#102 — Is Buddhism True？
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Summary
In this episode, I speak with Robert Wright about his new book, Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. We talk about the relationship between Buddhism and evolutionary psychology, and the illusory nature of the self, and how to deal with the cognitive biases that lead us to think the worst of people under some circumstances. And we talk about why Buddhism is True is a fascinating book, and why Buddhism should be read as a companion to The Moral Animal, which was one of the first books that many of us read on evolutionary psychology. And, of course, we talk a lot about meditation and morality. This episode was produced and edited by Sam Harris. It was edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was written and performed by Mark Phillips. The show was mixed and produced by Matthew Boll and Matthew Boll. Additional music was produced by David Fincher and Alex Blumberg. Sam Harris mixed this episode and edited it. Please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a patron patron of The Making Sense Podcast by becoming one of our patron patron(s) and/becoming a patron of Making Sense, wherever you get your free copy of the Making Sense podcast. If you're a patron, you'll get 20% off the entire podcast, plus an additional 20% discount when you sign up for the podcast, and we'll get 10% off of the next month's ad-free version of the making sense podcast, "The Making Sense edition, "Making Sense." Subscribe to Making Sense: $5, $10, $20, $25, $50, $55, $60, $65, $75, $100, $99, and $150, and so on, etc., and so much more! Thank you for listening to the podcast and supporting the podcast? You'll get access to all kinds of awesome stuff, including the "making sense" and "the Making Sense and much more. - Sam Harris is making sense of it all, too! - Thank you, Sam Harris - the podcast is made possible by you can help us make sense, too, and you'll be helping us spread the word out there by making sense everywhere else can be heard on the podcast "the best of it, too much more, everywhere else in the world, everywhere, and everywhere else.
Transcript
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Robert is an author, I think most famously, of the book The Moral Animal, which was one
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of the first books that many of us read on evolutionary psychology.
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Robert has written many other books and for many journals.
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He's written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Time, Slate, The New Republic.
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He's a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism, and has been a finalist
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He's taught in the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania, and in the religion
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department at Princeton, and he's currently a visiting professor of science and religion
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And Robert's new book is Why Buddhism is True, The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and
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We start the conversation putting some of our checkered history to rest so that we can
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Those of you who know the history will know that it has been, as I often say of these
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But we have a very collegial conversation on the topic at hand.
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We talk about the connection between meditation and morality.
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There's a fair amount about the harmony between evolutionary psychology and the Buddhist view of the mind.
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And also a lot about the illusoriness of the self and how to make sense of that claim.
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So you've written a fascinating new book, which I'm very eager to talk about.
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But before we dive into that, I need to say a word or two, or we should say a word or two
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about our history, because some of our listeners will be aware of it.
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And they, as a result, will be waiting for this conversation to run completely off the
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I'm sure we're capable of that if we put our mind to it.
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There was a passage in your book on page 17, which made me smile.
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I must say, that's the vibe I've been getting from you, lo, these many years.
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Well, first of all, if you keep calling my book fascinating or whatever you called it,
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I will be able to think generous and sympathetic thoughts toward you.
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I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a somewhat temperamental person in
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And I've always had a temper and, you know, issues matter to me.
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Um, I mean, it's funny because the book is about some of the cognitive biases that lead
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I mean, that lead us to think the worst of people under some circumstances.
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Do you think you're kind of wholly free of this?
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Well, you should feel free to interview me because this is definitely a conversation
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But I feel like the dynamic has been fairly one-sided between us.
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I, it's not to say that I can't be a jerk in other circumstances, but I feel like I've
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been noticing, I mean, not a ton of it and certainly not a ton of it of late, but I actually
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went back and looked at the history just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating or recalling
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But I think the only two times we've met are both on videotape.
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You unearthed this interview you did with me more than 10 years ago and released it,
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So it's this time capsule interview, which is kind of hilarious because it plays like
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And it's kind of funny in relation to your current book, because I now realize that your
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interest in things like meditation and Buddhism and the notion that the self might be an illusion
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and that it would be possible to be recognized as such.
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All of those interests predate that conversation we had a long time ago, where to my eye, I
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was getting a fairly incessant attitude of skepticism from you toward me on those topics.
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I mean, our conversation ranged over other topics as well.
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I think that the main issue ideologically between us has been you have felt that my linkage between
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the specific ideas within Islam and jihadism and therefore terrorism has been inaccurately or
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And you think that much of our entanglement with the Muslim world has very little to do
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It has much more to do with politics and tribalism and other more terrestrial issues.
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But I feel like that gave everything else you were hearing from me a kind of lack of luster,
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which made you deeply skeptical on points which now I see in your book that you and I
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There's a big there's a genuine ideological and slash philosophical tension between us
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I mean, I think you and some of the other new atheists are wrong about the relationship
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between religious doctrine and behavior generally and that in the contemporary context, that leads
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to unfortunate policies that that have exacerbated the situation.
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So, yeah, I and I continue to care deeply about that.
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Now, if that's led me to to be unfair to you in the past, then then I was wrong to do that.
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I actually haven't reviewed the record that much.
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I was thinking that review from the interview from that I did of you 10 years ago was I was
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I mean, I'm sure it was critical because I think you're wrong.
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And I hesitate to say that it's worth watching, but it's worth watching just for her.
