presence of the universe to each of its parts. It is more helpful, say Berry and Swimme, to see the planet Earth and the rock as drawn by the universe into bonded relationship, a profound intimacy. “The bonding simply happens; it simply is. The bonding is the perdurable fact of the universe, and happens primevally in each instant, a welling up of an inescapable togetherness of things.” Thus we can begin to grasp what is meant by the statement that gravity is not an independent power; it is the universe in both its physical and spiritual aspects that holds things together and is the primary activating power in every activity. We can begin to understand the idea that the universe acts, that it is not a thing, but a mode of being of everything. Each process, then, is ultimately indivisible.

Primal peoples of every continent understood this bonding, this intimacy, although obviously not with the tools and complex theories developed by modern science. Recent centuries have witnessed a concerted effort to rid scientific language of all anthropomorphisms. Instead, it has become mechanomorphic and reductionist. But let us consider the Milky Way. Its truth cannot be realized by focusing only on its early components, helium and hydrogen. Its truth also rests on the fact that in its later modes of being it is capable of thinking and feeling and creating—of evolving into creatures such as human beings. The Milky Way expresses its inner depths in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, for Emily Dickinson is a dimension of the galaxy’s development. In the long process of evolution, the sensibility of a poet derives from the Milky Way, and her or his feelings are an evocation of being, involving sunlight, thunderstorms, grass, mountains, animals, and human history. They are the evocation of mountain, animal, world. Poets do not think on the universe; rather, the universe thinks itself, in them and through them.

Thus, the vibrations and fluctuations in the universe are the music that called forth the galaxies and their powers of weaving elements into life. Our responsibility is to develop our capacity to listen. The eye that searches the Milky Way—the eye of humans or that of telescopes—is itself an eye shaped by the Milky Way. The mind searching for contact with the Milky Way is the very mind of the Milky Way searching for its inner depths.

The appearance of humans on this planet brought with it a new faculty of understanding, a consciousness characterized by a sense of wonder and celebration, and an ability to use parts of its external environment as instruments. Even in the time of Homo habilis (2.6 million to 1.5 million years ago), an intimate rapport between humans and the natural world was developing. And in the much later period of classical civilizations (3500 BCE to 1600 CE), the human social order was integrated with the cosmological order. Neither was conceivable without the other.

Yet while there was a great deal of teaching about humans’ relationship with the natural world in the Western, and especially the Eastern classical civilizations, there was also great devastation. Many Chinese philosophers and painters, for example, depicted that intimacy in eloquent terms, but endless wars and stripping the forests for more cultivation despoiled the countryside.

In the West, particularly, there developed an exaggerated anthropocentrism. When the Plague struck Europe in 1347, this changed to theocentrism, for since there was no germ theory to explain such a calamity, humans concluded that they must be too attached to Earth and should commit themselves to salvation from the Earth, absorption into the divine. Anthropocentrism and theocentrism, however, both denied the unity between the natural, human, and divine world. The mystical bonding of the human with the natural world was becoming progressively weaker. Closely associated with this insensitivity to the natural world was an insensitivity to women; patriarchal dominance reigned.

Since the late eighteenth century, the West has considered its most important mission to be that the peoples of Earth achieve their identity within the democratic setting of the modern nation‐state. Nationalism, progress, democratic freedoms, and virtually limitless rights to private property are the four fundamentals of this mystique. That unless their limits are recognized, these might bring catastrophe upon the natural world was not even considered. Land became something to be exploited economically rather than communed with spiritually. Wars of colonial conquest were related to the mission of propagating Western bourgeois values.

The “modern revelation”—characterized as it is by gradual awareness that the universe has emerged as an irreversible sequence of transformations enabling it to gain greater complexity in structure and greater variety in its modes of conscious expression—is a new mode of consciousness. This change in perception from an enduring cosmos to an ever‐transforming cosmogenesis has awesome implications that humans have not yet come to grips with. Our predicament is itself the result of a myth—the myth of Wonderland. If only we continue on the path of progress it tells us, happiness will be ours—happiness virtually equated with the ever‐ increasing consumption of products that have been taken violently from Earth or that react violently on it.

We need a new myth to guide human activity into the future. It should be analogous to the sense of mythic harmonies that suffused the fifteenth century Renaissance. At the beginning of the scientific age, the universe was perceived as one of order and harmony, in which each mode of being resonates with every other mode of being.

Somehow this sense of an intelligibly ordered universe has directed the scientific quest, say Swimme and Berry. But only recently have we been able to comprehend the depths of these harmonies, and thus fully recognize the mission of science. The scientific meditation on the structure and functioning of the universe that began centuries ago has yielded a sense of what can be called “the curvature of the universe whereby all things are held together in their intimate presence to each other.” Each thing is sustained by everything else.

We are on the verge of the Ecozoic era. What will it mean? This is a question explored in The Universe Story and Befriending the Earth, and in essays on economics, technology, law, bioregionalism, education, and planetary socialism in The Dream of the Earth. The basic answer begins to be found when we question some of our implicit assumptions:

 The assumption that we need constant economic growth, for example. How could we believe that human well‐being could be attained by diminishing the well‐being of the Earth? That we could achieve an ever‐expanding Gross Domestic Product when the Gross Earth Product is declining? Since the threat to both economics and religion comes from one source, the disruption of the natural world, should economics not also be seen as a religious issue? If the water is polluted, it can neither be drunk nor used for baptism.

 The implicit assumption that we could cure sick people by technologies and by focusing on their present problems. How can we have well people on a sick planet?

 The widespread idea that the primary purpose of education is to train people for jobs. We need jobs, certainly, but is it not more important for people to be educated for a diversity of roles and functions? Is it not more realistic, in the long run, to view education as coming to know the story of the universe, of life systems, of consciousness as a single story—and to help people understand and fulfil their role in this larger pattern of meaning? Even in the arts, rather than focusing on producing specialized professionals, would it not be better if all of us played music, if all children painted and wrote poetry?

 The conviction that a democracy that is exploiting the natural world is the highest form of governance. The anthropocentrism of the word is implicit in the root; “demo” refers to people, not to all beings on Earth, beings whose fate we are controlling in the name of human life, liberty, and happiness. We need a biocracy, a rule that will emerge from and be concerned with all the members of the community.

Re‐evaluating these and other “truths” that we hold as “self‐ evident” should enable us to realize that Earth is primary, while the human is secondary; that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. We should be enabled to step back a little from our diligent efforts to impose our will on life systems. We will then be free to listen to the natural world with an attunement that goes beyond our scientific perceptions and reaches the spontaneous sensitivities in our own inner being.

All human professions need to recognize that their primary source is the integral functioning of the Earth community. It is the natural world that is the primary economic reality, the primary educator, the primary governance, the primary technologist, the primary healer, the primary presence of the sacred, the primary moral value. The professions do not have the words for the type of transformation required; we need a new language. We need to transform the legal profession, for instance, and invent a new language in law, and then move from the ideal of democracy toward the more comprehensive paradigm of biocracy. One example: a constitution that recognizes not only the human on this continent, but the entire North American community, including animate beings, geographical structures, life systems.

Religion needs to appreciate that the primary sacred community is the universe itself. Our ethical sensitivities need to expand beyond suicide, homicide, and genocide, to include biocide and geocide.

Interwoven in all this is the need to fully recognize women’s gifts and their roles in the future, both for themselves and for the well‐being of Earth. The need to limit human population is modifying the traditional roles of women and men, indeed the entire human situation. As women are liberated from the oppressions they have endured in most traditional civilizations, a new energy should be released throughout the Earth.

Albeit slowly, changes are already happening, as divisions of learning begin to overcome their isolation. Fundamental to a real sea‐change, however, will be the move from a human‐centered to an Earth‐centered language. Words like good, evil, freedom, society, justice, literacy, progress, praise should be broadened to include other beings of the natural world.

A basic principle of the emerging Ecozoic era is that the universe requires two modes of understanding: it has cyclical modes of functioning, yes, but also irreversible sequential modes of transformation. The law of entropy must evoke a certain foreboding in human consciousness.

The Cenozoic era emerged quite independent of human influence, but Homo sapiens will enter into virtually every phase of the Ecozoic era. We cannot create trees, fish, or birdsong, but they could well disappear unless we choose to temper our awesome power with humility. We must follow three basic axioms in our relations with the natural world: acceptance, protection, fostering: Acceptance of the given order of things. Protection of the life‐systems at the base of the planetary community. Fostering a sense of active responsibility for the larger Earth community, a responsibility that devolves upon us through our unique capacity for understanding the universe story.

Our fundamental commitment in the Ecozoic era should be to perceive the universe as a communion of subjects rather than as a collection of objects. A major obstacle to this is our reluctance to think of the human as one among many species. Moreover, the change in consciousness required is of such enormous proportions and significance that it might be likened to a new type of revelatory experience.

In the new era we shall need to recapture the basic principle of balance. Its prototype lies in the awesome reality that the expansive original energy of the primordial Flaring Forth keeps the universe from collapsing and gravitational attraction holds the parts together, enabling the universe to flourish. So, too, on Earth: The balance of containing and expanding forces keeps the Earth in a state of balanced turbulence.

In the industrial age, however, humans have upset the equilibrium. In the Ecozoic era the task will be to achieve a creative balance between human activities and other forces on this planet. When the curvature of the universe, the curvature of the Earth, and the curvature of the human are in proper relation, then the Earth and its human aspect will have come into celebratory experience that is the fulfilment of Earthly existence.

Where does God fit into this story? This is a word that Berry rarely uses. It has been overused, and trivialized, he says. The word has many different meanings to people. His principal concern is to reach the larger society, including people who would not call themselves religious.

Although Berry does not say it in so many words, he implies that in the West, especially, we spend too much time defining God and arguing over definitions rather than recognizing—in both theological and experiential ways—the ineffable. The term “God,” he says, refers to the ultimate mystery of things, something beyond that which we can truly comprehend. Many primal peoples experience this as the Great Spirit, a mysterious power pervading every aspect of the natural world. Some people dance this experience, some express it in song, some find it in the laughter of children, the sweetness of an apple, or the sound of wind through the trees. At every moment we are experiencing the overwhelming mystery of existence.

Berry prefers to speak of the Divine, of the numinous presence in the world about us. This is what all of us, child or elder, Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or agnostic, can experience; this is the ground that all of us can truly know.

