Why Buddhism Is True
Details
This month we will be reading:
Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.
by Robert Wright
About book
A journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness.
The mind is designed to often delude us 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.
About chapters
- Pleasure as Illusion
- The Alleged Nonexistence of Your Self
- Thoughts Think Themselves
- Meditation
Pleasure as Illusion
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.
One illusion that’s common to these things: the overestimation of how much happiness they’ll bring.
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.
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:
Achieving these goals should bring pleasure, since animals, including humans, tend to pursue things that bring pleasure.
The pleasure shouldn’t last forever.After all, if the pleasure didn’t subside, we’d never seek it again.
Dukkha/unsatisfactoriness
Organisms, including humans, are designed by natural selection to react to their environments in ways that will make things “better” (in natural selection’s sense of the term). This means they are almost always, at some level, scanning the horizon for things to be unhappy about, uncomfortable with, unsatisfied with.
The Alleged Nonexistence of Your Self
the five “aggregates” that, according to Buddhist philosophy, constitute a human being and that human’s experience.
(1) the physical body
(2) basic feelings;
(3) perceptions
(4) “mental formations
(5) “consciousness
The Buddha runs down this list and asks which, if any, of these five aggregates seem to qualify as self. In other words, which of the aggregates evince the qualities you’d expect self to possess?
For starters, he links the idea of self to the idea of control.
So form—the stuff the human body is made of—isn’t really under our control. Therefore, says the Buddha, it must be the case that “form is not-self.” We are not our bodies.
We don’t ordinarily have this kind of control over our feelings
Control isn’t the only property that people tend to associate with the self, and it’s not the only property the Buddha examines in this discourse. When I think of my self, I think of something that persists through time. I’ve changed a lot since I was ten years old, but hasn’t some inner essence—my identity, my self—in some sense endured?
Maybe, after “you” let go of all five aggregates, it’s this one aggregate that is liberated, released from entanglement with the other four. And maybe that’s what “you” are after letting go of the idea of the self: a kind of purified form of consciousness.
Thoughts Think Themselves
He seemed to be saying that thoughts, which we normally think of as emanating from the conscious self, are actually directed toward what we think of as the conscious self, after which we embrace the thoughts as belonging to that self. This, in turn, seemed consistent with the idea that modules generate thoughts outside of consciousness and somehow inject them into consciousness.
Meditation
Moments of more consequential truth. If I’m feeling anxiety or dread or hatred, and, through meditation, I get to a point where I’m just observing the feeling rather than engaging with it, that is a moment of truth. Observing the feeling, after all, involves noting where in my body it resides and what form it assumes there. And that location and form—somewhat like the three separate sounds constituting the refrigerator’s hum—is an objective fact.
The more you focus on the objective fact—on the feeling itself and its instantiation in your body—the less unpleasantness you may feel.
Interviews:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJZTrVlSBTY
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/23/16179044/buddhism-meditation-mindfulness-robert-wright-interview
Why Buddhism Is True