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Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment Hardcover – August 8, 2017
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From one of America’s greatest minds, a journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness.
Robert Wright famously explained in The Moral Animal how evolution shaped the human brain. The mind is designed to often delude us, he argued, about ourselves and about the world. And it is designed to make happiness hard to sustain.
But if we know our minds are rigged for anxiety, depression, anger, and greed, what do we do? Wright locates the answer in Buddhism, which figured out thousands of years ago what scientists are only discovering now. Buddhism holds that human suffering is a result of not seeing the world clearly—and proposes that seeing the world more clearly, through meditation, will make us better, happier people.
In Why Buddhism is True, Wright leads readers on a journey through psychology, philosophy, and a great many silent retreats to show how and why meditation can serve as the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age. At once excitingly ambitious and wittily accessible, this is the first book to combine evolutionary psychology with cutting-edge neuroscience to defend the radical claims at the heart of Buddhist philosophy. With bracing honesty and fierce wisdom, it will persuade you not just that Buddhism is true—which is to say, a way out of our delusion—but that it can ultimately save us from ourselves, as individuals and as a species.
- Print length336 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication dateAugust 8, 2017
- Dimensions6.75 x 1 x 10 inches
- ISBN-101439195455
- ISBN-13978-1439195451
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Editorial Reviews
Review
—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
“Wright’s mix of conceptual ambition and humbly witty confiding makes for a one-of-a-kind endeavor—instead of a formulaic how-to book, a fascinating why-not-give-it-a-try book.”
—The Atlantic
“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
“[Why Buddhism is True] will become the go-to explication of Buddhism for modern western seekers, just as The Moral Animal remains the go-to explication of evolutionary psychology.”
—Scientific American
“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
“[Written] with such intelligence and grace.”
—Patheos
“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
“Joyful and insightful... both entertaining and informative.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A light, accessible guide for anyone interested in the practical benefits of meditation.”
—Vox
“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
“[Wright’s] argument contains many interesting and illuminating points.”
—The Washington Post
“Amusing and straight-forward.... Anyone... can safely dip their toes in the water here.”
—BookFilter
“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
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1 Taking the Red Pill
At the risk of overdramatizing the human condition: Have you ever seen the movie The Matrix?
It’s about a guy named Neo (played by Keanu Reeves), who discovers that he’s been inhabiting a dream world. The life he thought he was living is actually an elaborate hallucination. He’s having that hallucination while, unbeknownst to him, his actual physical body is inside a gooey, coffin-size pod—one among many pods, rows and rows of pods, each pod containing a human being absorbed in a dream. These people have been put in their pods by robot overlords and given dream lives as pacifiers.
The choice faced by Neo—to keep living a delusion or wake up to reality—is famously captured in the movie’s “red pill” scene. Neo has been contacted by rebels who have entered his dream (or, strictly speaking, whose avatars have entered his dream). Their leader, Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne), explains the situation to Neo: “You are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch—a prison for your mind.” The prison is called the Matrix, but there’s no way to explain to Neo what the Matrix ultimately is. The only way to get the whole picture, says Morpheus, is “to see it for yourself.” He offers Neo two pills, a red one and a blue one. Neo can take the blue pill and return to his dream world, or take the red pill and break through the shroud of delusion. Neo chooses the red pill.
That’s a pretty stark choice: a life of delusion and bondage or a life of insight and freedom. In fact, it’s a choice so dramatic that you’d think a Hollywood movie is exactly where it belongs—that the choices we really get to make about how to live our lives are less momentous than this, more pedestrian. Yet when that movie came out, a number of people saw it as mirroring a choice they had actually made.
The people I’m thinking about are what you might call Western Buddhists, people in the United States and other Western countries who, for the most part, didn’t grow up Buddhist but at some point adopted Buddhism. At least they adopted a version of Buddhism, a version that had been stripped of some supernatural elements typically found in Asian Buddhism, such as belief in reincarnation and in various deities. This Western Buddhism centers on a part of Buddhist practice that in Asia is more common among monks than among laypeople: meditation, along with immersion in Buddhist philosophy. (Two of the most common Western conceptions of Buddhism—that it’s atheistic and that it revolves around meditation—are wrong; most Asian Buddhists do believe in gods, though not an omnipotent creator God, and don’t meditate.)
These Western Buddhists, long before they watched The Matrix, had become convinced that the world as they had once seen it was a kind of illusion—not an out-and-out hallucination but a seriously warped picture of reality that in turn warped their approach to life, with bad consequences for them and the people around them. Now they felt that, thanks to meditation and Buddhist philosophy, they were seeing things more clearly. Among these people, The Matrix seemed an apt allegory of the transition they’d undergone, and so became known as a “dharma movie.” The word dharma has several meanings, including the Buddha’s teachings and the path that Buddhists should tread in response to those teachings. In the wake of The Matrix, a new shorthand for “I follow the dharma” came into currency: “I took the red pill.”
I saw The Matrix in 1999, right after it came out, and some months later I learned that I had a kind of connection to it. The movie’s directors, the Wachowski siblings, had given Keanu Reeves three books to read in preparation for playing Neo. One of them was a book I had written a few years earlier, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life.
I’m not sure what kind of link the directors saw between my book and The Matrix. But I know what kind of link I see. Evolutionary psychology can be described in various ways, and here’s one way I had described it in my book: It is the study of how the human brain was designed—by natural selection—to mislead us, even enslave us.
Don’t get me wrong: natural selection has its virtues, and I’d rather be created by it than not be created at all—which, so far as I can tell, are the two options this universe offers. Being a product of evolution is by no means entirely a story of enslavement and delusion. Our evolved brains empower us in many ways, and they often bless us with a basically accurate view of reality.