Since the universe story is the way the Divine is revealing itself, humans become sacred by participating in this larger sacred community. The gratitude that we feel in this experience, we call “religion.” For Berry, it would seem, all this is more real and less abstract than theology, because it emanates from experience of the emergent universe, an experience so basic that it is shared by other members of the Earth community.

Perhaps because of his comprehensive Weltanschauung, embracing non‐theistic faiths, Berry never speaks of a God who commands, judges, rules over a paradisiacal afterlife, or watches over human actions. He does not go into traditional religious questions like good, evil, Heaven, Hell, or individual salvation. Yet he points out that his position follows quite directly from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. In the first chapter Paul declares that “Ever since God created the world, this everlasting power and deity—however invisible—have been there for the mind to see in the things He has made.”

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In our discussions with Berry, he has stressed that his primary interest is that humans come to see the visible created world with whatever clarity is available. In his writings he does not go into all the basic theological questions like that of ultimate origins, but the first step, as Saint Paul suggests, is perception of the created world. In Berry’s view, God is not our first clear perception. Rather, the sense of God emerges in and through our perception of the universe. Just how the divine is perceived obviously varies among different peoples. In any case, it seems that the divine is perceived “in the things He has made.” The knowledge of God emerges in the human mind not directly, but through this manifestation.

Perhaps a major difficulty for many believers lies in Berry’s view that the universe is not a puppet world without an inner power through which it functions. Rather, God enables beings to be themselves, and to act in a way to bring themselves into being—not independently of deity, but still with a valid inner principle of life and activity. This activity of creatures is known as Second Cause, while the deity remains First Cause. These causes are not “real” in the same way, nor do they function in the same manner. But to deny the reality of the created world and the validity of its proper mode of activity, is to deny the capacity of the divine origin of things to produce anything other than ephemeral appearances. Ultimately our perception of the divine depends precisely on our perception of the reality of the visible world about us.

Speaking of the universe as a single multiform sequential celebratory event and of the human as that being in whom the universe reflects on and celebrates itself in a special mode of conscious self‐awareness, is speaking in and of the “created” order. That it says nothing directly about “God,” does not to Berry indicate any denial of the divine. It is, rather, the proper way of speaking to our times without getting into a preaching mode that would do more damage to religion than anything else. Humans can participate in the great celebration that is the universe itself, and the celebration is ultimately the finest manifestation of the divine. It is our way of seeing the divine “in all things that are made.” This great celebration might also be considered the Grand Liturgy of the universe, the shared liturgy that we enter into through our own humanly contrived pluralistic liturgies.

As we have seen, Berry is highly critical of many aspects of Christian doctrine and practice, since all of Western civilization has been profoundly affected by the biblical Christian tradition. Thus Christianity is involved not as a direct cause of our ecological crisis, but as creating the context. To summarize briefly:

 Thefirstproblemistheemphasisonatranscendent,personaldivinebeing,asclearly distinct from the universe.

 AsecondrelatedproblemisChristianity’sexaltationofthehumanasaspiritualbeingas against the physical nature of other beings—the human is so special that the human soul has to be created directly by God in every single case.

 Thethirdproblemisthatredemptionisseenassomekindofout‐of‐this‐world liberation.

 Thefourthistheidea,developedparticularlybyadevoutChristiannamedDescartes, that the world is a mechanism.

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All these “transcendencies” ‐ transcendent God, transcendent human, transcendent redemption, transcendent mind—foster entrancement with a transcendent technology which shall liberate us from following the basic biological laws of the natural world. In this manner we create a transcendent goal, a millennial vision harkening back to the Book of Revelation, with which to go beyond the human condition, says Berry.

While the Christian tradition until the Renaissance included elements of seeing the natural world as having a soul, since the time of Descartes, particularly, there has been a progressive loss of the cosmic dimension. Although there have always been strands in the tradition that deal well with the natural world, this is not emphasized in Christianity as it is preached. There is no adequate emphasis in the catechism, or Biblical commandments concerning the natural world.

The Bible introduced an emphasis on the divine in historical events. Its historical realism stimulates a dynamism toward developmental processes.

Like many other religions, Christianity, with its intense monotheism, tends toward narrowness. Among religious people, the more intense the commitment, the more fundamentalist they tend to be. What is needed today is not intensity, but expansiveness. By the same token, humans should have moved beyond the idea that any one religion has the fullness of revelation.

Narrowness also is evident in the traditional Christian hostility to animism. Saint Boniface, for example, cut down sacred oak trees. Today that would seem absurd. Could we not entertain the idea that instead, the future of Christianity will involve assimilating elements of paganism?

In view of all this, Berry makes the startling suggestion that we consider putting the Bible on the shelf for perhaps twenty years, so that we can truly listen to creation. One of the best ways to discover the deep meaning of things, he says, is to give them up for a while. Thus, we would be able to recover the ancient Christian view that there are two Scriptures, that of the natural world and that of the Bible. We would be able to create a new language, more adequate to deal with our present revelatory moment. Unfortunately, at present we are still reading the book instead of reading the world about us. We will drown reading the book.

Organized religion is frequently a destructive force—yet religion in the more basic sense is an important part of our being, he asserts. Among other things, it brings us together in celebration, and gives us the gift of delighting in existence.

We must recognize that the revelations of most religions as they are practiced today are inadequate to deal with the task before us. The traditions of the past cannot do what needs to be done, but we cannot do what needs to be done without all traditions. The new story of the universe does not replace them; it provides a more comprehensive context in which all the earlier stories can discover a more expansive interpretation.

It is of pivotal importance, Berry says, to be open to ongoing revelations, including those emerging from the scientific venture. Science does not reduce the mystery of the world, but actually enhances it. Indeed, in a broad sense scientific understanding is the key to the future of religion.

It is too early to appraise Berry’s influence, especially in a period when economic growth, land development, invention of mega‐technologies, and winning computerized wars against Third World upstarts continue to define our nation’s measures of might and our sense of personal power. The full import of Berry’s message may not sink in for many years.

But some of his influence is clearly visible. He cannot keep up with requests for speaking engagements. The demand for his writings grows every year, and his work is now being translated into other languages. During the course of our own travels, in conversations with people as diverse as Buddhists in Japan, Muslims in Egypt, and agnostics in Russia, speaking of Berry has always provoked great interest and requests for copies of his work.

One criticism of his thought is that he exaggerates the extent to which the Bible provides a context for an exploitative attitude toward the Earth. Another is that the challenges we face are more complex than rediscovering an integral relationship with Earth, and inevitably involve specific, personal, economic, and political questions about our own communities. A frequent objection is that his biocentric vision denies the chosen status of “man,” vice‐regent of God. Berry listens to such criticisms, sometimes adapts his thought to accommodate them, and sometimes replies with a helpful rejoinder.

Even critics admire his realism, sweeping synthesis, imaginative insights, and courage to confront the narrowness of traditional theology. They also respect the fact that although he often uses abstract terms, he always lends them a vivid—at times biting—concreteness. He describes environmental, economic, and political problems with down‐to‐earth examples. When looking to the future, he illustrates his ideas with examples ranging from methods of appropriate technology to bioregionalism or steady‐state economics. He even proposes, not entirely tongue‐in‐cheek, running every other truck on our highways into a ravine. It is not that he eschews all technological advances. But our new technologies must harmonize with natural processes, which operate on self‐nourishing, self‐ healing, self‐governing principles.

It is our observation that Berry, contrary to conventional wisdom, is becoming not less but more radical as he advances in years—and sees the time left for saving the planet running out. He is “radical” in the original sense of the word, harkening back to the Latin word radices, roots. It is as if he is driven by the thought “They just don’t get it. They don’t comprehend how deeply rooted it is, the crisis that confronts us!”

Sometimes one can hear the anger in this gentle man as he speaks of “the order of magnitude of the present catastrophic situation.” It is, he says, “so enormous, so widespread, and we don’t know what we are doing.” The people who built the automobile, the people who built the nuclear program, the people who dreamed up the Green Revolution in agriculture, were unable to make the connection between these and their adverse effects. Vandana Shiva says the Green Revolution initially produced great increases in India’s food supply, but in the end, it devastated the whole agricultural system. We made 50,000 nuclear bombs, and now we don’t know what to do with them!

We fool ourselves into thinking that recycling cans and papers will do it. Of course we must recycle. But basically that is designed to keep the system going. It can help mitigate the problem, but only until we can do the fundamental changes. Meanwhile, when ecology groups try to protect the last bit of our first‐growth forest, the entrepreneur types say these radicals are trying to do away with jobs. If these are the only jobs we can imagine, it is a sick society, and we need cultural therapy. We can’t solve this crisis by meliorism.

Yet Berry sees hope in the upwellinging of movements and modes of perception that suggest an awakening. He points to the growth of bioregional movements, Green political organizations, and confrontational movements launched by activist groups such as Greenpeace and Earth First! He talks about shifts of consciousness revealed in New Age thinkers, countercultural writers, and feminist, antipatriarchal movements. On the international level, he has been encouraged by shifts within the World Bank toward more viable programs, and the addition of an environmental department; the spread of vital information through organizations like The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the World Resources Institute, the Worldwatch Institute, and various United Nations programs; and even stirrings among some national and multinational business organizations.

Our awesome power spells our danger, but it also presents our opportunity, an unparalleled opening to a larger creativity, he observes. The danger lies in the mystique that pervades our patriarchal, plundering industrial society. It is a mystique that could propel us not into an Ecozoic era, but into one that could be called Technozoic, led by people—epitomized in the corporate establishment—who are committed to an even more controlled order. In the future. The dominant struggle will be the struggle between entrepreneur and ecologist. Our task is to reinvent the human, at the species level. Basic to this task is creating a new integration of the human with the forces of the natural world, and celebrating that integration.

Who will lead us into the future? The intimacy with the cosmic process that is needed describes the shamanic personality, a type that is emerging again in our society. As in earlier cultures, today the shaman may be woman as well as man. Certainly, to fulfil the function of healers, shamans must represent the feminine principle, embodied in the growing scientific perception of our planet as a single organism, alive, self‐governing, self‐ healing. True, nurturance is not the only role for women. Nurturing roles, however, are the key to the future; they are epitomized in the archetype of woman but reside in the capacities of each one of us.

Taking our cues from earlier peoples, we can create, or recreate, renewal ceremonies. We need to celebrate the great historical moments in the unfolding of the universe, cosmic events that constituted psychic‐spiritual as well as physical transformations. Such celebrations might begin with the primordial Flaring Forth and the supernova implosions, moments of grace that set the pattern for emergence of this planet. They might go on to include the beginning of photosynthesis, followed by the arrival of trees, then flowers, then birds, and other aspects of this wondrous evolution.