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I mean, one, we're both more than 10 years younger, which is unnerving in and of itself.
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But the way it's filmed, too, is kind of hilarious.
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It's like a two shot in what looked like it's like a wood panel, you know, legal office
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looking space and everything conspires to make it seem uncomfortable.
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And then we had a debate actually on the issue that we disagree about with respect to Islam.
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And that was very, very weird for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
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In fact, there may even be reasons that you don't know anything about.
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That was the one time I ever walked out on stage having just received a seemingly credible death
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That event was streamed live on the Internet, and someone called the venue saying that they
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were going to shoot me at exactly seven o'clock at that event.
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And I don't know if you recall any of this, but the event started a little late.
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And the half hour preceding my walking out on stage, I had been standing in the company of
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three officers from the LAPD and venue security and other security, all trying to assess whether
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And then I remember leaving their company feeling no total assurance.
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What's interesting in that video is you can actually see it on my face.
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The degree to which I'm scanning the audience while I'm talking is absolutely bizarre.
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I remember the security detail and thinking you must be a very important person.
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Also, I want to assure you that I had nothing to do with the death threat scene.
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If you want to win a debate, you can call in death threats on your opponent.
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I mean, I'll keep it in mind for future debates.
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I remember a wildly supportive audience for you, like rock star level, wildly supportive
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Yeah, it was some kind of gathering of like minded folk.
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Okay, well, so now to the matter at hand, we'll put all of that behind us.
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And all is forgiven because you've written, as I said, a very interesting book on a topic
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And well, I guess before we get into the book itself, just how would you summarize your
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interests and background as a writer and a journalist?
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This book is not obviously in your wheelhouse, given everything else you've done.
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I mean, I think I've always been interested in kind of cosmic, philosophical slash spiritual
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And that's evident in really probably in all my books.
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The most obvious kind of precursor, I guess, of this is my book on evolutionary psychology,
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The Moral Animal, where, you know, I noted in that I wasn't well versed in Buddhism at
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Just to be clear, it was the Buddhism part that seemed new.
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Obviously, the evolutionary psychology has been your through line for many years.
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I did note in that book and even emphasize two things.
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One, natural selection did not necessarily design us to see things clearly.
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You know, natural selection's bottom line is to get genes in the next generation.
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And if having an illusion or misperceiving something or having a tendency toward that
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will help get genes in the next generation, then natural selection will favor misperception.
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I even talked a little about the, for example, the split brain experiment suggesting that we
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overestimate the extent to which we have our conscious self is kind of a CEO self.
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The second thing I mentioned is that we are not designed to be happy and that, in particular,
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gratification is designed to evaporate because that's what keeps us motivated, you know, to
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seek, you know, more food, more sex, more status, whatever it is that has been conducive
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I didn't, I don't think I understood at the time.
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I did quote the Buddha saying something in that book, but it was kind of off topic.
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I mean, I don't think I understood at the time that these two things, having illusions about
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the world and being prone to suffering are not only, well, I knew that at least I kept, maybe
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I didn't understand the way Buddhism links them up in any event.
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I certainly did not understand the extent to which, as I now believe, evolutionary psychology
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provides a kind of a backstory for Buddhism and helps corroborate even some of Buddhism's most
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And also, I mean, I think modern psychology more broadly does.
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There are experimental findings that have nothing to do necessarily with evolutionary psychology
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So I see the clearest connection with that book, but I could probably find some little
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Now, there's a whole nother part of me that has written op-eds about foreign policy and
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That's only connected to this book in the sense that I think if we, if everyone in the
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world did see things more clearly in a way that I think meditation facilitates, we would
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have fewer wars and foreign policy problems in general.
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Well, so I should mention the title of the book.
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The book is Why Buddhism is True, The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.
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And we will get into the significance of all those words.
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But I guess let's just linger on the title for a second, because this I can only imagine
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as an author who has tried to dust off the term spirituality and put it in scare quotes
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I mean, yeah, no, I mean, I did that in waking up.
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In fact, we had the same publisher, Simon Schuster.
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So I can imagine this title, Why Buddhism is True, gave you a little trepidation.
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I mean, first of all, it just sounds kind of unbearably overbearing or something.
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There's like, who the hell are you to say that after, you know, 2,500 years, you've come
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up with some fresh insight into the question of the foundation of Buddhism's truth.
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Secondly, what are you doing using a word like true when there are even parts of Buddhist
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philosophical tradition that cast doubt on whether that word has ultimate meaning?
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You know, there are lots of different, you know, Buddhism, like all spiritual and, in
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a way, philosophical traditions has evolved over time and developed these different branches.
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In some cases, the different branches have different ideas.
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So isn't it essentialist to act as if there's a single Buddhism?
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I actually address those in a quick note to readers at the very beginning, or at least
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Um, you know, I joked to friends in publishing before the book came out that, uh, that the title
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may be a little hyperbolic, but I don't think it exceeds industry standards.
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But I, I, you know, honestly, I'm willing to stand by it.
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I, I mean, I, I also have an appendix where I elaborate on the specific, uh, Buddhist ideas
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that I think are corroborated and the extent of their corroboration I'm claiming.
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Uh, and I elaborate a little more on what I mean by true, but, but, you know, with all
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that as qualification, um, I'm serious about the title.