Still, ultimately, natural selection cares about only one thing (or, I should say, “cares”—in quotes—about only one thing, since natural selection is just a blind process, not a conscious designer). And that one thing is getting genes into the next generation. Genetically based traits that in the past contributed to genetic proliferation have flourished, while traits that didn’t have fallen by the wayside. And the traits that have survived this test include mental traits—structures and algorithms that are built into the brain and shape our everyday experience. So if you ask the question “What kinds of perceptions and thoughts and feelings guide us through life each day?” the answer, at the most basic level, isn’t “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that give us an accurate picture of reality.” No, at the most basic level the answer is “The kinds of thoughts and feelings and perceptions that helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation.” Whether those thoughts and feelings and perceptions give us a true view of reality is, strictly speaking, beside the point. As a result, they sometimes don’t. Our brains are designed to, among other things, delude us.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Some of my happiest moments have come from delusion—believing, for example, that the Tooth Fairy would pay me a visit after I lost a tooth. But delusion can also produce bad moments. And I don’t just mean moments that, in retrospect, are obviously delusional, like horrible nightmares. I also mean moments that you might not think of as delusional, such as lying awake at night with anxiety. Or feeling hopeless, even depressed, for days on end. Or feeling bursts of hatred toward people, bursts that may actually feel good for a moment but slowly corrode your character. Or feeling bursts of hatred toward yourself. Or feeling greedy, feeling a compulsion to buy things or eat things or drink things well beyond the point where your well-being is served.
Though these feelings—anxiety, despair, hatred, greed—aren’t delusional the way a nightmare is delusional, if you examine them closely, you’ll see that they have elements of delusion, elements you’d be better off without.
And if you think you would be better off, imagine how the whole world would be. After all, feelings like despair and hatred and greed can foster wars and atrocities. So if what I’m saying is true—if these basic sources of human suffering and human cruelty are indeed in large part the product of delusion—there is value in exposing this delusion to the light.
Sounds logical, right? But here’s a problem that I started to appreciate shortly after I wrote my book about evolutionary psychology: the exact value of exposing a delusion to the light depends on what kind of light you’re talking about. Sometimes understanding the ultimate source of your suffering doesn’t, by itself, help very much.
An Everyday Delusion
Let’s take a simple but fundamental example: eating some junk food, feeling briefly satisfied, and then, only minutes later, feeling a kind of crash and maybe a hunger for more junk food. This is a good example to start with for two reasons.
First, it illustrates how subtle our delusions can be. There’s no point in the course of eating a six-pack of small powdered-sugar doughnuts when you’re believing that you’re the messiah or that foreign agents are conspiring to assassinate you. And that’s true of many sources of delusion that I’ll discuss in this book: they’re more about illusion—about things not being quite what they seem—than about delusion in the more dramatic sense of that word. Still, by the end of the book, I’ll have argued that all of these illusions do add up to a very large-scale warping of reality, a disorientation that is as significant and consequential as out-and-out delusion.
The second reason junk food is a good example to start with is that it’s fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings. Okay, it can’t be literally fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings, because 2,500 years ago, when the Buddha taught, junk food as we know it didn’t exist. What’s fundamental to the Buddha’s teachings is the general dynamic of being powerfully drawn to sensory pleasure that winds up being fleeting at best. One of the Buddha’s main messages was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly and leave us thirsting for more. We spend our time looking for the next gratifying thing—the next powdered-sugar doughnut, the next sexual encounter, the next status-enhancing promotion, the next online purchase. But the thrill always fades, and it always leaves us wanting more. The old Rolling Stones lyric “I can’t get no satisfaction” is, according to Buddhism, the human condition. Indeed, though the Buddha is famous for asserting that life is pervaded by suffering, some scholars say that’s an incomplete rendering of his message and that the word translated as “suffering,” dukkha, could, for some purposes, be translated as “unsatisfactoriness.”
So what exactly is the illusory part of pursuing doughnuts or sex or consumer goods or a promotion? There are different illusions associated with different pursuits, but for now we can focus on one illusion that’s common to these things: the overestimation of how much happiness they’ll bring. Again, by itself this is delusional only in a subtle sense. If I asked you whether you thought that getting that next promotion, or getting an A on that next exam, or eating that next powdered-sugar doughnut would bring you eternal bliss, you’d say no, obviously not. On the other hand, we do often pursue such things with, at the very least, an unbalanced view of the future. We spend more time envisioning the perks that a promotion will bring than envisioning the headaches it will bring. And there may be an unspoken sense that once we’ve achieved this long-sought goal, once we’ve reached the summit, we’ll be able to relax, or at least things will be enduringly better. Similarly, when we see that doughnut sitting there, we immediately imagine how good it tastes, not how intensely we’ll want another doughnut only moments after eating it, or how we’ll feel a bit tired or agitated later, when the sugar rush subsides.
Why Pleasure Fades
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to explain why this sort of distortion would be built into human anticipation. It just takes an evolutionary biologist—or, for that matter, anyone willing to spend a little time thinking about how evolution works.
Here’s the basic logic. We were “designed” by natural selection to do certain things that helped our ancestors get their genes into the next generation—things like eating, having sex, earning the esteem of other people, and outdoing rivals. I put “designed” in quotation marks because, again, natural selection isn’t a conscious, intelligent designer but an unconscious process. Still, natural selection does create organisms that look as if they’re the product of a conscious designer, a designer who kept fiddling with them to make them effective gene propagators. So, as a kind of thought experiment, it’s legitimate to think of natural selection as a “designer” and put yourself in its shoes and ask: If you were designing organisms to be good at spreading their genes, how would you get them to pursue the goals that further this cause? In other words, granted that eating, having sex, impressing peers, and besting rivals helped our ancestors spread their genes, how exactly would you design their brains to get them to pursue these goals? I submit that at least three basic principles of design would make sense:
1. Achieving these goals should bring pleasure, since animals, including humans, tend to pursue things that bring pleasure.