CES Monthly Musings – September‐October, 2013 Page 33 of 45

Once we begin to celebrate this story we will understand the fascination that draws scientists to their work. Without entrancement in this new context it is unlikely that humans will have the psychic energy needed for renewal of Earth.

That entrancement comes from the immediate communion of humans with the natural world. We are rediscovering our capacity for entering into the larger community of life. Every form of being is integral with this story. Nothing is itself without everything else.

Berry’s shamanic voice raises a challenge. Is the human species viable, or are we careening toward self‐destruction, carrying with us our fellow Earthlings? Can we move from an anthropocentric to a biocentric vision—and more importantly, actualize it in a biocracy? How can we help activate the intercommunion of all members of the Earth community? What shall we be leaving the children—the young of our own families, our own species and of other species whose fate we share?

Can we find the guidance we need in religions as they exist today?

References

Berry, Thomas. 1991. The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

Berry, Thomas with Clarke, Thomas. 1991. Befriending the Earth. Mystic: Twenty‐Third

Publications.

Swimme, Brian and Berry, Thomas. 1992. The Universe Story. San Francisco: Harper, San Francisco.

Copyright retained by author(s)

This article has been reprinted from Trumpeter (Vol. 11, No. 1, 1994), ISSN: 0832‐6193. Marjorie Hope and James Young, deceased, are the authors of The Faces of Homelessness, Macmillan/Lexington, 1986; The South African Churches in a Revolutionary Situation, Orbis, 1982; The Struggle for Humanity, Orbis, 1977. This paper, “A Prophetic Voice,” was intended to be a chapter of their book‐in‐progress, tentatively entitled The New Alliance: Faith and Ecology.

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NEW BIOGRAPHY ON THOMAS BERRY AT A 30% DISCOUNT

Columbia University Press published the first biography on Thomas Berry in spring 2019. The book was written by Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, and Andrew Angyal. The book was released just prior to the 10thanniversary of Thomas Berry’s death on June 1, 2019. Information on the book and how to pre-order it at a 30% discount are available here.

Berry was one of the 20thcentury’s most important thinkers. He had encyclopedic knowledge which he synthesized in books such as The Dream of the Earth and The Great Work. His works were intellectually profound, inspiring, and evocative. Anne Marie Dalton termed the latter characteristic poesis. His presentations, written work, and conversations changed the lives of many people and gave rise to a historic movement that is continuing.

 

FREE ACCESS TO ONLINE COURSES ON

JOURNEY OF THE UNIVERSE AND THOMAS BERRY

 Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, Yale University, are offering four six-week online courses. Brian Thomas Swimme provides introductory comments. These are featured as a specialization under the title:  “Journey of the Universe: A Story for our Times.” They are available in English and in Chinese.

This specialization includes two courses on Journey of the Universe and a course on TheWorldview of Thomas Berry. Each of these courses can be taken independently, followed by an Integrating Capstone course. These are MOOCs available on Coursera to anyone, anywhere on the planet.

Learners may audit these courses FREE OF CHARGE (with the exception of the capstone course). Or learners may register for all of the courses for a small fee and, upon completion, receive a specialization certificate. The courses do not have to be completed within the six-week period, rather, learners may take the classes and finish at their own pace.

Courses:

Journey of the Universe: The Unfolding of Life (film & book)

Journey Conversations: Weaving Knowledge and Action

The Worldview of Thomas Berry: Flourishing of the Earth Community

Integrating Capstone: Living Cosmology (only available as part of the specialization certificate—not available to audit)

For more details and to register, go to:

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/journey-of-the-universe

 

 

 

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Why Buddhism Is True - Wikipedia, Amazon, Goodread, New Yorker, NPR

Why Buddhism Is True - Wikipedia



Why Buddhism Is True
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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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. 

As of August 2017, the book had peaked at The New York Times No. 4 bestseller in hardcover nonfiction.[1]


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. 

A review in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik stated, "Wright’s book has no poetry or paradox anywhere in it. [...] Yet, if you never feel that Wright is telling you something profound or beautiful, you also never feel that he is telling you something untrue. Direct and unambiguous, tracing his own history in meditation practice—which eventually led him to a series of weeklong retreats and to the intense study of Buddhist doctrine—he makes Buddhist ideas and their history clear."[4]

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] 

Kirkus Reviews called the book a "cogent and approachable argument for a personal meditation practice based on secular Buddhist principles."[3]

Adam Frank, writing for National Public Radio, called it "delightfully personal, yet broadly important".[6]

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]

Thompson questioned both Wright's version of secularized and naturalized Buddhism and, conversely, Wright's conception of evolutionary psychology that Wright claims Buddhism is uniquely equipped to address.[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]

1. ^ Cowles, Gregory (18 August 2017). "A Science Writer Embraces Buddhism as a Path to Enlightenment". The New York Times. Retrieved 3 February 2018.
2. ^ Jump up to:a b Illing, Sean (12 October 2014). "Why Buddhism is true". Vox. Retrieved 30 October 2017.
3. ^ Jump up to:a b c "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation | Kirkus Review". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved 14 December 2017.
4. ^ Gopnik, Adam. "What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can't". The New Yorker. Retrieved 30 October 2017.
5. ^ Damasio, Antonio (7 August 2017). "Assessing the Value of Buddhism, for Individuals and for the World". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 December 2017.
6. ^ Frank, Adam. "Why 'Why Buddhism is True' is True". National Public Radio. Retrieved 15 December 2017.
7. ^ Romeo, Nick (25 August 2017). "Meditation can make us happy, but can it also make us good?". The Washington Post. Retrieved 14 December 2017.
8. ^ 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)

===

불교는 왜 진실인가

위키백과, 우리 모두의 백과사전.

불교는 왜 진실인가(부제: 명상과 깨달음의 과학)은 언론이이자 진화 심리학자인 로버트 라이트의 2017년 책이다. 2017년 8월 이 책은 논픽션 양장본 부문에서 뉴욕타임스 베스트셀러에서 4위를 기록했다.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

목차

1 내용

2 반응

2.1 긍정적

2.2 부정적

3 각주

내용

이 책에서, 로버트 라이트는 환생과 같은 초자연적 현상에 대한 믿음을 배제하고, 마음챙김 명상과 같은 세속적이고 서구화 된 불교 양식을 옹호한다. 그는 또한 명상의 보편화는 타인에 대한 감수성, 동정심, 공감을 일깨워 미국 사회 전반에 만연한 정치적 부족주의를 줄일 수 있다고 주장한다. 그는 또한 인간 고통의 원인에 대한 불교의 진단은 진화 생물학과 진화 심리학에 비춰볼 때 타당하다고 진단한다. 마음모듈이론과 불교의 가르침 중 무아론의 공통점 또한 집중적으로 다루고 있다.

반응

긍정적

“ 라이트의 책에는시나 역설이 없습니다. [...] 그러나 라이트가 당신에게 심오하거나 아름다운 것을 말하고 있다고 느끼지 않는다면 직접 연습과 모호하지 않고 직접 명상 연습을 통해 자신의 역사를 추적했습니다. 결국 그는 일주일에 걸친 퇴각과 불교 교리에 대한 강렬한 연구로 이어졌으며 불교 사상과 역사를 분명하게 만들어줍니다. ”

 

— Adam Gopnik의 뉴요커의 리뷰

“ 라이트의 책은 도발적이고 유익하며 많은 면에서 읽을만하다. ”

 

— 신경 과학자 안토니오 다 마시오

“ 세속적인 불교 원칙에 근거한 개인 명상 연습. ”

 

— Kirkus Reviews

“ 유쾌하고 개인적이지만 광범위하게 중요한 새 책 ”

 

— 미국 공영방송의 저술가 인 애덤 프랭크

“ 진실과 자유에 대한 그의 웅장한 주장을 라이트가 완전히 증명하는 것은 아니지만, 그의 주장에는 많은 흥미롭고 명민한 주장들이 포함되어있다. ”

 

— 워싱턴 포스트

부정적

에반 톰슨 (Evan Thompson)은 2020년에 라이트의 책이 담고 있는 불교예외주의에 대해 의문을 제기했다. 그에 따르면 불교예외주의는 불교가 다른 종교보다 우월하며 실제로 종교가 아니라 일종의 마음 과학, 치료, 철학이라는 주장이다. 톰슨은 라이트의 세속적이고 자연적 불교에 의문을 제기했으며, 과연 라이트의 말대로 불교만이 진화심리학을 독자적으로 설명할 수 있는지에 대해서도 회의감을 표현했다.

각주

1.  Cowles, Gregory (18 August 2017). "A Science Writer Embraces Buddhism as a Path to Enlightenment". The New York Times. Retrieved 3 February 2018.
2.  Illing, Sean (12 October 2014). "Why Buddhism is true". Vox. Retrieved 30 October 2017.
3.  Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation | Kirkus Review". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved 14 December 2017.
4.  Gopnik, Adam. "What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can't". The New Yorker. Retrieved 30 October 2017.
5.  Damasio, Antonio (7 August 2017). "Assessing the Value of Buddhism, for Individuals and for the World". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 December 2017.
6.  Frank, Adam. "Why 'Why Buddhism is True' is True". National Public Radio. Retrieved 15 December 2017.
7.  Romeo, Nick (25 August 2017). "Meditation can make us happy, but can it also make us good?". The Washington Post. Retrieved 14 December 2017.
8.  Thompson, Evan (2020). Why I am Not a Buddhist. Yale University Press.

분류: 불교진화생물학2017년 책

===

From one of America’s most brilliant writers, a New York Times bestselling journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness.

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, 

Why Buddhism Is True lays the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age and shows how, in a time of technological distraction and social division, we can save ourselves from ourselves, both as individuals and as a species.

===

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Why Buddhism is True

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.

About the Author

Robert Wright is the New York Times bestselling author of The Evolution of God (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Nonzero, The Moral Animal, Three Scientists and their Gods (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Why Buddhism Is True. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the widely respected Bloggingheads.tv and MeaningofLife.tv. He has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Time, Slate, and The New Republic. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton University, where he also created the popular online course “Buddhism and Modern Psychology.” He is currently Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York.  --This text refers to the paperback edition.