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Well, and I don't, it's not that I've had some special insight, certainly, as you know,
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if you've read the book, I don't claim to be some kind of great meditator.
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I mean, Sam, you have much more meditative depth and meditative history than I have, and
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Um, I just think that until the advent of modern evolutionary psychology and some findings
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from experimental psychology, uh, in general, it was, it was not possible to nail some of
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So it's just, uh, it's like for most, for almost all of 2,500 years, it hasn't been possible
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Well, there's one thing you bring that is pretty novel.
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I don't know that I have encountered it anywhere, which is the piece that we'll talk about the
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way in which evolutionary psychology really dovetails nicely with the truths as they can
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be gleaned from Buddhism or specifically the practice of meditation.
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I guess the other caveat here is that you are not endorsing any form of Buddhism.
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You're not arguing that rebirth is true or likely to be true.
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And I don't think you talk about in the book, but I would imagine you're not any more of a
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fan of Buddhism as a reservoir of political insight than I am.
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And if you look at societies that have been Buddhist historically, they have fairly unimpressive
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And the people who've argued that Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was made possible in large
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part because of a Buddhist spirit of quietism that incubated that kind of extremism.
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I don't have a strong opinion about that, but it's just not obvious that Buddhism is the
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perfect operating system for a society to thrive politically or scientifically or in any other
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I guess people would want to remind us of what's happening in Myanmar right now and very strange
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career arc of Aung San Suu Kyi, who was everyone's favorite saint when she was under
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And now she's not far from some bizarre angel of tribal vengeance in her not dealing responsibly
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with the Rohingya Muslim ethnic cleansing crisis.
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So it's not Buddhism you're really pushing for as any kind of ideology.
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There are certain things in Buddhism, specifically mindfulness meditation and the truths about human
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experience that can be gleaned from it that you think give us an unusually good look at
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what it's like to be us and what the prospects are for bettering our lives by a deliberate use of
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I'm not defending things commonly considered supernatural or exotically metaphysical like
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I'm talking about the naturalistic part of Buddhism, sometimes called secular Buddhism.
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But I would say I am defending, well, not just radical claims.
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Well, first, let me say, I think at the heart of Buddhism pretty broadly lies what I consider
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a kind of amazing claim, which is that the reason we suffer and the reason we make other people
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And that's I say it's an amazing claim because it suggests that you can kill three birds with
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If you can learn to see the world more clearly, then you will suffer less.
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You will be a better person toward other people.
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And I think that's found pretty broadly across the Buddhist traditions.
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I certainly think you can locate that in both Theravada and Mahayana.
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And if you ask what they mean by see the world clearly, again, in both traditions, there are
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some pretty radical claims about the extent to which we're deluded.
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I mean, the idea that the self doesn't exist or even that our conception of the self is is way,
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The doctrine of so-called emptiness, that that our perception of the world out there is deeply
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misleading in ways we could get into later if you want.
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That's a radical claim when you look at what the claim is.
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And I'm actually defending those propositions to a pretty considerable extent.
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And I'm certainly defending that that first thing that that, you know, the reason we suffer,
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you know, that our suffering and our bad behavior are related to not seeing the world clearly.
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Well, I guess it says something about me that the truths of selflessness and emptiness and
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the connection between suffering and seeing the world clearly, those weren't among the
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radical claims that I was thinking about when when I was differentiating you from the rest
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All of that seems now to me straightforwardly true.
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Take some work to even get them to take it seriously.
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I mean, I would quickly say on the political issue.
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I mean, that's a whole subject we could get into.
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But I think the first thing people have to understand when they ask, well, wait a second,
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what about Myanmar is, you know, in Asia, lay Buddhists, by and large, don't meditate.
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So right away, if, you know, if my book is talking to a considerable extent about how meditation
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can clarify both our literal kind of, well, our vision of reality and our moral vision,
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that what's happening, the horrible things that are happening right now in that part of
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the world are not, you know, all that closely connected to that claim.
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Yeah, no, that is something that is not often appreciated, that meditation is a very esoteric
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endeavor within the context of any Buddhist society, really.
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I would think this is probably true even of Tibetan society, such as it still exists.
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But it's definitely true of a place like Thailand or Burma.
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So several doors open here that I want to rush through each at the same time.
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I guess, so just to summarize basically what you said about the point of contact between
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meditation or Buddhism and science, there is this alignment between what we can understand
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about ourselves largely through evolution and to some degree through neuroscience and how
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And understanding this both can give an impetus to a practice like meditation, and they can
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also both reduce our suffering and reduce the kind of suffering we produce for others.
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I think that second piece that speaks to goodness and morality, I feel like that connection, I feel
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like you've also acknowledged this somewhere in the book, that connection is less clear, which
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is to say there are people who seem at least to be very good meditators who aren't necessarily
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And so the connection between competence in meditation and being a good person is less direct
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Um, and of course, you know, historically, uh, if you, you know, the Dharma, the Buddhist
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teachings have included a lot of, uh, ethical instruction.
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The assumption seems not to have been, uh, that if you just meditate, you'll automatically
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That said, I think there's a correlation, some kind of probabilistic correlation.
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I mean, I think you see this even at the beginning of a meditative practice.