2. The pleasure shouldn’t last forever. After all, if the pleasure didn’t subside, we’d never seek it again; our first meal would be our last, because hunger would never return. So too with sex: a single act of intercourse, and then a lifetime of lying there basking in the afterglow. That’s no way to get lots of genes into the next generation!
3. The animal’s brain should focus more on (1), the fact that pleasure will accompany the reaching of a goal, than on (2), the fact that the pleasure will dissipate shortly thereafter. After all, if you focus on (1), you’ll pursue things like food and sex and social status with unalloyed gusto, whereas if you focus on (2), you could start feeling ambivalence. You might, for example, start asking what the point is of so fiercely pursuing pleasure if the pleasure will wear off shortly after you get it and leave you hungering for more. Before you know it, you’ll be full of ennui and wishing you’d majored in philosophy.
If you put these three principles of design together, you get a pretty plausible explanation of the human predicament as diagnosed by the Buddha. Yes, as he said, pleasure is fleeting, and, yes, this leaves us recurrently dissatisfied. And the reason is that pleasure is designed by natural selection to evaporate so that the ensuing dissatisfaction will get us to pursue more pleasure. Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productive. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.
Scientists can watch this logic play out at the biochemical level by observing dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is correlated with pleasure and the anticipation of pleasure. In one seminal study, they took monkeys and monitored dopamine-generating neurons as drops of sweet juice fell onto the monkeys’ tongues. Predictably, dopamine was released right after the juice touched the tongue. But then the monkeys were trained to expect drops of juice after a light turned on. As the trials proceeded, more and more of the dopamine came when the light turned on, and less and less came after the juice hit the tongue.
We have no way of knowing for sure what it felt like to be one of those monkeys, but it would seem that, as time passed, there was more in the way of anticipating the pleasure that would come from the sweetness, yet less in the way of pleasure actually coming from the sweetness.I,† To translate this conjecture into everyday human terms:
If you encounter a new kind of pleasure—if, say, you’ve somehow gone your whole life without eating a powdered-sugar doughnut, and somebody hands you one and suggests you try it—you’ll get a big blast of dopamine after the taste of the doughnut sinks in. But later, once you’re a confirmed powdered-sugar-doughnut eater, the lion’s share of the dopamine spike comes before you actually bite into the doughnut, as you’re staring longingly at it; the amount that comes after the bite is much less than the amount you got after that first, blissful bite into a powdered-sugar doughnut. The pre-bite dopamine blast you’re now getting is the promise of more bliss, and the post-bite drop in dopamine is, in a way, the breaking of the promise—or, at least, it’s a kind of biochemical acknowledgment that there was some overpromising. To the extent that you bought the promise—anticipated greater pleasure than would be delivered by the consumption itself—you have been, if not deluded in the strong sense of that term, at least misled.
Kind of cruel, in a way—but what do you expect from natural selection? Its job is to build machines that spread genes, and if that means programming some measure of illusion into the machines, then illusion there will be.
Unhelpful Insights
So this is one kind of light science can shed on an illusion. Call it “Darwinian light.” By looking at things from the point of view of natural selection, we see why the illusion would be built into us, and we have more reason than ever to see that it is an illusion. But—and this is the main point of this little digression—this kind of light is of limited value if your goal is to actually liberate yourself from the illusion.
Don’t believe me? Try this simple experiment: (1) Reflect on the fact that our lust for doughnuts and other sweet things is a kind of illusion—that the lust implicitly promises more enduring pleasure than will result from succumbing to it, while blinding us to the letdown that may ensue. (2) As you’re reflecting on this fact, hold a powdered-sugar doughnut six inches from your face. Do you feel the lust for it magically weakening? Not if you’re like me, no.
This is what I discovered after immersing myself in evolutionary psychology: knowing the truth about your situation, at least in the form that evolutionary psychology provides it, doesn’t necessarily make your life any better. In fact, it can actually make it worse. You’re still stuck in the natural human cycle of ultimately futile pleasure-seeking—what psychologists sometimes call “the hedonic treadmill”—but now you have new reason to see the absurdity of it. In other words, now you see that it’s a treadmill, a treadmill specifically designed to keep you running, often without really getting anywhere—yet you keep running!
And powdered-sugar doughnuts are just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, the truth is, it’s not all that uncomfortable to be aware of the Darwinian logic behind your lack of dietary self-discipline. In fact, you may find in this logic a comforting excuse: it’s hard to fight Mother Nature, right? But evolutionary psychology also made me more aware of how illusion shapes other kinds of behavior, such as the way I treat other people and the way I, in various senses, treat myself. In these realms, Darwinian self-consciousness was sometimes very uncomfortable.
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a meditation teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, has said, “Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.” What he meant is that if you want to liberate yourself from the parts of the mind that keep you from realizing true happiness, you have to first become aware of them, which can be unpleasant.
Okay, fine; that’s a form of painful self-consciousness that would be worthwhile—the kind that leads ultimately to deep happiness. But the kind I got from evolutionary psychology was the worst of both worlds: the painful self-consciousness without the deep happiness. I had both the discomfort of being aware of my mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.
Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” Well, with evolutionary psychology I felt I had found the truth. But, manifestly, I had not found the way. Which was enough to make me wonder about another thing Jesus said: that the truth will set you free. I felt I had seen the basic truth about human nature, and I saw more clearly than ever how various illusions imprisoned me, but this truth wasn’t amounting to a Get Out of Jail Free card.