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Review

"I have been waiting all my life for a readable, lucid explanation of Buddhism by a tough-minded, skeptical intellect. Here it is. This is a scientific and spiritual voyage unlike any I have taken before."
--Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and bestselling author of Authentic Happiness

"This is exactly the book that so many of us are looking for. Writing with his characteristic wit, brilliance, and tenderhearted skepticism, Robert Wright tells us everything we need to know about the science, practice, and power of Buddhism."
--Susan Cain, bestselling author of Quiet<br ><br >

"Robert Wright brings his sharp wit and love of analysis to good purpose, making a compelling case for the nuts and bolts of how meditation actually works. This book will be useful for all of us, from experienced meditators to hardened skeptics who are wondering what all the fuss is about."

--Sharon Salzberg, cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society and bestselling author of Real Happiness 

<br ><br >"What happens when someone steeped in evolutionary psychology takes a cool look at Buddhism? If that person is, like Robert Wright, a gifted writer, the answer is this surprising, enjoyable, challenging, and potentially life-changing book."
--Peter Singer, professor of philosophy at Princeton University and author of Ethics in the Real World<br ><br >

"Joyful and insightful... both entertaining and informative."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)<br ><br >

"A well-organized, freshly conceived introduction to core concepts of Buddhist thought.... Wright lightens the trek through some challenging philosophical concepts with well-chosen anecdotes and a self-deprecating humor."
--Kirkus Reviews<br ><br 

"A sublime achievement."
--Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker<br ><br >

"Cool, rational, and dryly cynical, Robert Wright is an unlikely guide to the Dharma and 'not-self.' But in this extraordinary book, he makes a powerful case for a Buddhist way of life and a Buddhist view of the mind. With great clarity and wit, he brings together personal anecdotes with insights from evolutionary theory and cognitive science to defend an ancient yet radical world-view. This is a truly transformative work."
--Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at Yale University and author of Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

"What a terrific book. The combination of evolutionary psychology, philosophy, astute readings of Buddhist tradition, and personal meditative experience is absolutely unique and clarifying."
--Jonathan Gold, professor of religion at Princeton University and author of Paving the Great Way: Vasubandhu's Unifying Buddhist Philosophy

"Regardless of their own religious or spiritual roots, many open-minded readers who accompany [Wright] on this journey will find themselves agreeing with him."
--Shelf Awareness --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

Review

“A sublime achievement.”
―Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

“Provocative, informative and... deeply rewarding.... I found myself not just agreeing [with] but applauding the author.”
―The New York Times Book Review

“This is exactly the book that so many of us are looking for. Writing with his characteristic wit, brilliance, and tenderhearted skepticism, Robert Wright tells us everything we need to know about the science, practice, and power of Buddhism.”
―Susan Cain, bestselling author of Quiet

“I have been waiting all my life for a readable, lucid explanation of Buddhism by a tough-minded, skeptical intellect. Here it is. This is a scientific and spiritual voyage unlike any I have taken before.”
―Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and bestselling author of Authentic Happiness

“A fantastically rational introduction to meditation…. It constantly made me smile a little, and occasionally chuckle…. A wry, self-deprecating, and brutally empirical guide to the avoidance of suffering.”
―Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine

“[A] superb, level-headed new book.”
―Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian

“Robert Wright brings his sharp wit and love of analysis to good purpose, making a compelling case for the nuts and bolts of how meditation actually works. This book will be useful for all of us, from experienced meditators to hardened skeptics who are wondering what all the fuss is about.”
―Sharon Salzberg, cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society and bestselling author of Real Happiness 

“What happens when someone steeped in evolutionary psychology takes a cool look at Buddhism?  If that person is, like Robert Wright, a gifted writer, the answer is this surprising, enjoyable, challenging, and potentially life-changing book.”
―Peter Singer, professor of philosophy at Princeton University and author of Ethics in the Real World

“Delightfully personal, yet broadly important.”
―NPR

“Rendered in a down-to-earth and highly readable style, with witty quips and self-effacing humility that give the book its distinctive appeal and persuasive power.”
―America Magazine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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From Australia

Gina

3.0 out of 5 stars Oscillating thoughts

Reviewed in Australia on 8 January 2018

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From the onset, I immediately liked what I was reading, but as I progressed further and further into the book, I started losing interest. This is not to discount the author and his superior knowledge on this subject, with all due respect, but more about my mindset at the time of reading this book.

Let me explain.

I'm by no means an expert on meditation or on any science around the philosophy of meditation and enlightenment, so my boredom came about because I felt like I'd acquired this knowledge before, either through having read similar, or from having explored meditation in my earlier life (this sounds arrogant of me, but I promise you, it's not intended to sound like that at all), and because the author tended to sermonise too much, in my opinion, which I found very annoying.

I think that the minute I realised this about the book, is about the time that I simply switched off and lost interest, but regardless, I still read it to the end, because I don't like leaving books unfinished and at least wanted to give the author the due respect to read his book to the end.

Having said this, there were bits in the book that resonated with me, especially because it seemed 'common core' as the author puts it.  The bits where he speaks of questioning an emotion and getting an answer, and suddenly the emotion is gone! I've done this many times before in the course of my entire life, and I was thrilled that the author had also had this experience.  An example of this experience would be in which I'd suddenly be in a situation where I'd placed a judgement call (be it subconsciously) of someone new to me, and because of that judgement call, I'd find myself feeling aggravated, only to then realise in an instant that I'm feeling this way and to check-in with myself and ask the magic question, why? Why am I feeling this way about that person? And as soon as I'd get my answer, it's like an epiphany and the sky opens up and the angels in the universe are all suddenly playing a harp together, and instantly, whatever feelings and thoughts I had of that person,  positive or negative, it's gone.  

Other than that, the other stuff in his book, was 'common core,' stuff that you may already know and may have tried before, such as; meditate.  Still the mind.  Feel the emptiness.  Know you are nothing and simultaneously know that you are something, that is in the here and now, forever more. Easy done for some of us, but not so easy for some of us.  For me.  What can I say? I'm here, right now.  My mind is actively active, but can be a blank as I focus on my breath or focus on simply being.  

You get the gist.

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Scott K

5.0 out of 5 stars A book for everyone

Reviewed in Australia on 21 July 2020

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Although I have been meditating and reaping the rewards for year, little did I know that if I improved my technique, the benefits would double.

This book taught me how to improve my technique and reap the benefits.

It's easy reading and even if you have no interest in Buddhism, it's much more about that.

It teaches how ’not to take anything for granted’ wonderful whether you are a meditater like me, or for someone who just needs a little assistance getting out of the daily anxieties and potholes we find ourselves in.

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David N, Canberra, Australia

4.0 out of 5 stars Ignore the title - a secular investigation of western Buddhism psychology and why meditation helps

Reviewed in Australia on 6 March 2020

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Not-self – the idea that there is no executive function within our conscious mind – the self is an illusion as we react to many stimuli within our minds, esp feelings. The best given example is jealousy, when it arises and we are not in control.

Robert Wright “Budhhism is right” – (you have to get beyond the awful title!) His position is that modern and esp evolutionary psychology accords with Buddha on much of this (so what), and that mindful meditation can help get some measure of clarity..

Seemingly knowledgeable and uses lots of citations (haven't investigated how credible they are, but presented as eminent psychologists and taken on trust). His delivery is a little flippant and irreverent to a degree – so easy to read and amusing at times.

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enrico

2.0 out of 5 stars I was waiting for this book like a kid waiting for a lolly

Reviewed in Australia on 27 June 2018

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I was waiting for this book like a kid waiting for a lolly.

and always when you image something big, reality is different..from the title, i was expect a book that can open my mind, with scientific proof about Buddhism, and the why, the book is very hard to understand ( i'm not english native), and very very boring about personal history, personal fact from the past, so he became heavier and heavier, i didn't finished it, but i was expecting something more focus on why, examples, studies, scientific way plus personal experience. i found other book much more interesting than this one.

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meditatecreate

5.0 out of 5 stars An absolutely brilliant book. A thorough and entertaining dissertation on Buddhism ...

Reviewed in Australia on 10 February 2018

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An absolutely brilliant book. A thorough and entertaining dissertation on Buddhism in a way that is accessible to those who are not Buddhist. Wright is a captivating writer. This book is a must read.

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Claire Martenson

5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting

Reviewed in Australia on 23 December 2019

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SO interesting. Love this book. I have suggested this to many friends

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Geoffrey

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Buddhism book I've read for a long time

Reviewed in Australia on 13 February 2018

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Best Buddhism book I've read for a long time. But you have to take time, trying to understand the influenced of Western psychology and Buddhism can be difficult. He is a great writer. Read The Moral Animal also.

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From other countries

Andrew G. Marshall

4.0 out of 5 stars Emptiness and Not-Self Two Buddhist ideas and how they could change your life

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 January 2018

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We see the world through the distorting lens of natural selection - that's the central idea in Wright's enlightening book - but what is good for getting our genes passed onto the next generation (all that natural selection cares about) does not necessarily make for the good life. However, many centuries ago Buddhism came up with a way to look beyond our knee jerk reactions of attraction and repulsion. It is called mindfulness meditation and Wright adds modern knowledge from neuroscience and psychology to show how we can have a truer sense of our best interests and thereby gain more self-control.

In particular, he is interested in two Buddhist concepts: not self and emptiness. Incidentally, these are two ideas I have long struggled with... Let's start with emptiness because Wright helped me finally nail this idea. Although we see, for example, our home as the source of security, continuity and lots of warm feelings associated with family, it is really just a pile of bricks and mortar. In the Buddhist sense it is an empty concept onto which we have projected all these emotions. Sure, our home evokes lots of strong reaction but a passing stranger would just see a house and react to the architecture or the location - which once again carries various cultural projections about whether a detached house is better than a semi-detached and how close it is to shops or how remote (which are all equally arbitrary criteria). As a therapist, I'm used to the concept that nothing is inherently good or bad but coloured by how we marshal our experiences, our prejudices and our expectations.

So good so far... but not-self is a much tougher idea. What I did find interesting is that Wright scuppers the idea of self as CEO which sits somewhere inside us and decides rationally what actions to take. Instead he uses neuroscience to explain that we have various modules that take charge. Rather than fighting temptation - for example to eat high sugar and fat foods - he suggests using the acronym: RAIN. Recognise the feeling, Accept it, Investigate the feeling and finally - the hard bit but meditation apparently helps - to Non-identify with the feeling and have Non-attachment to it. In this way the urge is allowed to form but does not get constantly re-inforced by the short term pleasure of, for example, eating the cake. Thus the link to the reward is broken and although the urge might still blossom without gratification it reduces and ultimately subsides.