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If meditation, you know, if you're just doing what you don't even think of as Buddhist
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meditation and you call it mindfulness-based stress reduction, and it calms you down a
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little, you'll probably be an easier person to get along with.
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I mean, uh, uh, you'll probably become what a utilitarian would call a better person just
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because you're causing less suffering, you know?
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And, and I think that, that correlation tends to be there, but you're right.
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There are a number of famous, very adept meditators, you know, who sexually exploited their students
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And in principle, meditation is a tool, you know, adeptness at meditation could in principle
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be used to make you a more effectively bad person.
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As a general matter, I think you're, you're absolutely right.
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When you look at the motives in yourself for being a jerk, they are fairly reliably undercut
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by your pain, more and more attention to the dynamics of your own suffering and wellbeing
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and, you know, questioning rather skeptically why you should follow each thought to its behavioral
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And I do think there is a, as you said, a probabilistic correlation between time spent practicing something
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like mindfulness and being more ethically sensitive.
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Before we actually get into mindfulness and its connection to what we know about ourselves
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scientifically, how did you get into any of this?
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When was your interest in something as esoteric as mindfulness was?
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It's not, it's pretty current now, but, you know, 14 or so years ago, it was not nearly
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How did you get interested and what form has your interest taken?
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Yeah, well, I guess, you know, probably ever since college, I had occasionally tried to
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It was one of those things, you know, you're supposed to dabble in Eastern philosophy and
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I have a very limited attention span for one thing.
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So I finally, on the advice of a friend, tried an actual one week meditation retreat in 2003,
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silent meditation retreat in the, you know, Vipassana slash mindfulness tradition.
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You might say Vipassana and mindfulness aren't exactly the same thing, but they're related.
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And, you know, it was just, first two days were hell.
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I couldn't focus on my breath, hated myself for failing.
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Most of our listeners will be familiar, I think, with this topic because I've had Joseph
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Goldstein on the podcast, although it's been a couple of years.
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But do you want to describe what a meditation retreat is like and how startlingly different
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it is from ordinary life for someone who hasn't done it?
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In fact, the first thing this friend did was say, you should go hear Joseph Goldstein talk
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And this was 2001 because I remember it was right after 9-11.
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And then it's, you know, it's his retreat center, the Insight Meditation Society that
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And, you know, these things vary from retreat center to retreat center, how they're structured
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At IMS, it's like, by my count, I think it was five and a half hours total of sitting meditation
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each day, five and a half hours of walking meditation.
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You do a little job in the morning that keeps the cost down for everyone.
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At night, you hear a Dharma talk by one of the teachers.
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You know, the meditation sessions are 45 minutes.
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There's no talking except like a couple times a week you can check in with a teacher either
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And if anybody goes to a retreat, my advice is do not bring your smartphone.
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Don't, whether or not the retreat center emphasizes this, get off the grid, set your email on auto
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So you're there, you're not, you know, so those first couple of days, I'm like, you know,
00:27:50.060
everyone there looks like they're doing better than I am.
00:27:52.200
Uh, and most of them were, I'm sure they, uh, you know, they were mostly veterans.
00:27:56.660
Probably I couldn't focus on 10 consecutive breaths.
00:28:06.680
Had you meditated for some considerable period before you sat your first retreat or did you
00:28:15.340
I went to a couple of meetings at a place where they did Zen in DC, like 25 years ago.
00:28:20.920
I had gone at a Unitarian church to a Unitarian church here.
00:28:26.840
I mean, to sessions after the church service a few times, but no, I just, it had never,
00:28:31.920
I had never understood why anyone would meditate.
00:28:34.540
Hadn't got an inkling, like zero positive reinforcement.
00:28:38.020
Well, that's interesting because not many people jump into a retreat without having experienced
00:28:43.860
enough benefit or seeming benefit from meditation to feel like they want the full immersion
00:28:49.780
Yeah, I don't, I don't, I honestly don't know why.
00:28:52.700
I mean, as you probably know, I was brought up religiously and so, I don't know, maybe
00:28:56.240
there was, you know, and then I lost my Christian faith.
00:29:01.760
And also, I mean, as I acknowledge in the book, I'm not a person wholly without improvements
00:29:07.120
that could be made to my psyche, you might say.
00:29:09.900
And that's what brings a lot of people to meditation, you know, just ranging from mild anxiety to
00:29:16.140
severe self-loathing, whatever the issue may be.
00:29:18.520
You know, it often begins as a therapeutic thing.
00:29:21.000
I think in my case, it was more than therapeutic.
00:29:24.440
I think I was, you know, I probably in some sense wanted salvation, you know?
00:29:31.100
I mean, that's, I was, I was brought up to want salvation and I don't know, but, but I
00:29:38.280
They're not guaranteed to work out wonderfully, but they, you know, I call them extreme sports
00:29:44.320
I mean, there can be harrowing times and deeply gratifying and awe-inspiring times and profoundly
00:29:51.920
illuminating times, but it's a serious thing that I encourage people to do if they're at
00:30:01.180
I guess, I don't know if you would agree with this, but when I recommend that someone sit
00:30:05.720
a retreat or if someone comes to me, you know, wondering whether or not they should sit a retreat,
00:30:09.280
I tend to say that they shouldn't sit a retreat shorter than five to seven days.