So is there another version of the truth out there that would set me free? No, I don’t think so. At least, I don’t think there’s an alternative to the truth presented by science; natural selection, like it or not, is the process that created us. But some years after writing The Moral Animal, I did start to wonder if there was a way to operationalize the truth—a way to put the actual, scientific truth about human nature and the human condition into a form that would not just identify and explain the illusions we labor under but would also help us liberate ourselves from them. I started wondering if this Western Buddhism I was hearing about might be that way. Maybe many of the Buddha’s teachings were saying essentially the same thing modern psychological science says. And maybe meditation was in large part a different way of appreciating these truths—and, in addition, a way of actually doing something about them.
So in August 2003 I headed to rural Massachusetts for my first silent meditation retreat—a whole week devoted to meditation and devoid of such distractions as email, news from the outside world, and speaking to other human beings.
The Truth about Mindfulness
You could be excused for doubting that a retreat like this would yield anything very dramatic or profound. The retreat was, broadly speaking, in the tradition of “mindfulness meditation,” the kind of meditation that was starting to catch on in the West and that in the years since has gone mainstream. As commonly described, mindfulness—the thing mindfulness meditation aims to cultivate—isn’t very deep or exotic. To live mindfully is to pay attention to, to be “mindful of” what’s happening in the here and now and to experience it in a clear, direct way, unclouded by various mental obfuscations. Stop and smell the roses.
This is an accurate description of mindfulness as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far. “Mindfulness,” as popularly conceived, is just the beginning of mindfulness.
And it’s in some ways a misleading beginning. If you delve into ancient Buddhist writings, you won’t find a lot of exhortations to stop and smell the roses—and that’s true even if you focus on those writings that feature the word sati, the word that’s translated as “mindfulness.” Indeed, sometimes these writings seem to carry a very different message. The ancient Buddhist text known as The Four Foundations of Mindfulness—the closest thing there is to a Bible of Mindfulness—reminds us that our bodies are “full of various kinds of unclean things” and instructs us to meditate on such bodily ingredients as “feces, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, skin-oil, saliva, mucus, fluid in the joints, urine.” It also calls for us to imagine our bodies “one day, two days, three days dead—bloated, livid, and festering.”
I’m not aware of any bestselling books on mindfulness meditation called Stop and Smell the Feces. And I’ve never heard a meditation teacher recommend that I meditate on my bile, phlegm, and pus or on the rotting corpse that I will someday be. What is presented today as an ancient meditative tradition is actually a selective rendering of an ancient meditative tradition, in some cases carefully manicured.
There’s no scandal here. There’s nothing wrong with modern interpreters of Buddhism being selective—even, sometimes, creative—in what they present as Buddhism. All spiritual traditions evolve, adapting to time and place, and the Buddhist teachings that find an audience today in the United States and Europe are a product of such evolution.
The main thing, for our purposes, is that this evolution—the evolution that has produced a distinctively Western, twenty-first-century version of Buddhism—hasn’t severed the connection between current practice and ancient thought. Modern mindfulness meditation isn’t exactly the same as ancient mindfulness meditation, but the two share a common philosophical foundation. If you follow the underlying logic of either of them far enough, you will find a dramatic claim: that we are, metaphorically speaking, living in the Matrix. However mundane mindfulness meditation may sometimes sound, it is a practice that, if pursued rigorously, can let you see what Morpheus says the red pill will let you see. Namely, “how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
On that first meditation retreat, I had some pretty powerful experiences—powerful enough to make me want to see just how deep the rabbit hole goes. So I read more about Buddhist philosophy, and talked to experts on Buddhism, and eventually went on more meditation retreats, and established a daily meditation practice.
All of this made it clearer to me why The Matrix had come to be known as a “dharma movie.” Though evolutionary psychology had already convinced me that people are by nature pretty deluded, Buddhism, it turned out, painted an even more dramatic picture. In the Buddhist view, the delusion touches everyday perceptions and thoughts in ways subtler and more pervasive than I had imagined. And in ways that made sense to me. In other words, this kind of delusion, it seemed to me, could be explained as the natural product of a brain that had been engineered by natural selection. The more I looked into Buddhism, the more radical it seemed, but the more I examined it in the light of modern psychology, the more plausible it seemed. The real-life Matrix, the one in which we’re actually embedded, came to seem more like the one in the movie—not quite as mind-bending, maybe, but profoundly deceiving and ultimately oppressive, and something that humanity urgently needs to escape.
The good news is the other thing I came to believe: if you want to escape from the Matrix, Buddhist practice and philosophy offer powerful hope. Buddhism isn’t alone in this promise. There are other spiritual traditions that address the human predicament with insight and wisdom. But Buddhist meditation, along with its underlying philosophy, addresses that predicament in a strikingly direct and comprehensive way. Buddhism offers an explicit diagnosis of the problem and a cure. And the cure, when it works, brings not just happiness but clarity of vision: the actual truth about things, or at least something way, way closer to that than our everyday view of them.
Some people who have taken up meditation in recent years have done so for essentially therapeutic reasons. They practice mindfulness-based stress reduction or focus on some specific personal problem. They may have no idea that the kind of meditation they’re practicing can be a deeply spiritual endeavor and can transform their view of the world. They are, without knowing it, near the threshold of a basic choice, a choice that only they can make. As Morpheus says to Neo, “I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.” This book is an attempt to show people the door, give them some idea of what lies beyond it, and explain, from a scientific standpoint, why what lies beyond it has a stronger claim to being real than the world they’re familiar with.
I. This and all subsequent daggers refer to elaborative notes that can be found in the Notes section at the end of the book.
Product details
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster; Later prt. edition (August 8, 2017)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1439195455
- ISBN-13 : 978-1439195451
- Item Weight : 1.35 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.75 x 1 x 10 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #254,728 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #982 in Buddhism (Books)
- #1,706 in Meditation (Books)
- #3,014 in Happiness Self-Help
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About the author
Robert Wright is a contributing editor of The New Republic, a Slate.com columnist, and a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the cofounder of www.bloggingheads.tv, runs the web-based video project www.meaningoflife.tv, and lives in Princeton, NJ, with his wife and two daughters.