The downside to this book is that Wright - like the majority of us - is a relative beginner to meditation and when it comes to seeking clarifications about Buddhism and enlightenment, he has to interview people further along the road. My suspicion is he often hears what he wants to hear, simplifying the arguments and glossing over the complexities of his case. Having said that I am convinced that I need to meditate more and take on board the concept of emptiness - because it is my attachment to particular things and outcomes which is often the source of so my unhappiness.

A useful book that I will stay with me for a long time and I recommend to others who want to take the red pill and see the 'truth'.

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Matt Mills

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books I've read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 March 2019

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As someone who's a scientist but also has an interest in secular buddhism, this book is amazing and I can't recommend it enough. Wright does a great job of taking you on a journey of logic, not for the purpose of converting anyone to a buddhist way of thinking, but just to simply show that the buddha's philosophy makes a lot of sense. The buddha made observations about human psychology thousands of years ago, and Wright excellently puts that into the context of modern living.

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Andrew Bill

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, prepare to start being challenged.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 December 2017

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Just read Evolutionary Psychology by David Buss and as I have been trying to understand Buddhism for 50 years or so, I wondered how the two related to each other. The net immediately identified Why Buddhism is True and the rather brave author delivered abundantly. He confirmed the idea that dukkha as interpreted as unsatisfactoriness would enhance survival to reproduce. Mr Wright's honest description of his experiences during meditation are very helpful. He clarified the emptiness/formless ideas and helped me understand 'conditioning' very clearly. His discussion of no self enabled me to identify two slightly different points of view, one where the thoughts and feelings are not part of you which is his point of view, and the other where the thoughts and feelings are part of you, but not all of you, which I lean towards. Perhaps the other aspect he clarified that the word attachment could, depending on context, mean being 'lost in thought' i.e. conscious awareness being entrained in the thought stream as opposed to the mindfulness observation of the thought stream, is related to the two points of view about no self. His discussion about how the loving kindness towards all sentient beings could arise was not convincing to me, and would obviously be a great step towards avoiding conflict, but if we did see through the little tricks natural selection has programmed into us we may stop reproducing.

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MT

5.0 out of 5 stars Don’t Miss this Superb Book...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 February 2019

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This book is very different (in a good way) to many on Buddhism because it dares to approach the subject from some unique and intriguing perspectives that I suspect will thoroughly enthral you.

While my Favourite Book on Eastern Philosophy / Religion remains Freedom From the Know (by that acknowledge Master Krishnamurti) the Book under review is now firmly in my Top 3 Sharing a shelf with the aforesaid, and with Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now.

To share bookshelf space with Krishnamurti and Eckhart Tolle, you’ve really got to deliver something special - this book most definitely does! Think you’ll love it.

11 people found this helpful

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Dennis Farcinsen Leth

5.0 out of 5 stars Buddhism and modern psychology.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 October 2020

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This is an amazing book that tries to unveil why buddhism is true. I started reading the book with a little background from various mindfullness and meditation books and as an experienced meditator.

It's a great book and it reaches some of the same conclusions as prof. Peter Elsass did in my native danish language. Modern western world can learn a lot from buddhism in ways that would bring our mental state in balance (if it is in unbalance).

The book is written with enormous insight into meditation, buddhism and psychology.

Sometimes Robert gets a little bit to educating and 'know it all' but that actually suits this book.

I can highly recommend it.

4 people found this helpful

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Tham Chee Wah

5.0 out of 5 stars A breakdown of an illusive concept

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 September 2019

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For someone who would like to have the illusive meditation dissected and explained, this is the go-to book. The theories are being structured and explained with insights and laid out in their simplest form.

Pick this up if you’ve doubts about meditation. In this book’s context, the author uses his own meditation experiences and encounters to bring readers to at least understand that the actions or inactions will lead to a blissful awareness. In this book, the author talks about the Buddhist meditation practice.

A lively and genuine experience-to-conceptual presentation of a daily practice, when done conscientiously, liberates the mind. For any novice, first timer, even a doubter, the message from this book is - why not? Try it.

For me, I’ve been doing daily meditation for decades. I truly appreciate the author’s work, beautiful, genuine and touching.

4 people found this helpful

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TimG7

3.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 August 2020

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Disappointed. The reviews suggested almost a life changing read. It started very well. As the book progressed I switched off. I felt it was over complicated in parts and explanations could of been clearer and shorter. If you are looking at an introduction to Buddhism I wouldnt suggest this as a starting point. It was like reading a book by someone who never quite gets to the point until the last minute. I try very hard to focus on the positives but it felt like the author was trying to make the subject over intellectual in his presentation. Less is more.

3 people found this helpful

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savagegardener

3.0 out of 5 stars Unsatisfying Mishmash.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 January 2021

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After reading any book, I spend some time asking myself if I learnt anything useful from it, or if it made me look at the world in a way that I hadn't considered before, and in this case the answers to both these questions is a resounding "no". The trouble is that this attempt by an academic, who happens to have dipped his toes in a bit of meditation, to then try and pull together strands of philosophy, science, and various flavours of Buddhism into a coherent whole is a complete failure. In the realms of the spiritual and the mystical, logic , and dissection by the intellect , rarely, if ever, will arrive at the truth. The book has interesting parts, but at times it's simply too long winded, and in the end it was a relief to finish it. For any serious spiritual seeker, I strongly recommend reading and watching the work of Eckhart Tolle or Sadhguru, or lesser known teachings from Robert Goodwin. If you want science, go to a scientist, if you want spirituality go to the great spiritual teachers of our time. If you want a wishy washy soup of both that satisfies neither appetite, read this.

One person found this helpful

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J. Morgan

1.0 out of 5 stars Became annoying.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 January 2021

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This if course may just be me as a lot of things in my life start out OK but end up being annoying (I'll introduce you to a string of my X's one day if you like).

Take this sentence: "I don't know from first hand experience what it would be like to take LSD and follow it with a heroin chaser..." But guess what? Within one sentence he's off comparing this imaginary experience that he's never had - to one he HAS had meditating. Huh? It's all a bit like that. And it's all a bit 'let's sit down and me explain how to be happy'. Really? Basically he's a bit of a bliss ninny. Looking for permanent happiness. Never a good idea that.

Up to you but I'd save my money if I knew now what I didn't know then.

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(Who knows)

5.0 out of 5 stars Loved it! Thought provoking.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 November 2018

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The book got me thinking. Always a good sign from a book.

I also agree with the title of the book (Though it does come across as arrogant). If any spiritual movement has got it right, Buddhism has got the closest in my honest opinion. The book describes a grown up version of spirituality thats not stuck in the middle ages and actually encourages you to use and master your mind (rather than shutting it down and believing what you are told to believe).

Most recommended from me!

5 people found this helpful

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Thomas H.

3.0 out of 5 stars More the science of meditation than a real discussion on buddhism

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 April 2020

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A largely average book on Buddhism. I think the naming is largely wrong. It's a good book if you want the health benefits of meditation and the health benefits of 'buddhism,' which the book oversimplifies to the point where it ignores the spirituality Buddhism entails but not good if you actually want to discover more about buddhism as I did. Maybe not a fault of the book, but perhaps a mis-advertisment.

2 people found this helpful

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MikeW

1.0 out of 5 stars Uninspiring and boring.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 December 2020

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This book started off with a lot of promise, relating our natural reactions to evolution. I was hoping for some useful insights. However after a while I found it became tedious and I lost interest. It became so boring that I struggled to get to the end. It didn't seem to progress and it certainly didn't attract me to Buddhism at all. The tenets of Buddhism are far too vague and difficult to understand and frankly don't make sense. If you are looking for some inspiration or a way to help you cope with problems I advise you to give this a miss.

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Paulo

5.0 out of 5 stars Good mix of science and faith ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 February 2021

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If of course, faith is the right word...

I listened to the audio book, as is almost always the case the audio was off putting at times, because I am from the UK not the USA and we are different. I gave five stars because in the end all the distracting language, phrasing and accent didn't matter. I learned and developed from reading this book and I will go back to it time and again.

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Sejin, start your review of Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

Jan 23, 2018Roy Lotz rated it liked it  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: misanthropology, religion-mysticism-theology, orientalism

A far more accurate title for this book would be Why Mindfulness Meditation is Good. For as Wright—who does not consider himself a Buddhist—admits, he is not really here to talk about any form of traditional Buddhism. He does not even present a strictly “orthodox” view of any secular, Western variety of Buddhism. Instead, this is a rather selective interpretation of some Buddhist doctrines in the light of evolutionary psychology.

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)

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Aug 13, 2017Darwin8u rated it really liked it  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: 2017, religion

“The problem with introspection is that it has no end.”
― 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)

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Aug 11, 2017Mehrsa rated it it was amazing

I've read every book Wright's written and all have been fantastic. This is my favorite. It's the perfect book for the cultural moment we're in. Forget the title--it's misleading. The book is a nice primer on meditation and evolutionary theory with some helpful insights. Basically, our brains are not wired for peace and happiness--only to propel our genes forward. There's a yearning for more programmed into us and the only antidote is mindfulness meditation. I've read a ton of evolutionary theory and a bunch of buddhism lite, but this one is exactly the synthesis I've been waiting for (without knowing it). It changed the way I think about meditation and my thoughts and feelings. Read it and pass it along. We all need this book right now or we're going to nuke ourselves off the planet or otherwise destroy it through greed in no time. (less)

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Dec 17, 2019Mario the lone bookwolf rated it really liked it

Shelves: 0-mental-strength, wright-robert

This is a fact-based and serious book that uses brain science, evolutionary psychology/biology and sociobiology to prove each claimed assumption and maybe one of the best explanations of how and why mindfulness and a livelong training and evolution of meditation and self-reflection might be advisable.

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)

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Oct 18, 2020Sean Barrs rated it really liked it  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: 4-star-reads, spirituality-buddhism

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

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.

__________________________________

You can connect with me on social media via My Linktree.
__________________________________ (less)

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Oct 25, 2019Otis Chandler rated it it was amazing  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, self-improvement, psychology, philosophy, buddhism, happiness

3 notes & 42 highlights

This was a really compelling book for me - it made me think deeply about myself and the world and opened my eyes a bit too. It's no coincidence that multiple of my smarter friends have told me to read it!