00:30:18.040
I feel like the first two or three days of any retreat of really any length, I mean, it
00:30:22.900
can be two or three days or it can be three months, are the hardest.
00:30:27.480
And if you only sit for a weekend, you basically have had the full experience of hitting the wall
00:30:35.340
of your own restlessness and disinclination to be there without giving yourself any time to settle
00:30:41.100
in for, you know, what it's like to actually be there.
00:30:47.800
I say like when they say, what about a weekend retreat?
00:30:51.560
I say, well, if it's a good way to scout out a teacher to see if you want to spend a whole week
00:30:57.420
Otherwise, I would not expect very dramatic results.
00:31:00.220
So I would not have gotten anything out of a weekend retreat.
00:31:05.760
And yet by the end of a week, you know, and I described some of this in the book, but by
00:31:11.640
I mean, there had been both individual experiences while meditating that were, well, in one case,
00:31:22.300
But beyond that, there's just this transformation of your consciousness.
00:31:26.340
I mean, I mean, not just when you're meditating, but you're like walking around in the woods and
00:31:34.060
And I remember in this first retreat, I came upon a weed called a plantain weed that I had
00:31:40.320
actually spent a lot of time trying to kill, usually by pulling up, because it's the kind
00:31:44.160
of weed that had afflicted a couple of front lawns I had had.
00:31:48.000
And I just suddenly thought, why have I been trying to kill this weed?
00:31:54.520
And now that's going to sound like this touchy-feely, oh, you know, but there's a significant
00:31:59.700
point I was experientially apprehending here, which is that, and it sounds trivial when you
00:32:06.560
say it as a point, okay, which is just that weed is a human-imposed category.
00:32:20.140
There are plants that in some cultures people have decided they don't want on their lawns
00:32:24.340
or their flower beds, and that's what we call a weed.
00:32:25.980
But that doesn't mean that there's any kind of objective, rigorous rule that separates weeds
00:32:33.680
And it doesn't mean that weeds are actually unattractive in some objective sense.
00:32:39.780
And again, that sounds kind of like a trivial point, that humans categorize things.
00:32:45.040
Obviously, it's a human-imposed category, but Sam, you probably know what I mean.
00:32:49.160
When you feel it as a perceptual shift, you know, you realize that how subtly these human
00:32:58.080
conceptions and like stories we tell infiltrate your perception normally.
00:33:02.960
So like I had been going around apprehending essence of weed in this subtle way that I didn't
00:33:09.100
even understand, you know, I wasn't aware of doing it, but when it's gone and you're
00:33:15.600
just, it's just a plant, that's a really dramatic perceptual shift.
00:33:22.420
And, you know, I personally think, I mean, it depends on what you mean by the Buddhist concept
00:33:27.480
And there are different interpretations of this within Buddhism, but I think the perception
00:33:30.880
I had is related to one common interpretation of the idea of emptiness, which is just that
00:33:39.100
the things we see in the world actually don't have essences.
00:33:44.160
And to see the, you know, to see emptiness is to truly experientially appreciate that things
00:33:53.260
don't have essences and that the essences we perceive reflect kind of human-imposed categories.
00:34:01.400
And again, it would be hard to appreciate from what I've said how powerful it felt to like look
00:34:08.960
at a weed that I had always hated and go, that's as beautiful as the other stuff in the forest.
00:34:15.260
But I think it was like a non, a highly non-trivial apprehension.
00:34:20.620
Well, before we get into the topic of emptiness, which I definitely want to touch, I think we
00:34:26.020
should just remind people what the practice of mindfulness is so that they can understand
00:34:31.740
what it is you were doing that could have produced an epiphany like that and others we'll
00:34:36.920
And this is also speaks to why there's nothing unscientific about this enterprise.
00:34:43.340
There's a lot that can go by the name of meditation or, you know, spiritual practice that can seem
00:34:49.280
starkly unscientific because it comes freighted with specifically religious concepts and iconography
00:34:57.360
and things that are being added to your experience, you know, ritualistically or, you know, by virtue
00:35:03.720
of, you know, what you're visualizing or the mantra you're chanting.
00:35:07.900
And all of that can seem like a departure from empirical rigor.
00:35:13.220
And it's not to say that all of those practices need be a departure from empirical rigor.
00:35:17.820
There's a way to stand with the Hare Krishnas and chant without being a religious lunatic,
00:35:23.840
I would argue, but with something like mindfulness, the connection to science, at least potentially,
00:35:32.800
All mindfulness is, is paying very close attention to experience without adding anything to it.
00:35:47.820
It's just in each moment, you are making an effort to clearly notice whatever you in
00:35:55.740
fact notice, you know, whether it's a sensation in the body or a sight or a sound or a thought
00:36:01.380
or a mood arising in the mind, you're noticing these phenomenon, the contents of consciousness
00:36:09.980
And that clear noticing is different from the way you're tending to live in at least two
00:36:18.140
I mean, one is you're tending to live your life, and this is something very few people
00:36:22.560
notice about themselves until they try to meditate, you're tending to live lost in thought.
00:36:27.940
You're thinking every moment of the day without noticing that you're thinking.
00:36:31.960
And your experience of the present moment and your experience of anything you can notice
00:36:37.180
is coming to you through this veil of discursivity that is in fact not noticed by you.