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Customers find the book insightful, intellectual, and well-written. They appreciate the continuous emphasis and reminders about mindfulness. Readers also mention the psychological model is well-presented and convincing. They find the ideas interesting and the book a pleasant introduction to the benefits of meditation. Reader describe the author as extremely intelligent and approachable.
"...He is refreshingly unpretentious--humorously self-effacing, and transparent about his motivations for writing...." Read more
"...This book will preach wonderfully to your choir, though you might want to skim the parts where Wright whistles through the graveyard of spirituality...." Read more
"...Generally speaking then, Wright’s book is a pleasant introduction to the benefits of meditation and some of the foundational concepts of Buddhism...." Read more
"...is able to present complex ideas with concision, candor, and intellectual force...." Read more
Customers find the book very good, rewarding, and useful. They say it's a good book for group study and generates good discussion. Readers also mention the book is unique and argues for the validity of the Four Noble Truths.
"...The book is not always convincing, but it is engaging, approachable, and thought-provoking." Read more
"...Because these books are written by brilliant, honest and diligent people, their attempts to create a secular, therapeutic Buddhism actually do a..." Read more
"Robert Wright’s book on Buddhism and meditation is an engaging introduction to some of the central tenets of Buddhism as rooted in basic principles..." Read more
"...Any way around it, this book is great. If you crave an intellectual background for the things you devote yourself to, this book will do it...." Read more
Customers find the pacing of the book articulated, clear, and simple. They also mention the author speaks in a calm, soothing, informative, and conversational voice. Readers also mention that the narrator is unusually adept at capturing the humor as well as the depth of the ideas. They say the author is able to present complex ideas with concision, candor, and intellectual force.
"...And he is a clear writer--he does not try to intimidate us with obtuseness and paradox, even when addressing difficult concepts...." Read more
"...Wright is able to present complex ideas with concision, candor, and intellectual force...." Read more
"...comes across as extremely intelligent, yet approachable, and a wee bit irreverent...." Read more
"...His non-expert, struggling to understand is helpful when he talks with the Pros at retreats. Very reinforcing and supporting with my background...." Read more
Customers find the content engaging, entertaining, and enjoyable. They say it makes reading insightful and rewarding. Readers also mention the book sucks them in and makes living somewhat easier.
"...The book is not always convincing, but it is engaging, approachable, and thought-provoking." Read more
"...to this life and that this mental technique makes living somewhat easier to bear...." Read more
"...In sum, the book is highly readable, fun, and deeply rewarding...." Read more
"...It is also well written and amusing, leaving me interested in reading other works by this author." Read more
Customers find the book credible, funny, and inspiring. They say it's written by brilliant, honest, and diligent people. Readers also mention the book shows Buddhism is an accurate representation of reality.
"...Because these books are written by brilliant, honest and diligent people, their attempts to create a secular, therapeutic Buddhism actually do a..." Read more
"...book makes a good case for showing that Buddhism is an accurate representation of reality. I wish the author were not so wordy and self-centered...." Read more
"...how the brain works, I can attest that this is a well written and accurate piece...." Read more
"...The author has done a great job in clarifying why Buddhism is a True, Satisfying, and Beneficial way to live one's' life...." Read more
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Why Buddhism is True
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Secular, naturalistic Buddhism rests on a few key ideas: the idea that people don't have an essential 'self' (no-self), the idea that dissatisfaction (dukkha) is caused by the 'hedonic treadmill' of pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, and that meditation can help us to get off this treadmill. The philosophical approach is similar to that of Stephen Batchelor in Confession of a Buddhist Atheist and Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World.
There is a decidedly Gnostic bent to the writing here, right from the beginning, when the movie The Matrix is cited. Here natural selection is the process which holds us in a state of delusion, warps our perceptions of reality, prevents us from experiencing lasting contentment and satisfaction, and keeps us trapped on the hedonic treadmill. And secular-Buddhism is The Way (the 'red pill') that will liberate us from this endless drama of delusion and frustration. This view of evolution stands in marked contrast with that of Wright's previous book, The Evolution of God (Back Bay Readers' Pick), in which biological and cultural evolution are instead 'divine' processes by which the Good becomes manifest in the world. (The God-as-Evolution view is also that of the 'Integral' spirituality of Ken Wilber, Steve McIntosh, and others.)
Part of this book is dedicated to showing that the key ideas of secular-Buddhism are scientifically true, through discussion of studies in psychology and neuroscience (an approach shared with Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, by Sam Harris). This would be more convincing if the studies were cited as a way of evaluating Buddhism against competing theories of well-being, such as modern positive psychology, but the book generally avoids this type of direct comparison. This is reflective of the basic approach of secular-Buddhism: the concepts which don't find support in scientific studies, such as reincarnation, or lasting enlightenment, are abandoned or de-emphasized. Secular-Buddhism is reformulating Buddhism to be more consistent with modern psychology, a dynamic which complicates the question of whether science can be used to show that 'Buddhism is True'.
Wright expands on the concept of 'no-self' by presenting a 'modular' model of the mind. The idea is that our mind is composed of modules with different goals, desires, and thought patterns. The modules jostle and compete with each other on the subconscious level. Only when one of them carries a sufficiently strong feeling, do we then become aware of its associated thought on a conscious level. While Wright finds some support for this modular model from the Insight Meditation school, and from psychological research, he formulates it through his own preferred perspective of evolutionary psychology (Darwinian competition within the subconscious mind). Interestingly, the model is extended to suggest how mindfulness can improve our 'self'-control, and to weaken the pull of indulgent or addictive behavior.