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)

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May 18, 2019William2 rated it it was ok  ·  review of another edition

I disagree with the author’s view of meditation as a study of one’s thought. But then there are so many schools of meditation… I’m primarily interested in the evolutionary psychology angle here, but have to sit through these pages that don’t entirely accord with my Soto Zen dharma. But as Shunryu Suzuki-roshi once said—read Zen Mind, Beginners Mind—there’s something to be gained from all schools of meditation, and we should seek those aspects of any dharma which strengthen our practice instead of seeking to tear down by way of a brittle Western-style critique, which, let’s face it, is little more than dogma-mindset or just plain envy masked by pedantic connoisseurship.

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)

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Aug 07, 2017Brian Bergstrom rated it it was amazing  ·  review of another edition

This is a truly remarkable, fantastic book. It is one of those rare volumes that will turn your head inside out and leave you seeing the world differently, not because he (or it) is extreme, but because reality is extreme; he is sewing together science and philosophy and offering readers a breathtaking tapestry for their consideration. Briefly, his argument is that our minds are populated by evolved psychological adaptations that were naturally selected for their adaptive utility, NOT for seeing the world objectively. And especially when it comes to our feelings and emotions, our minds often saddle us with perceptual and conceptual distortions that lead to unnecessary suffering. This state of affairs, as revealed by psychological science, aligns well with Buddhist renderings of the human predicament, and (even more remarkably) psychological science is also showing that the Buddhist prescription of mindfulness meditation can indeed help alleviate much of this suffering. Mindfulness meditation works as a kind of cognitive exercise (a kind of mental resistance training), that over time affords us distance from the tumultuous workings of our mind and allows us to see things more clearly (which often drains anxiety and anger of their motivational power) and helps foster our ability to chart where our mind goes next. Not only does mindful distance get us closer to the Truth (or at least further from delusion), but Wright argues that it can also bring us closer to moral truth, enhancing our capacity for responding in idealistically ethical ways.

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)

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Sep 29, 2017Radiantflux rated it it was ok  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, self-help, spirituality

62nd book of 2017.

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)

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Oct 02, 2017Indran Fernando rated it did not like it

Even if this book has its occasional thought-provoking moment, my overwhelming reaction is shock at how fluffy and slipshod the writing is. It seems as if Wright submitted a rough draft to make some quick cash. (Why waste time on an editor--just throw a goldfish on the cover and wait for the Whole-Foods-goers to take out their mandala-adorned hemp wallets.) A promising book was undermined by the author's unwillingness to do research or teach himself about Buddhism or anthropology.

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)

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Oct 31, 2017Murtaza rated it really liked it

Growing up I always had a problem reading philosophy books, which often seemed to be written in a way that made them deliberately obtuse and inaccessible. For that reason I was really glad when I discovered the writing of Will Durant, an early 20th century writer who became popular for revisiting the arguments of the great philosophers in a clear and unpretentious language. It struck me as a very American thing to do, and I think with this book Robert Wright does much the same thing with Buddhist philosophy.

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)

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Jun 26, 2019Gabrielle rated it really liked it  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: philosophy, recommended-for-jason, reviewed, non-fiction, own-a-copy, buddhism, read-in-2019

The title is a bit misleading, in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way. This book is really about Wright wanting you to know why he thinks secular Buddhism makes sense, and why mindfulness meditation is good for you. Wright goes with the basic idea that suffering is caused by our desires, and that our desires are caused by our illusory perception of reality. Buddhist practice aims to bring people out of that state of delusion and suffering, but Wright wanted to know, very practically, how that works. How does keeping the mind still and counting your breath while sitting in front of a wall make things clearer? He uses evolutionary biology and neuropsychology to dig at that question, and I must say that he comes up with very interesting explanations.

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)

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Oct 09, 2017Ken rated it really liked it  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: finished-in-2017, contemporary, philosophy-religion

In book titles, the sub-title after the title is a popular but often unnecessary thing. In this case, it's necessary. Why Buddhism Is True is very much indeed about The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.

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 religion philosophy. But I had no choice but to be here. Meaning: move over Siddhartha. Make room for Darwin. Lots of natural selection, because natural selection works against Buddhism which works against natural selection.

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)

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Feb 14, 2018Jake rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, ideology, mind, neuroscience, body

Wright looks at Buddhism through the lens of modern psychology, but with a primary focus on his specialty: Evolutionary Psychology. The book served to be pretty enlightening , as it gave a solid overview of a secular, or "naturalistic " perspective of Buddhism - by showing how many psychological theories that are currently entertained by the scientific community have, all the while ,been accepted(albeit in a implicit sense... very implicit sense) by Buddhists for thousands of years . Well, at least some of them. He acknowledges that there are a ton of schools of thought that can be classified under the category of Buddhism - therefore drawing a universal understanding of all schools is kinda hard. Which, partially invalidates the universality of his thesis. But , I digresss. The book was pretty good as an introduction to some secular perspectives of Buddhism, some modern perspectives in psychology , and an ehhh intro to evo psych. yay

It is well complimented by wrights earlier book on evolutionary psychology, the moral animal . (less)

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A Critic at LargeAugust 7 & 14, 2017 Issue

What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can’t

Examining the science and supernaturalism of Buddhism.

By Adam Gopnik

July 31, 2017

An author owns a snappy title, and then the snappy title owns the author. Robert Wright, having titled his new book “Why Buddhism Is True,” has to offer a throat-clearing preface and later an apologetic appendix, in order to explain exactly what he means by “Buddhism” and exactly what he means by “true,” while the totality of his book is an investigation into why we think there are “whys” in the world, and whether or not anything really “is.” Wright sets out to provide an unabashedly American answer to all these questions. He thinks that Buddhism is true in the immediate sense that it is helpful and therapeutic, and, by offering insights into our habitual thoughts and cravings, shows us how to fix them. Being Buddhist—that is, simply practicing Vipassana, or “insight” meditation—will make you feel better about being alive, he believes, and he shows how you can and why it does.

Robert Wright argues for meditation as a fully secular form of psychotherapy.

Robert Wright argues for meditation as a fully secular form of psychotherapy.Illustration by Anne Laval

Wright’s is a Buddhism almost completely cleansed of supernaturalism. His Buddha is conceived as a wise man and self-help psychologist, not as a divine being—no miraculous birth, no thirty-two distinguishing marks of the godhead (one being a penis sheath), no reincarnation. This is a pragmatic Buddhism, and Wright’s pragmatism, as in his previous books, can touch the edge of philistinism. Nearly all popular books about Buddhism are rich in poetic quotation and arresting aphorisms, those ironic koans that are part of the (Zen) Buddhist décor—tales of monks deciding that it isn’t the wind or the flag that’s waving in the breeze but only their minds. Wright’s book has no poetry or paradox anywhere in it. Since the poetic-comic side of Buddhism is one of its most appealing features, this leaves the book a little short on charm. Yet, if you never feel that Wright is telling you something profound or beautiful, you also never feel that he is telling you something untrue. Direct and unambiguous, tracing his own history in meditation practice—which eventually led him to a series of weeklong retreats and to the intense study of Buddhist doctrine—he makes Buddhist ideas and their history clear. Perhaps he makes the ideas too clear. Buddhist thinkers tend to bridge contradictions with a smile and a paradox and a wave of the hand. “Things exist but they are not real” is a typical dictum from the guru Mu Soeng, in his book on the Heart Sutra. “You don’t have to believe it, but it’s true” is another famous guru’s smiling advice about the reincarnation doctrine. This nimble-footed doubleness may indeed hold profound existential truths; it also provides an all-purpose evasion of analysis.

Still, the Buddhist basics are all here. Sometime around 400 B.C.E.—the arguments over what’s historically authentic and what isn’t make the corresponding arguments in Jesus studies look transparent—a wealthy Indian princeling named Gotama (as the Pali version of his name is rendered) came to realize, after a long and moving spiritual struggle, that people suffer because the things we cherish inevitably change and rot, and desires are inevitably disappointed. But he also realized that, simply by sitting and breathing, people can begin to disengage from the normal run of desires and disappointments, and come to grasp that the self whom the sitter has been serving so frantically, and who is suffering from all these needs, is an illusion. Set free from the self’s anxieties and appetites and constant, petulant demands, the meditator can see and share the actualities of existence with others. The sitter becomes less selfish and more selfless.

Buddhism has had a series of strong recurrent presences in America, and, though Wright doesn’t stop to trace them, they might illuminate some continuities that show why his kind of Buddhism got here, and got “true.” Its first notable appearance was in late-nineteenth-century New England, where, as Van Wyck Brooks showed long ago, Henry Adams was “drawn especially to the lands of Buddha.” Another New England Buddhist of the day was William Sturgis Bigelow, who brought back to Boston some twenty thousand works of Japanese art, and who, when dying in Boston, called for a Catholic priest and asked that he annihilate his soul. (He was disappointed when the priest declined.) These American Buddhists, drawn East in part by a rejection of Gilded Age ostentation, recognized a set of preoccupations like those they knew already—Whitman’s vision of a self that could shift and contain multitudes, or Thoreau’s secular withdrawal from the race of life. (Jon Kabat-Zinn’s hugely successful meditation guide, “Wherever You Go, There You Are,” is dotted with Thoreau epigraphs in place of Asian ones.) The quietist impulse in New England spirituality and the pantheistic impulse in American poetry both seemed met, and made picturesque, by the Buddhist tradition.

The second great explosion of American Buddhism occurred in the nineteen-fifties. Spurred, in large part, by the writings of the émigré Japanese scholar D. T. Suzuki, it was, in the first instance, aesthetic: Suzuki’s work, though rich in tea ceremonies and haiku, makes no mention of Zazen, the hyper-disciplined, often painful, meditation practice that is at the heart of Zen practice. The Buddhist spirit, or the easier American variant of it, blossomed in Beat literature, producing some fine coinages (Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums”). Zen, though apparently an atypically severe sect within Buddhism, came to be the standard-bearer, so much so that “Zen” became an all-purpose modifier in American letters meaning “challengingly counterintuitive”—as in “Zen and the Art of Archery” or the masterly “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” where you learn how not to aim your arrow or how to find a spiritual practice in a Harley. It was this second movement that blossomed into a serious practice of sitting lessons and a set of institutions, the most prominent, perhaps, being the San Francisco Zen Center.

Though separated by generations, the deeper grammar of the two Buddhist awakenings was essentially the same. Buddhism in America is simultaneously exotic and familiar—it has lots of Eastern trappings and ceremonies that set it off from the materialism of American life, but it also speaks to an especially American longing for a publicly productive spiritual practice. American Buddhism spins off museum collections and Noh-play translations and vegetarian restaurants and philosophical books and, in the hands of the occasional Buddhist Phil Jackson, the triangle offense in basketball.