00:36:44.920
It's just hard to pay attention because you are thinking every single moment of the day
00:36:50.440
And so you'll try to follow the breath as an initial exercise in mindfulness.
00:36:58.220
People will pay attention to the breath and then feel that they're doing it for even minutes
00:37:04.000
at a time and then say, well, you know, when you ask them what that was like, well, you
00:37:08.660
know, I did it for like five minutes, but then I got distracted and then I came back.
00:37:12.560
Whereas, you know, and as everyone discovers on their first retreat, you know, if their life
00:37:16.840
depended on it, they couldn't stay on the breath for anything like five minutes.
00:37:20.600
It's hard enough to follow five breaths in succession without getting carried away by thought.
00:37:25.680
Yeah, actually, it was once on a retreat with the Burmese meditation master, Upandita Saidao,
00:37:33.740
It was like a two-month retreat and it was set up in such a way that you could hear the,
00:37:39.400
as you said, that you would have a daily or every other day interview for 10 minutes with
00:37:45.640
And this retreat was set up so that you could actually, you could hear the interview that
00:37:52.380
And you're in the vestibule waiting for your chance to talk to Upandita.
00:37:55.740
And so I could hear the person in front of me every time I went for an interview.
00:37:59.000
So I was hearing this person say in the beginning, you know, in the first few days of the retreat
00:38:03.580
that he could, as I just said, he could stay with the breath for maybe five minutes and
00:38:10.800
And, you know, I just recognized at once how absurd that was because this was not my first
00:38:15.180
But then over the course of maybe six weeks, I could hear his experience getting more honest
00:38:21.220
where he would say that, you know, now maybe he can get 10 breaths in succession and then
00:38:26.380
That's not a description of a person's ability degrading.
00:38:30.680
That is a description of what it's like to actually equip yourself with the tools to notice
00:38:35.840
how powerfully distracted you are in each moment.
00:38:38.920
And so just to bring one other element in here.
00:38:40.620
So once you can pay attention to experience closely, again, without adding anything to
00:38:48.000
it, you then begin to notice the difference between merely being aware of phenomenon and
00:38:55.480
reacting habitually to phenomenon as described in the Buddhist lexicon, you know, with desire
00:39:02.960
And so your tendency to grasp at what's pleasant and push away what's unpleasant, that begins
00:39:09.160
to seem, as in fact it is, a powerful source of disturbance in your mind.
00:39:15.640
And as you know, the Buddhists link that to basically all forms of psychological suffering.
00:39:21.080
But at minimum, this is an automaticity you can relax by merely paying more careful attention
00:39:27.700
to the raw qualities of experience, non-judgmentally, not, you know, not grasping at what's pleasant
00:39:35.060
And when you do that, a door into a very different kind of experience of a sort that you just
00:39:46.000
And again, at no point have you stepped away from the spirit of scientific empiricism.
00:39:54.620
You're not believing anything on insufficient evidence.
00:39:56.780
You're not pretending to know something you don't know.
00:39:59.360
You're actually just paying more careful attention to what it's like to be you in each moment.
00:40:08.840
People haven't done it, doubting this and saying, well, so you say, you went off and
00:40:12.200
meditated and you're claiming that the view of reality you had after that is truer than
00:40:21.320
Um, I think you and I both feel on the basis of the actual experience that there are reasons
00:40:28.780
to believe, uh, that it is a more objective view you're getting when your mind calms down,
00:40:37.260
you can kind of feel the layers of, uh, story fading away and, and, and, and, and so on.
00:40:45.780
Um, what I try to do in the book is, is to provide actual, you know, arguments to the
00:40:56.420
I mean, to take, uh, what you mentioned, the emphasis in Buddhism on both aversion on
00:41:02.020
the one hand and a particular kind of attraction on the other, a kind of a clinging, you use
00:41:07.680
the term desire, a kind of a, you know, a craving for something, what, however you want
00:41:12.580
to put it, um, I think that, that is just a very deep insight into the way human psychology
00:41:26.920
Um, and you know, if you, if you, if you pay attention and again, it's hard, as you say,
00:41:34.800
it, you know, it's easy to think, well, if I want to see things clearly, I'll just look
00:41:38.560
at these curtains and stare at them and not look at anything else.
00:41:41.440
And there's some sense in which you're seeing them more clearly than you were five minutes
00:41:45.980
But, but I, I think when you meditate, you realize how subtle, uh, the things are that
00:41:52.620
are keeping you from true, uh, clarity and, and they tend to boil down to very subtle manifestations
00:42:03.320
of aversion and kind of clinging or, or, or desire, right?
00:42:07.340
I mean, it's like, it's like that weed, there was, there was an element of aversion in my
00:42:12.500
perception of that weed that was coloring that perception in very subtle ways.
00:42:19.200
And that, you know, and I argue that, that if aversion is coloring your view of something
00:42:27.380
If you really want to talk about what is an objective view of the world, you have to remember
00:42:32.360
that the aversions we have are, they're products of a particular evolutionary process, natural
00:42:39.480
selection as manifests in a particular lineage, namely human evolution.
00:42:46.160
Um, and then, you know, on top of that particular experiences we have in our lifetimes and so on,
00:42:51.380
but the point is aversion and, and, uh, and desire, there's not necessarily anything wrong
00:43:00.680
And in fact, both of them can be very valuable survival mechanisms and can be a great pragmatic
00:43:05.160
value and can also bring you pleasure that it's not to be denied.