One of the pleasures of The Evolution of God was its detailed historical examples of the ways in which the 'spiritual marketplace' of competing ideas, and the needs of merchants, kings, and rulers all influenced the development of ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Wright could have also taken this approach with Buddhism, exploring how its history as the state religion of multiple empires has shaped its development over time and place. I was hoping for this, and am disappointed not to find it here. However, Wright instead manages to tackle some pretty subtle philosophical issues, such as the distinction between the Buddhist concept of 'emptiness' (sunyata) and Hindu non-dualism, in a manner that is unusually accessible. He enlivens the discussion with narrative accounts of past conversations and interviews.
This book is in many ways a personal account: Wright has found a version of secular-Buddhism that is True for him in his life, and he is bringing us along through his experience and thought process. Unlike many authors on Eastern spirituality, he is in no way trying to present himself as enlightened, or a spiritual teacher or guru. He is refreshingly unpretentious--humorously self-effacing, and transparent about his motivations for writing. And he is a clear writer--he does not try to intimidate us with obtuseness and paradox, even when addressing difficult concepts. The book is not always convincing, but it is engaging, approachable, and thought-provoking.
This narrowest slice of the Buddhism cake out of which Wright wants to make a worldwide meal — secular, Western, Theravada, Vipassina — seems to be a popular diversion for the aging atheist who wants a late-in-life grand project and some intellectual cover for wishful thinking. Trying to repackage, say, Catholicism, wouldn’t be exotic and inspiring enough. Instead, Wright enjoys the convert’s blindspots to an old (yet new) religion. Being a first gen Buddhist, he is unburdened by parents who serve as painful counterexamples. (Yup, I’m a second gen guy).
My biggest gripe with Wright is that he takes this narrowly defined notion, coats it in the novice’s zeal and then prescribes this “red pill” to the world. Yup, “The Matrix” is the best philosophical metaphor he can muster for the idea that “things are not what they seem.” Rather than a red pill, I’d see this as a red flag, a warning that the author can overlook some glaring and outlandish plot holes. (In the Matrix, the robot overlords use humans as batteries! They can create fine-grained illusory worlds, but can’t come up with better batteries than humans? Also, Keanu’s acting is about as lush and fruitful as a Zen rock garden.) I think Wright overlooks similarly large plot holes in the arcane, but sticky, spiderweb of Buddhist thought.
As far as I can see after reading this book, there really is no workable meditative practice (beyond the minimal self help version) that doesn’t rely on either 1) a personal preference that shouldn’t be universalized or 2) explicit or implicit supernatural beliefs. I’m pretty sure that, if there were a workable secular Buddhism, Wright would have found it.
He sure thinks he found it. In fact he thinks he's found nothing less than personal and global salvation. Tribalism, he feels, is the “biggest problem facing humanity.” And meditation is supposedly the end of that. But he’s too good a writer, and too rigorous a scholar not to reveal the holes in his own argument.
I’m not saying I’m going to surprise him with any of my objections. He’s done his homework. He’s even bravely interviewed quite a few “enlightened” meditators on his vlog. (Once they stop claiming to have quiet DMN and egoless minds, they describe what sounds like very normally middle class American lives.)
My whole argument is nothing new to Wright. Just as he remains enchanted with the “hard problem,” I’m sure he will not be swayed by my arguments. Instead, I’m hoping the astute reader will drink the last drop of skepticism that Wright cannot let pass his lips. Wright veers off at the last moment, losing a game of chicken with the truth. Excuse my armchair psychoanalysis, (he offers these anecdotes up in his book, so fair game) he loses his atheist nerve because he can’t disavow the memory of his mother and his own innate yearning for Jesus-style salvation.
The greatest counter examples to Wright’s most ambitious hope (the end of tribalism) are the millennia of Buddhist societies. Buddhist cultures are, on the whole, no better (though probably no worse) than any other culture. Certainly Buddhism and the Vedic traditions have proven themselves very compatible with war, tribalism, classism (Caste system!) and the oppression of women. The Tibetan word for “woman” literally mean “of inferior birth.” Also, Buddhism has not been a great incubator for science. Though the Dalai Lama is fond of science, it should be noted that he’s has to fly the scientists to him.
The move Wright makes to avoid this mountain of historical evidence is to narrowly define his project as “Western Buddhism.” It’s new and improved Buddhism! And it’s all about the mindfulness. Wright must slice the cake this thinly because, “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.”
By focusing on mindfulness and on the individual benefits of that practice, Wright can claim to rescue the baby from the historical bath water. In other words, rather than answer the question of why most Buddhists don't want to meditate (not a great endorsement), and why most Buddhist cultures are equally flawed to non-buddhist, he takes shelter in the idea that those Buddhist cultures are flawed because they are full of the wrong type of Buddhists. If you meditate, then you are on the right path, he says.
But even amongst those who do meditate, there are plenty examples of jerks.Examples of evil meditators are shockingly common. Wright has to deal with the “Zen Predator.” Sexual exploitation of students by masters is so common — around 30% of US Zen schools have had public sex scandals. Wright (and Sam Harris) have both had to awkwardly wrestle with these all too frequent violations. Bless them both for at least admitting that this problem exists.
There are two main strategies to deal with the Buddhist version of the "problem of evil" -- what I call The Problem of the Evil Meditator. You either bite the bullet and admit that 1) enlightenment is indifferent to morality or 2) adopt incrementalism. The second is Wright’s main move. These evil masters just haven’t meditated enough, or they neglected to meditate broadly enough. Just as Wright claims (wrongly in my opinion) that evolution tends towards greater complexity, he also claims that meditation tends to lead one toward a more moral life. Hmmm.