The Buddhist promise in the American mind is that you can escape and engage. “Ten minutes a day toward Enlightenment” is the sort of slogan that has inspired the current generation to unimaginably large numbers of part-time meditators. (Among whom I number myself, following guided meditations recorded by Joseph Goldstein, a seventysomething Vipassana teacher who has the calming, grumpy voice of an emeritus professor at City College, though my legs are much too stiff for the lotus position and I have to fake it, making mine in every sense a half-assed practice.) “Don’t just sit there, do something” is the American entreaty. With Buddhism, you can just sit there and do something.

Wright, like his Bay Area and Boston predecessors, is delighted to announce the ways in which Buddhism intersects with our own recent ideas. His new version of an American Buddhism is not only self-consciously secularized but aggressively “scientized.” He believes that Buddhist doctrine and practice anticipate and affirm the “modular” view of the mind favored by much contemporary cognitive science. Instead of there being a single, consistent Cartesian self that monitors the world and makes decisions, we live in a kind of nineties-era Liberia of the mind, populated by warring independent armies implanted by evolution, representing themselves as a unified nation but unable to reconcile their differences, and, as one after another wins a brief battle for the capital, providing only the temporary illusion of control and decision. By accepting that the fixed self is an illusion imprinted by experience and reinforced by appetite, meditation parachutes in a kind of peacekeeping mission that, if it cannot demobilize the armies, lets us see their nature and temporarily disarms their still juvenile soldiers.

O.K. so well have sex and if that works out well go out for a nice dinner and maybe a movie.

“O.K., so we’ll have sex and if that works out we’ll go out for a nice dinner and maybe a movie.”

Buddhism, alone among spiritual practices, has always recognized this post-hoc nature of our “reason,” asking us to realize its transience through meditation. (“Not much really there, is there?” Joe Goldstein murmurs about thought in one of his guided meditations.) Meditation, in Wright’s view, is not a metaphysical route toward a higher plane. It is a cognitive probe for self-exploration that underlines what contemporary psychology already knows to be true about the mind. “According to Buddhist philosophy, both the problems we call therapeutic and the problems we call spiritual are a product of not seeing things clearly,” he writes. “What’s more, in both cases this failure to see things clearly is in part a product of being misled by feelings. And the first step toward seeing through these feelings is seeing them in the first place—becoming aware of how pervasively and subtly feelings influence our thought and behavior.”

Our feelings ceaselessly generate narratives, contes moraux, about the world, and we become their prisoners. We make things good and bad, desirable and not, meaningful and trivial. (We put snappy titles on our tales and then the titles own us.) Wright gives the example of a “buzz-saw symphony” as a small triumph of his emancipation: hearing a buzz saw whining in the background, what would usually have been a painful distraction became, robbed by meditation of any positive or negative cues (this is a pleasant sound / this is an unpleasant one), somehow musical. Meditation shows us how anything can be emptied of the story we tell about it: he tells us about an enlightened man who tastes wine without the contextual tales about vintage, varietal, region. It tastes . . . less emotional. “All the states of equanimity come through the realization that things aren’t what we thought they were,” Wright quotes a guru as saying. What Wright calls “the perception of emptiness” dampens the affect, but it also settles the mind. If it isn’t there, you don’t overreact to it.

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Having gone the full Buddha route, Wright gives us accounts of meditation retreats, and interviews with enlightened meditators; he explores sutras and explains dharma. Given that he’s more product-oriented than process-oriented, Wright tends to reflect on the advantages of meditation rather than reproduce their pleasures. Meditation, even the half-assed kind, does remind us of how little time we typically spend in the moment. Simply to sit and breathe for twenty-five minutes, if only to hear cars and buses go by on a city avenue—listening to the world rather than to the frantic non sequiturs of one’s “monkey mind,” fragmented thoughts and querulous moods racing each other around—can intimate the possibility of a quiet grace in the midst of noise. The gong with which Goldstein’s meditations begin on YouTube, though a bit of Orientalia, does settle the mind and calm its restlessness. (Yet many sounds of seeming serenity—birds singing, leaves rustling—are actually the sounds of ceaseless striving. The birds are shrieking for mates; even the trees are reaching insistently toward the sun that sustains them. These are the songs of wanting, the sounds of life.)

Wright has, for the purposes of his book, tied himself to a mechanical view of the constraints that operate on the human mind—the same one that he has posited in previous books, rooted in the doctrines of evolutionary psychology. This is the view—to which Wright is, as a Buddhist might say, overattached—that our deepest desires are instincts implanted by natural selection in our primeval past. Whether or not evolutionary psychology is a real or a pseudoscience—opinions vary—one can believe that human beings are afflicted with too much wanting without thinking that we are that way because once upon a time those cravings helped us have more kids than our neighbors. Even if our desires were implanted by evolution rather than inculcated by culture, they’re still always helplessly double: altruistic impulses encourage us to look after our tribe; genocidal ones encourage us to get rid of the neighboring tribe. Pair bonding is adaptive, but so is adultery: fathers want to care for their offspring and see them thrive; they also want to have sex with the woman in the next cave in order to cover all genetic bets. Desires may arise from natural selection or from cultural tradition or from random walks or from a combination of them all—but Buddhist doctrine would be unaffected by any of these “whys.” If every doctrine of evo-psych turns out to be false—if it’s somehow all culture and inculcation—it wouldn’t affect the Buddhist view about our need to get out of it.

Other recent books on contemporary Buddhism share Wright’s object of reconciling the old metaphysics with contemporary cognitive science but have a less doctrinaire view of the mind that lies outside the illusions of self. Stephen Batchelor’s “After Buddhism” (Yale), in many ways the most intellectually stimulating book on Buddhism of the past few years, offers a philosophical take on the question. “The self may not be an aloof independent ‘ruler’ of body and mind, but neither is it an illusory product of impersonal physical and mental forces,” he writes. As for the mind’s modules, “Gotama is interested in what people can do, not with what they are. The task he proposes entails distinguishing between what is to be accepted as the natural condition of life itself (the unfolding of experience) and what is to be let go of (reactivity). We may have no control over the rush of fear prompted by finding a snake under our bed, but we do have the ability to respond to the situation in a way that is not determined by that fear.” Where Wright insists that the Buddhist doctrine of not-self precludes the possibility of freely chosen agency, Batchelor insists of Buddhism that “as soon as we consider it a task-based ethics . . . such objections vanish. The only thing that matters is whether or not you can perform a task. When an inclination to say something cruel occurs, for example, can you resist acting on that impulse? . . . Whether your decision to hold the barbed remark was the result of free will or not is beside the point.” He calls the obsession with free will a “peculiarly Western concern.” Meditation works as much at the level of conscious intention as it does at the level of unreflective instinct.

Batchelor wants to make Buddhism pragmatic not just in the idiomatic sense—practical for daily use—but in the technical philosophical sense as well: he thinks that the original doctrines of Buddhism were in accord with the ideas of truth put forward by neopragmatists like Richard Rorty, for whom there are no firm foundations for what we know, only temporary truces among willing communities which help us cope with the world. Buddhism, in his view, was long ago betrayed into Brahmanism; the open-ended artisanal practice of meditation became a caste-bound dogma with “truths” and ceremonies. It is a process of fossilization hardly unknown to other spiritual movements—there was a time when Hasidism was all about spontaneity and enthusiasm, and a break from too much repetitive tradition—but in Batchelor’s view it led to a needlessly ornate and authoritarian faith, while his own brand of Buddhism has been restored to its origins.

Batchelor also tackles the issue, basically shelved by Wright, of whether Buddhism without any supernatural scaffolding is still Buddhism. As a scholar, he doesn’t try to deny that the supernaturalist doctrines of karma and reincarnation are as old as the ethical and philosophical ones, and entangled with them. His project is unashamedly to secularize Buddhism. But, since it’s Buddhism that he wants to secularize, he has to be able to show that its traditions are not hopelessly polluted with superstition.

Here Batchelor’s pragmatic turn, made tightly on a sharply curving road, begins to fishtail more than a little. He insists that reincarnation is just an embedded doctrine in the ancient Pali culture—a metaphor like all the others we live with, a cosmological picture that works well, not unlike the metaphors of evolutionary fitness and cosmology that are embedded in our own culture. The centrality of reincarnation doctrines shouldn’t be held as a mark against Buddhist truth.

Maureen Alsop is leaving her magnolia and her delphinium and her cats with us this weekend.

“Maureen Alsop is leaving her magnolia, and her delphinium, and her cats with us this weekend.”

Can we really tiptoe past the elaborate supernaturalism of historical Buddhism? Secular Buddhists try to, just as people who are sympathetic to the ethical basis of Christianity try to tiptoe past the doctrines of Heaven and Hell, so that Hell becomes “the experience of being unable to love,” or Heaven a state of “being one with God”—not actual places with brimstone pits or massed harps. Batchelor, like every intelligent believer caught in an unsustainable belief, engages in a familiar set of moves. He attempts to italicize his way out of absurdity by, in effect, shifting the stresses in the simple sentence “We don’t believe that.” First, there’s “We don’t believe that”: there may be other believers who accept a simple reward-and-punishment system of karma passing from generation to generation, but our group does not. Next comes “We don’t believe that”: since reincarnation means eternal rebirth and coming back as a monkey and the rest of it, the enlightened Buddhist tries to de-literalize the “that” to make it more appealing, just as the Christian redefines Hell. In the end, we resort to “We don’t believe that”: we just accept it as an embedded metaphor of the culture that made the religion.

Then there’s the shrug-and-grin argument that everyone believes something. Is it fair to object that most of us take quantum physics on faith, too? Well, we don’t take it on faith. We take it on trust, a very different thing. We have confidence—amply evidenced by the technological transformation of the world since the scientific revolution, and by the cash value of validated predictions based on esoteric mathematical abstraction—that the world picture it conveys is true, or more nearly true than anything else on offer. Batchelor tap-dances perilously close to the often repeated absurdity that a highly credulous belief about supernatural claims and an extremely skeptical belief about supernatural claims are really the same because they are both beliefs.

A deeper objection to the attempted reconciliation of contemporary science and Buddhist practice flows from the nature of scientific storytelling. The practice of telling stories—imagined tales of cause and effect that fixate on the past and the future while escaping the present, sending us back and forth without being here now—is something that both Wright and Batchelor see as one of the worst delusions the mind imprints on the world. And yet it is inseparable from the Enlightenment science that makes psychology and biology possible. The contemporary generation of American Buddhists draws again and again on scientific evidence for the power of meditation—EEGs and MRIs and so on—without ever wondering why a scientific explanation of that kind has seldom arisen in Buddhist cultures. (Science has latterly been practiced by Buddhists, of course.)