00:43:10.120
It, it, it, it's when you start, uh, when they color your view of the actual truth of
00:43:17.680
things, uh, that I think they are just, uh, that they are, uh, philosophically suspect.
00:43:23.620
So I think, you know, I think this, this, the, the, the, this Buddhist, this cutting to the
00:43:28.520
core of it, like more than a couple of millennia ago that, that this emphasis on aversion and,
00:43:35.080
you know, kind of clinging attraction or attraction, it's, it's astute and it's profound.
00:43:41.280
I mean, when you think about it, since the very origins of life to approach or to avoid
00:43:48.340
If you look at a bacterium, that's what its behavioral algorithm is all about.
00:43:51.840
So since we were, I mean, who knows when sentience, subjective experience, as we think of it,
00:43:58.060
uh, dawned, but, but in some sense at its very core are these two experiences,
00:44:05.080
experiences and they, they infiltrate our emotions, they infiltrate our perceptions more subtly.
00:44:12.140
And I, and I think one, that's why I think that one, uh, perspective from which to appreciate
00:44:17.740
Buddhist philosophy is the evolutionary perspective, if that makes sense.
00:44:22.600
Well, let me just flag a possible point of confusion here.
00:44:25.360
So it would be easy to respond based on what you just said, that of course, desire and aversion
00:44:30.460
have been hammered into us by evolution and they're absolutely necessary for our survival.
00:44:37.180
You're just going to wander off a cliff if you have no desire to stay alive or not suffer
00:44:45.100
So there's this, I think, understandable sense that a life without desire and aversion would
00:44:53.520
be a bad thing, or in fact, just starkly untenable.
00:44:59.480
There's something, I guess we could call a kind of status quo bias here.
00:45:03.480
It's not well understood that the mind in terms of its kind of raw attention, the powers of
00:45:10.240
attention can be trained or that a person can be more or less talented in paying attention.
00:45:16.640
Now, it's obviously in a kind of a physical domain, it's obvious, you know, that there's
00:45:21.240
a difference between an Olympic sprinter and someone who can't even get off the couch,
00:45:25.940
I mean, there's a range of athletic abilities is undeniable.
00:45:30.040
And there's a range of intellectual abilities we also recognize, but these run more in the
00:45:36.180
direction of knowledge acquisition and an aptitude for it.
00:45:39.780
So it's not really well understood that just by, you know, looking at the drapes, as you
00:45:45.360
say, most people aren't in a good position even to begin to pay attention.
00:45:52.340
And there really is a scope for real training here, even to get to the starting line in terms
00:45:59.840
of understanding what there is to pay attention to and what the consequences of noticing it might
00:46:05.820
And so this is a real barrier that a lot of people never surmount, which is they hear that
00:46:11.800
meditation is a good idea or has all of these health benefits or psychological benefits, and
00:46:19.640
And so they try it for five minutes or an hour, and they look inside and they just see nothing
00:46:25.620
of interest, really, because they're really just sitting there thinking whether the legs
00:46:30.680
And they're not actually able to do the practice to a degree to reveal anything at all.
00:46:37.420
The fact of that failure isn't obvious to them.
00:46:39.580
And this is why taking psychedelics has been the doorway to a real commitment to something
00:46:47.300
like meditation for so many people in the West, because, you know, many of us wouldn't
00:46:52.020
have been convinced that there was a there there, but for having our normal levels of
00:46:58.180
psychological unhappiness overridden for a time by one or another drug.
00:47:02.800
That's not to say that drug experiences are always a perfect surrogate for what there is
00:47:09.300
But at a minimum, if you take 100 micrograms of LSD, something is going to happen.
00:47:15.040
Now, it may be very unpleasant, it could be pleasant or unpleasant, but very few people
00:47:19.560
walk away from that experience thinking that it's impossible to change a human experience.
00:47:25.760
I mean, they may think that it was just a drug experience and has no implication for the rest
00:47:31.320
But with meditation, you really do have the problem where you can recommend it to a skeptical
00:47:37.500
They can think they've tried it and they've come away thinking that it, you know, it doesn't
00:47:42.860
work for them or this is just a totally fraudulent enterprise.
00:47:46.280
People are practicing some elaborate form of self-deception by meditating.
00:47:51.480
And I personally think that the fact that I've gotten something out of it means that just
00:48:00.680
It never worked, but there was a way I finally found to try it.
00:48:04.020
It did make it work, even if it took like a one week silent meditation retreat.
00:48:08.340
But I think there are very few people who can't come to see that, oh, yes, this is giving
00:48:16.200
I mean, let me give you a trivial sounding example, but I think a significant one.
00:48:20.860
So where I do my morning meditation, there's like one of these little, you know, kind of
00:48:29.320
And one thing I've discovered while meditating and listening to it is that actually this refrigerator's
00:48:37.660
hum, at least, definitely consists of at least three different sounds that are coming from
00:48:42.700
different parts of the refrigerator's mechanism.
00:48:46.180
And they are, you know, varying apparently independently of one another.
00:48:50.660
So they're kind of weaving this little symphony.