Most traditional Buddhist will use the universal spackle of reincarnation to cover these cracks. You don’t like to meditate? You’re molesting your meditation students? You just haven’t lived enough lives. But the secular Buddhist can’t avail themselves of this dodge. So Wright shrinks down the reincarnation dodge to an ideal on the horizon. You are on a path defined by an unattainable end. It’s the journey not the destination. Masters are more ideals than reality. (Stoicism uses the sage as the same escape hatch.) I’m not buying it. The ideal end doesn’t justify the failed means.
Okay, you say, what about all the people whose lives have been improved by meditation? What about all this fMRI studies that show they are happier, more self-controlled? Well, Wright himself doesn’t lean very heavily on this neuro-proof. Wright sidesteps the current batch of fMRI research, relying instead on his personal anecdote. This is a smart move, because nothing beats “this worked for me” testimonials and they are by their nature beyond debunking.
So why doesn’t he use the research? I think it’s because, there is a signal in the research, but it doesn’t yet amount to much more than the tautology that those who like meditating like to meditate. The most exhaustive meta studies (that Wright ignores) show very weak signals. And the research generally fails to make a very important comparison of meditation to other similar activities. For instance, if meditating about playing guitar brings benefit, wouldn’t actually playing bring even greater benefit?
Regardless of the size of adept meditators’ PFC’s, it’s a fact that most Buddhist don’t meditate, and most people who start meditating stop. So if it’s a medicine, it’s a medicine few people want to take, and once you take it, you stop. It will be interesting to see how long Wright keeps it up.
But wait (OMG, you’re still reading?) The greatest and perhaps most ambitious part of this book is that Wright is trying to place the Buddha in Darwin’s lap. This is Wright at his best, dropping some mad EvoPsych knowledge. He does a good job of showing how natural selection has not selected for happiness. So far so good. And the modal concept of mind is fascinating. This part alone was therapeutic to me in a CBT sort of way. But then he makes another false step. He implies that since the Buddha diagnosed the problem (I’m not sure that is true, but let’s grant it) then perhaps Buddhism has also found the cure. But why would that be the case? This is like trying to get the molecular structure of Dopamine by reading Democritus.
So why does meditation help us understand that which the Buddha himself could not have known: The problem that natural selection doesn’t give a fig about our happiness; it only programs desires that lead not to happiness but to getting genes into the next generation? Wright suggests that by meditating on the nature of our consciousness we can get an essential added dimension of understanding, a better window into the exact way in which Evolution screwed us. It’s sort of a Mary’s Room of suffering. You can understand it intellctually, but you don’t grok it until you meditate.
This is just unfounded. Even if you are just talking about our inner minds, there is no good reason to believe that meditation reveals anything more real than the meanderings of an unskilled mind. Wright makes the weaker claim that it only reveals something true about our consciousness. Mystic Buddhists on the other hand, including most who call themselves secular, implicitly make the claim that meditation is revealing something not just about the mind, but about the nature of reality, but Wright kinda demures on that point. However, to the extent that he is a mysterian about consciousness itself, when he claims that meditation reveals something fundamental about consciousness, he is making an implicit ontological claim. This is in my opinion a hidden mystical claim. Certainly the idea that merely examining subjective consciousness reveals something more than subjective consciousness is questionable.
To show you why this is wrong, let me tell you something that happened to me during a guided meditation called a “body scan.” The instructor was focusing our attention on sensations in the body. Through her ignorance of anatomy, she suggested we should focus on the empty ventricles in our brains. There are no empty areas in the brain. But I felt them! I focused on them!
Since then I’ve experimented. You can create all sorts of false sensations just by suggesting them to yourself. I’ve meditated on lungs in my forearm. Try it. You will feel them there too. Little lungs in your forearm expanding and contracting with each breath. This should lead you not only to be skeptical about the accuracy of focusing on sensations, but the viability of this project at all. If we are to escape illusion, how can more illusion get us there? If you can suggest a sensation that isn’t actually real, if you can feel things about your body that are demonstrably false, by what lights do you argue that merely reflecting on the subjective experience of consciousness will reveal something truer and more real about consciousness?
It's the qualia dodge, the idea that by focusing on a subjective experience you are ipso facto having a subjective experience. But in this case it actually works against itself. If it's all false perception all the way down, on what foundation does your meditation instructor say "ah yes, you have entered the stream." There is no standard by which you can prioritize the authenticity of one meditative experience over another. Why is one illusion more insightful than another?
No, you say, the meditative focus is on something more primitive than this. You tune in to the field of consciousness itself. It supposedly exists between thoughts, between feelings, between sensations. You examine these entities to see that they are, like all of reality, not what they seem. And most importantly that there is no "self" doing the experiencing.
Sorry, I’m not buying it. Wright is mixing up his types of seeming. Being a self is not the same sort of seeming as, to use a Sam Harris example, when you see a coiled rope and think it’s a snake. Upon further inspection you realize it’s just rope. This is not an illusion, it is a misperception. There is objective standards by which you can evaluate this concept. The sense of being a self, however, is not a misperception of this type. It is a locally valid -- and irrefutable on its own terms -- perception. Why? Because we have skin and skull. These are not arbitrary boundaries. We have cell membranes. There is a lot of chemical self-making going on in our bodies. It’s not an illusion. Beyond the Hume style intellectual interrogation of self, I don't see how meditation can add anything.
Yes, get bored enough at a month long silent retreat, and you can start to hallucinate that you don’t end at your skin or, in Wright’s personal example, that your foot tingling is as much a part of you as a bird singing. But this is like saying by spinning in circles long enough you can sense the intrinsic spin of the universe. Biology can explain why we have a sense of dizziness after spinning. We are not feeling the universe, we are feeling the fluid in our ear. Presumably, biology can also explain someday why meditators have fairly predictable experiences. But then it will be an explanation like, spin around in circles enough, and your inner ear will get confused.