What Wright correctly sees as the heart of meditation practice—the draining away of the stories we tell compulsively about each moment in favor of simply having the moment—is antithetical to the kind of evidentiary argument he admires. Science is competitive storytelling. If a Buddhist Newton had been sitting under that tree, he would have seen the apple falling and, reaching for Enlightenment, experienced each moment of its descent as a thing pure in itself. Only a restless Western Newton would say, “Now, what story can tell us best what connects those apple-moments from branch to ground? Sprites? Magnets? The mysterious force of the mass of the earth beneath it? What made the damn thing fall?” That’s a story we tell, not a moment we experience. The Buddhist Newton might have been happier than ours—ours was plenty unhappy—but he would never have found the equation. Science is putting names on things and telling stories about them, the very habits that Buddhists urge us to transcend. The stories improve over time in the light of evidence, or they don’t. It’s just as possible to have Buddhist science as to have Christian science or Taoist science. But the meditator’s project of being here now will never be the same as the scientist’s project of connecting the past to the future, of telling how and knowing why.

Both Wright and Batchelor end with a semi-evangelical call for a secularized, modernized Buddhism that can supply all the shared serenity of the old dispensation and still adjust to the modern world—Batchelor actually ends his book with a sequence of fixed tenets for a secular Gotama practice. But does their Buddhism have a unique content, or is it simply the basics of secular liberalism with a borrowed Eastern vocabulary? What is the specifically Buddhist valence of saying, as Batchelor does, that the practitioners of a secular Buddhism will “seek to understand and diminish the structural violence of societies and institutions as well as the roots of violence that are present in themselves”? Do we need a twenty-five-hundred-year-old faith from the East to do this—isn’t that what every liberal-arts college insists that its students do, anyway, with the help of only a cultural-studies major?

All secularized faiths tend to converge on a set of agreeable values: compassion, empathy, the renunciation of mere material riches. But the shared values seem implicit in the very project of secularizing a faith, with its assumption that the ethical and the supernatural elements can be cleanly severed—an operation that would have seemed unintelligible to St. Paul, as to Gotama himself. The idea of doing without belief is perhaps a bigger idea than any belief it negates. Secular Buddhism ends up being . . . secularism.

Can any old faith point a new way forward? No doctrine is refuted by the bad behavior of the people who believe in it—or else all doctrines would stand refuted—but the stories of actual Buddhism in large-scale practice in America do not encourage the hope that Buddhism will be any different from all the other organized faith practices. One of the best books about Buddhism in contemporary America, Michael Downing’s “Shoes Outside the Door” (2001), takes as its subject the San Francisco Zen Center and its attempted marriage of spiritual elevation with wild entrepreneurial activity. Downing’s novelistic and nuanced account focusses on the charismatic, Bill Clintonish master of the Zen Center, Richard Baker, who got embroiled in a Bill Clintonish sex scandal. American Buddhism seems as susceptible to the triple demon of power, predation, and prejudice as every other religious establishment.

A faith practice with an authoritarian structure sooner or later becomes a horror; a faith practice without an authoritarian structure sooner or later becomes a hobby. The dwindling down of Buddhism into another life-style choice will doubtless irritate many, and Wright will likely be sneered at for reducing Buddhism to another bourgeois amenity, like yoga or green juice. (Batchelor refers to this as a “dumbing down of the dharma.”) Yet what Wright is doing seems an honorable, even a sublime, achievement. Basically, he says that meditation has made him somewhat less irritable. Being somewhat less irritable is not the kind of achievement that people usually look to religion for, but it may be as good an achievement as we ought to expect. (If Donald Trump became somewhat less irritable, the world would be a less dangerous place.)

If there is something distinctive about a Buddhist secularism, it is that the Buddhist believes in the annihilation of appetite, while the pure secular humanist believes in satisfying our appetites until annihilation makes it impossible. Appetite, though, has a way of renewing itself even after it’s been fed; no matter what we do, some new gnawing materializes. Dissatisfaction with our circumstances, the frustration of our ambitions, something no bigger than a failure to lose enough weight or to have an extra room to make a nursery out of: even amid luxury, the ache of the unachieved seems intense enough. It is these dissatisfactions that drive so many Americans—who cannot understand why lives filled with material pleasure still feel unfulfilled—to their meditation mats.

Secularized or traditional, the central Buddhist epiphany remains essential: the fact of mortality makes loss certain. For all the ways in which science and its blessed godchild scientific medicine have reduced the overt suffering that a human life entails, the vector to sadness remains in place, as much as it did in the Buddha’s time. Gotama’s death, from what one doctor describes as mesenteric infarction, seems needlessly painful and gruesome by modern standards; this is the kind of suffering we can substantially alleviate. But the universal mortality of all beings—the fact that, if we’re lucky, we will die after seventy years or so—is not reformable. The larger problem we face is not suffering but sadness, and the sadness is caused by the fact of loss. To love less in order to lose less seems like no solution at all, but to see loss squarely sounds like wisdom. We may or may not be able to Americanize our Buddhism, but we can certainly ecumenicize our analgesics. Lots of different stuff from lots of different places which we drink and think and do can help us manage. Every faith practice has a different form of comfort to offer in the face of loss, and each is useful. Sometimes it helps to dwell on the immensity of the universe. Sometimes it helps to feel the presence of ongoing family and community. Sometimes it helps to light a candle and say a prayer. Sometimes it helps to sit and breathe. ♦

Published in the print edition of the August 7 & 14, 2017, issue, with the headline “American Nirvana.”

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of, most recently, “A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.”

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Why 'Why Buddhism Is True' Is True

September 26, 201710:50 AM ET

ADAM FRANK

In his new book, Robert Wright wants to focus on Buddhism's diagnosis of the human condition, as opposed to the traditional aspects of Buddhism as a religion.

Gargolas/Getty Images

Why Buddhism Is True

Why Buddhism Is True

The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

by Robert Wright

Hardcover, 321 pagespurchase

Here is one thing author Robert Wright and I agree on when it comes to Buddhist meditation: It's really, really boring.

At least, it's boring in the beginning. But there is another thing we agree on, too. That initial meditative boredom is actually a door. It's an opening that can lead us to something essential, and essentially true, that Buddhism has to teach us about being human.

Wright's insight on this point is just one of the many truths in his delightfully personal, yet broadly important, new book Why Buddhism Is True.

The "true" in Wright's title doesn't refer to the traditional kinds of scriptural truths we think of when we think of religions and truth. Wright is explicitly not interested in the traditional aspects of Buddhism as a religion. The book, for example, makes no claims about reincarnation or Tibetan rainbow bodies or the like. Instead, Wright wants to focus on Buddhism's diagnosis of the human condition. The part that is relevant to the here and now. It's Buddhism's take on our suffering, our anxiety and our general dis-ease that Wright wants to explore because that is where he sees its perspective lining up with scientific fields like evolutionary psychology and neurobiology.

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To his credit, Wright is more than cognizant that exploring just these aspects of Buddhism means he is filtering out quite a bit of its history. As he reminds his readers:

"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."

Wright also acknowledges that even within this "scientific" Buddhism he is interested in, there are also enormous differences between various philosophical schools of thought, many with 1,000-year histories.

"I'm not getting into super-fine-grained parts of Buddhist psychology and philosophy," he tells us.

"For example, the Abhidhamma Pitaka, a collection of early Buddhist texts, asserts that there are eighty-nine kinds of consciousness, twelve of which are unwholesome. You may be relieved to hear that this book will spend no time trying to evaluate that claim."

I was happy to see Wright address these issues of history and interpretation head-on. No matter where Buddhism's encounter with the West takes it, ignoring history doesn't do anyone any good (I've tried to explore these issues myself here at 13.7 and elsewhere, including here and here).

But with those important caveats, Wright is then forceful in his main argument that "Buddhism's diagnosis of the human predicament is fundamentally correct, and that its prescription is deeply valid and urgently important."

To back up this claim, Wright leans heavily on evolutionary psychology, which he says, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, "is the study of how the human brain was designed — by natural selection — to mislead us, even enslave us." That misleading and enslaving, however, is all in the service of getting our genes into the next generation. As he writes:

"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."

These lines give you hint of Wright's tone throughout the book. He is very funny and uses his own experiences to drive to the book's questions. In particular, it was his first experience at a week-long meditation intensive two decades ago that launched his journey into Buddhism and "contemplative practice" (i.e. meditation). His accounts of time spent on "the cushion" are full of self-effacing humor and real insights.

Wright's main point is that evolution hardwires us with intense emotions that are in fact delusions. (He has discussed this in an interview with Fresh Air's Terry Gross.) They developed as survival responses to the environments we evolved in and they were tuned to those environments. Now they just don't make sense and need to be seen for what they are. As he puts it:

"These feelings — anxiety, despair, hatred, greed — ... 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 the 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."

According to Wright, Buddhism, at least its more contemplative side, offers specific insights into, and a path out of, these delusions. In particular, the direct experiences gained via contemplative practice can, he says, weaken the hold of these evolutionary once-needed delusions. In the process, Wright argues, we can all learn to wreak a little less havoc on ourselves and the rest of the world. As he puts it:

"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."

That broad nonsectarian approach is an important part of Wright's approach. Raised as a Southern Baptist, he left the church in his teens. But he doesn't look back in anger. Perhaps that is why he isn't arguing that people need to become a Buddhist to practice its truths. As he writes: "Asserting the validity of core Buddhist ideas doesn't necessarily say anything, one way or the other, about other spiritual or philosophical traditions." Later, he reminds us of the Dalai Lama's admonition: "Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are."

Which takes me back to that whole meditation is boring (at least in the beginning) thing. One of the best parts of Wright's book is its realism. No matter how many books you read on Buddhist insights into human beings, they won't mean much unless you find yourself a regular practice. It's the practice that counts. It's the practice that slowly lets you see the delusion in our constant stream of desires and aversions. That is, after all, why they call it practice. Wright does an excellent job of unpacking this reality for his readers, demonstrating again and again how contemplative practice can lead to understanding and how understanding can lead to an important kind of freedom.

Adam Frank is a co-founder of the 13.7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, and author of the upcoming book Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth. You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @adamfrank4

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