00:48:53.640
But anyway, I maintained it that it is an objective fact that if I consulted with the makers
00:48:58.400
of the refrigerator or somebody, they could confirm that, yeah, actually, the hum is these
00:49:03.880
Now, I am sure that if I had never started meditating, I would have gone my whole life
00:49:08.160
thinking that a refrigerator's hum is a, you know, it is just one thing, right?
00:49:14.580
And annoying in the same way that that weed of yours is annoying.
00:49:17.960
That's the other thing is when you're when you're listening to it during your meditation,
00:49:24.560
But but but but but that part, you might say, is subjective.
00:49:27.480
What's not subjective is that I think, you know, I think you could confirm.
00:49:31.760
Actually, I was getting closer to the truth when I said, no, there's at least three different
00:49:39.620
Now, on the kind of relatedly on the on the thing you mentioned first about, well, aversion
00:49:48.120
and and and desire or attraction are pragmatically useful.
00:49:55.920
But even then, I think it's important or it can be useful to anyone and including someone
00:50:02.920
who does mindfulness meditation to get clear on when feelings are actually useful to you,
00:50:09.880
the person, as opposed to when they were useful merely from natural selections point of view.
00:50:16.280
And then third, as opposed to when in like a modern environment, you're have you're having
00:50:22.940
a feeling like anxiety that that might have been more useful in the environment we evolved
00:50:28.460
in, but is not so useful now because you're reacting to a novel environment that we're not
00:50:35.600
So and this gets back to the fact that we're not designed to see the world clearly.
00:50:41.960
Like if you look at something like fear, you know, if you're taking a walk and you've been
00:50:48.060
told that there are rattlesnakes around and somebody died of a rattlesnake bite while hiking.
00:50:52.760
Every time you hear the grass rustling, you're going to think there's a rattlesnake there.
00:50:57.040
You're going to entertain that hypothesis very seriously.
00:51:00.060
If a lizard darts out, you may briefly literally see a snake.
00:51:11.740
And both of those are designed in features from by natural selection, apparently.
00:51:15.620
And the logic is clear that it's better to be safe and sorry.
00:51:18.340
Better to have all these false positives of fear than than to be insufficiently vigilant
00:51:27.440
Now, that's a case where your interests in natural selection interests coincide.
00:51:32.440
You look at something else like our drive for status.
00:51:39.100
Well, status during evolution seems to have been correlated with genetic proliferation.
00:51:45.660
On the other hand, the seeking of it seems to be subject to that general tendency of gratification
00:51:51.820
So we get the promotion or we do whatever we rise in people's esteem and before we enjoy
00:52:00.780
So there I would say, look, if you love it, go for it.
00:52:04.860
But but if it's if the status game is causing you suffering on balance, then you might remind
00:52:10.940
yourself that was just designed to get your genes into the next generation in a different
00:52:18.540
Actually, you know, so if you want to think about socioeconomic status, that's inversely
00:52:24.980
So there's all kinds of absurdities that a modern environment creates.
00:52:29.680
And finally, if you look at something like anxiety, natural emotion.
00:52:35.300
But first of all, there is the false positive issue.
00:52:37.940
So like, yeah, it's natural to think, oh, where's my toddler?
00:52:47.820
You know, you want to be vigilant about your toddler.
00:52:50.000
But then you look at something like public speaking anxiety or the anxiety that a parent
00:52:54.940
feels upon dropping their child off at a daycare center for the first day where they're
00:52:58.900
going to be tended by somebody, you know, the parents don't know.
00:53:05.680
I mean, it's, you know, in the environment of evolution, in a kind of hunter gather type
00:53:10.680
environment, they didn't do public speaking and address a bunch of people where it really
00:53:15.640
mattered and they had never met any of the people they didn't.
00:53:18.140
They didn't leave their children in the care of people they had never met.
00:53:22.180
And so these are cases where if you're lying awake at night before a big talk or if you're
00:53:27.680
sitting there worrying about your kid at daycare when it's not going to motivate you to do
00:53:31.540
anything that's going to help, these are unproductive anxieties that they're causing you suffering.
00:53:38.320
They are in many of these cases, they lead to actual illusions like catastrophe scenarios.
00:53:44.480
So I think it's you're right that our feelings were designed to be pragmatically useful, but
00:53:52.640
sometimes that they were useful from the organism's point of view and sometimes just from the point
00:53:58.880
And sometimes in the modern environment, they're they're not useful from anyone's point of view.
00:54:05.100
And so I think, you know, I try to provide this this backstory in the book because I think
00:54:12.660
it is it is useful for some people in when they're doing something that, as you know,
00:54:19.380
mindfulness meditators encourage you to do, which is just observe your feelings as they
00:54:24.740
kind of appear and disappear and see them as these transient phenomena and as nothing more.
00:54:30.980
In other words, don't invest them with the meaning that we're naturally inclined to invest them
00:54:36.480
with. Here again, I think the evolutionary story can help a meditator appreciate that, yeah,
00:54:43.920
it might you might be getting closer to the truth if you just drop the meaning that you've
00:54:49.400
invested feelings with and just watch the feelings.
00:54:52.840
One thing you make very clear in the book is that nature didn't equip us to know reality.
00:54:58.220
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00:55:02.820
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00:55:07.480
podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations
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I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely
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on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.
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here are those videos that will be anyone who can. And you can see me in the comments is