Being a self is not a misperception like mistaking a rope for a snake. It is an accurate perception like thinking the world is flat. You see, thinking the earth is flat is not actually an illusion. It is a perspectival truth. The earth is actually flat if you live on it. My cup stays on the table, the coffee stay in the cup. My level is level. It’s only if you want to look at Google earth, or launch a rocket, or wonder why you can see a ships mast over the horizon before the ship, etc. — it’s only under these situations that the world being round means something useful to you. But there is no normal human sensory input of the roundness of the earth, just as we can't see molecules.
Yes, the world is actually round, but when we see the world as flat we are not being fooled by our senses. It is, locally, actually truly flat. No amount of meditation on the actual roundness of the world will give you a vision of its actual roundness. There is no sense data for the roundness. You can meditate on the Earth’s roundness, you can conjure an image, but just like the lungs in my forearms, you will have “an experience”, but not really of the roundness. If you meditate on the Earth’s roundness, you are merely creating a suggested fantasy. This is exactly why there was no Buddhist science. The only reliable and productive way to see past seeming, to see past the Matrix, is not the red pill, it’s science. So sorry, you can't escape the notion of self on an experiential level. You are just being a good little suggestible participant in a very old scam.
We are stuck in our skull, like it or not. Buddhist meditation is simply replacing our perspectively valid sense of self with a hypnogogic implanted illusion. When meditators say they are experiencing that, they are certainly experiencing "something" and something that can be produced with reasonable frequency. However, they aren't actually experiencing what they say.
How do I make this claim? If you want there to be something being observed beyond the normal sensory welter, then it is actually on the Robert Wrights and the Sam Harrises of the world to explain what a brain can access that is getting into the skull. What exactly is the input? Sam Harris wants there to be a "field of consciousness" but then he's participating in a slightly more nuanced version of Deepok Chopra's "universal consciousness." This is not the sort of stuff for serious people.
In short, if everything is an illusion, how can you claim that the experience of "no self" isn't also an illusion? Wright wants to say that you are having the experiential dimension of the Darwinian truth. I buy the Darwinian part, but I see no good reason to buy the claim that highly contrived brain states (most people cannot attain it) are any more authentic than, say, an acid trip.
Most readers are reading this book for the more practical claims. For happiness and well being. If you love Buddhism and meditation, keep loving them. This book will preach wonderfully to your choir, though you might want to skim the parts where Wright whistles through the graveyard of spirituality. But If you do want to be a Buddhist, remember What Owen Flanagan makes beautifully clear in his book: if you want to be a Buddhist, you are having a mere preference for a type of happiness. It is not an ultimate, universal or superior happiness. It is a Buddhist definition of happiness. Actually, its only one type of Buddhism’s one definition of happiness.
When Wright’s instructor cautioned him, “I think you may have to choose between writing this book and liberation.” Wright obviously chose writing the book. “I’m a writer” he says, “and I consider pretty much everything I do grist for the mill.” Turns out Wright doesn't’ really want Buddhist Nirvana. Robert Wright’s nirvana involves writing books. It is no less of a Nirvana than his instructor’s, and I’m so glad that he didn’t let her talk him out of it. And I applaud him loudly when he says in the acknowledgments about his daughters, “If being enlightened would mean not seeing essence-of-wonderful-daughter when I look at them, I’m glad I haven’t attained enlightenment!” So please buy this book and read it carefully. Wright does a heroic job of trying to place the Buddha on Darwin’s lap. He lucidly explains the current understanding of evolutionary and neuro psychology. Where he fails is in his attempts to show that meditation is 1) a cure for the pains bestowed on us by natural selection and 2) a window into a deeper understanding of that world.
Feel zero regret if you don’t like meditation. You will have to be strong in your convictions though, because we are in the midst of a culture-wide mindfulness onslaught. If you don’t want to meditate before class or a work meeting, you will be putting yourself at a distinct cultural disadvantage. This is, after all, the new salvation of the cognoscenti, so if you reject it, you are likely to be branded a philistine or a wanton.
You should feel no more insult from these supercilious attitudes than you would from any hobbyist who condemns you for not enjoying their hobby. Wright doesn’t admit it (though I think he kind of does), but he likes Buddhism the way an avid ping pong player likes ping pong. It’s okay if ping pong is your thing (and should they ever do an fMRI study of ping pong nuts, they will see that their brains respond accordingly), but those of us who don’t like ping pong are off the hook.
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This book isn't just a philosophical exposition; it's a scientific exploration into the underpinnings of human cognition, emotion, and perception. Drawing from the latest research in neuroscience, the author offers empirical validation for the profound insights provided by Buddhist philosophy and meditation.
The impact of the book is significantly heightened by its ability to facilitate a deeper connection with oneself. During instances when I've felt adrift from my emotions or disconnected from my mental state, the teachings of this book, steeped in both ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience, have guided me back to equilibrium.
This scientific perspective doesn't diminish the personal and emotional impact of the book, rather, it augments it. The fusion of scientific rigor with philosophical wisdom makes the teachings more tangible, relatable, and applicable to day-to-day life.
The book's power extends into its audio format, which I've found equally enriching. Both reading and listening to it have allowed me to absorb the scientific and philosophical insights at a deeper level, reinforcing my understanding and application of its teachings.
In sum, "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment" represents a fascinating confluence of neuroscience, philosophy, and spirituality. It successfully bridges the gap between empirical science and introspective wisdom, offering a transformative tool for understanding our minds and our lives.
If you're seeking not just a book, but a scientifically grounded journey into self-discovery and enlightenment, I highly recommend this. It transcends the boundary between science and philosophy, offering a fresh perspective on our inner workings and our understanding of reality.