Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.

Buddha believed that the less you judge things—including the contents of your mind—the more clearly you’ll see them, and the less deluded you’ll be.

Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.

the conscious self doesn’t create thoughts; it receives them.

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

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.

The thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi is said to have written, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

This has been the point of much of this book. The human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it. It is designed, in a certain sense, to be controlled by that input. And a key cog in the machinery of control is the feelings that arise in response to the input. If you interact with those feelings via tanha—via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings—you will continue to be controlled by the world around you. But if you observe those feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can in some measure escape the control; the causes that ordinarily shape your behavior can be defied, and you can get closer to the unconditioned.

RAIN. First you Recognize the feeling. Then you Accept the feeling (rather than try to drive it away). Then you Investigate the feeling and its relationship to your body. Finally, the N stands for Nonidentification, or, equivalently, Nonattachment. Which is a nice note to end on, since not being attached to things was the Buddha’s all-purpose prescription for what ails us.

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.

As Kurzban has summarized this finding, “We think we’re better than average at not being biased in thinking that we’re better than average.

In fact, one big lesson from Buddhism is to be suspicious of the intuition that your ordinary way of perceiving the world brings you the truth about it.

What causes all the hatred? At some level, it’s always the same thing: human beings operating under the influence of human brains whose design presupposed their specialness. That is, human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields that control us in many and subtle ways, convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it’s not a reflection of the “real us”; whereas they and theirs aren’t in the right and aren’t by nature good, and when they do the occasional good thing, it’s not a reflection of the “real them.” And it doesn’t help matters that these reality-distortion fields often magnify, even out-and-out fabricate, the threat posed by them and theirs.

So if meditation did liberate you from obedience to these feelings, it would be, in a certain sense, dispelling an illusion—the illusion you implicitly subscribe to when you follow the feeling, the illusion that the rage, and for that matter the revenge it inspires, is fundamentally “good.” It turns out the feeling isn’t even good in the basic sense of self-interest.

This is a reminder that natural selection didn’t design your mind to see the world clearly; it designed your mind to have perceptions and beliefs that would help take care of your genes.

If you want the shortest version of my answer to the question of why Buddhism is true, it's this: Because we are animals created by natural selection. Natural selection built into our brains the tendencies that early Buddhist thinkers did a pretty amazing job of sizing up, given the meager scientific resources at their disposal. Now, in light of the modern understanding of natural selection and the modern understanding of the human brain that natural selection produced, we can provide a new kind of defense of this sizing up.

If you accept the idea that many of our most troublesome feelings are in one sense or another illusions, then meditation can be seen as, among other things, a process of dispelling illusions.

In other words, if you were to build into the brain a component in charge of public relations, it would look something like the conscious self.

The Dalai Lama has said, “Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.

Mindfulness meditation is often thought of as warm and fuzzy and, in a way, anti-rational. It is said to be about “getting in touch with your feelings” and “not making judgments.” And, yes, it does involve those things. It can let you experience your feelings—anger, love, sorrow, joy—with new sensitivity, seeing their texture, even feeling their texture, as never before. And the reason this is possible is that you are, in a sense, not making judgments—that is, you are not mindlessly labeling your feelings as bad or good, not fleeing from them or rushing to embrace them. So you can stay close to them yet not be lost in them; you can pay attention to what they actually feel like. Still, you do this not in order to abandon your rational faculties but rather to engage them: you can now subject your feelings to a kind of reasoned analysis that will let you judiciously decide which ones are good guiding lights. So what “not making judgments” ultimately means is not letting your feelings make judgments for you. And what “getting in touch with your feelings” ultimately means is not being so oblivious to them that you get pushed around by them.

The Buddha said anger has a “poisoned root and honeyed tip.

understanding the ultimate source of your suffering doesn’t, by itself, help very much.

Zen is for poets, Tibetan is for artists, and Vipassana is for psychologists.

when we see them for what they are. When we’re not pulled into the drama of them. It’s sort of like going to the movies. We go to the movies and there’s a very absorbing story and we’re pulled into the story and we feel so many emotions . . . excited, afraid, in love. . . . And then we sit back and see these are just pixels of light projected on a screen. Everything we thought is happening is not really happening. It’s the same way with our thoughts. We get caught up in the story, in the drama of them, forgetting their essentially insubstantial nature.

The gratification of curiosity rather frees us from uneasiness than confers pleasure; we are more pained by ignorance than delighted by instruction.

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.

Underlying it all is the happiness delusion. As the Buddha emphasized, our ongoing attempts to feel better tend to involve an overestimation of how long “better” is going to last. What’s more, when “better” ends, it can be followed by “worse”—an unsettled feeling, a thirst for more. Long before psychologists were describing the hedonic treadmill, the Buddha saw it.

It is the study of how the human brain was designed—by natural selection—to mislead us, even enslave us.

If you put these two fundamental Buddhist ideas together—the idea of not-self and the idea of emptiness—you have a radical proposition: neither the world inside you nor the world outside you is anything like it seems.

You may have noticed a trend in this chapter: the more we ponder the connection between reason and feeling, the dimmer the prospects seem for keeping our behavior under truly rational control. First we learned that Hume seems to have been right: our “reasoning faculty” isn’t ever really in charge; its agenda—what it reasons about—is set by feelings, and it can influence our behavior only by in turn influencing our feelings. Then we learned that, actually, even the term reasoning faculty suggests more in the way of orderly deliberation than is typical of the human mind. The view emerging here is that we don’t so much have a reasoning faculty as reasoning faculties; modules seem to have the ability to recruit reasons on behalf of their goals.