TS: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Robert Wright. Robert is a journalist, scholar, and award-winning author of several books spanning several topics, including science, history, religion, evolutionary psychology, and game theory. His first book, The Evolution of God, was a New York Times bestseller, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. His other titles, Nonzero, The Moral Animal, and Three Scientists and Their Gods have also received significant critical acclaim. His most recent book, Why Buddhism is True, was published in August of 2017.
Robert is also the cofounder and editor-in-chief of Bloggingheads.tv, a current-events “diavlog” where a diverse cast of contributors discuss politics and ideas. A primary mission of Bloggingheads is to help people see things from perspectives other than their own, and in particular, from perspectives that for whatever reason they aren’t normally able to appreciate.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Robert and I spoke about how mindfulness meditation can be understood as a rebellion against natural selection. We also talked about the discovery in meditation, and in contemporary psychology, that we actually don’t think our thoughts as much as thoughts are rising as what Robert calls “mental modules,” and how this leads to an insight from Buddhist philosophy about the discovery of no-self. We also talked about whether or not there’s an unseen order in the universe; what drives moral action; two different ways to look at enlightenment: as a process, and also as an ideal instinct; and finally, when we step back and become aware of how our minds work, how we’re participating in what Robert calls “a metacognitive revolution”—a revolution upon which Robert believes our future depends. Here’s my conversation with Robert Wright:
Robert, to begin, I’d love to dial us back two decades or so, and understand what was going on in your life—here you’re a critically acclaimed writer and journalist—that drew you to meditation. How did you become interested in meditation, and why?
RW: Well, I guess I had flirted with meditation kind of off and on, probably since college, but I had never really felt that I got much out of it, and I hadn’t taken a very serious stab at it, I have to admit. But, I finally decided on the recommendation of a friend to kind of go whole-hog and do a one-week silent meditation retreat at the Insight Meditation Society. This was in 2003. By the end of the week, I was sold.
As far as what got me to do it, I guess I was brought up religiously, but was no longer religious by the time I graduated from college, so maybe I was looking for something that was spiritual in a different sense than my spiritual upbringing had been spiritual. I don’t know. I was curious. But in any event, after a week of retreat, I was sold. I was an evangelist.
TS: OK, that’s strong language, becoming an evangelist, being “sold.” What happened during that week that it had such an impact on you?
RW: Well, the first couple days were intensely frustrating. I don’t have a very long attention span, so I was having at least as much trouble as the average person focusing on my breath. But within a few days, things changed, and by the end of the week I just felt that my consciousness was in a totally different place. I was just much more appreciative of beauty. I was much less judgmental of people, and in addition to that, I had had just a couple of fairly dramatic experiences during the retreat. I mean, while meditating.
I know at the end of the retreat I called my wife, and she says that just as soon as she heard the tone of my voice, she liked the new me better than the old me, because I was just so much calmer, and happier, I guess. Of course, as you know I’m sure, however transformed you feel at the end of your first retreat—and I did feel transformed—the transformation doesn’t last automatically. You have to work at a daily practice to hang onto some of what you feel you got. I’ve had my ups and downs since then, but I definitely have a well-established daily practice now, and I’ve been to a number of retreats since that have served as kind of refreshers, but that was the big threshold for me, back in 2003.
TS: One of the things that I think is so interesting about your story is that you discovered meditation in a profound way through a week-long silent retreat. I think that a lot of people try to start meditating listening to an audio program, or reading a book, or working with an app, and they’re working with 10 minutes a day, or 15 minutes a day, but they don’t actually go to a retreat. I know in my own experience it was the deep immersion experience like you’re describing, a silent retreat that really introduced me and gave me the taste of meditation. I don’t know if I could’ve done it just 10-minutes-a-day-style. I’m wondering what your thoughts are about that.
RW: I feel I could not have done it. I had tried. I had even been to kind of a, I guess it was just kind of an all-day session, and actually that was just to kind of check out the teachers who were teaching the retreat that I went to. They were teaching a kind of a one-day thing in the area. I went to that, but I didn’t feel that I got the hang of it, so to speak, or got a whole lot out of it. I just found that they seemed like perfectly nice people, and I’d be happy to spend a week under their guidance. But no, I don’t think it ever would’ve clicked for me had I not done total immersion, just gone to boot camp. I don’t think anything less than that would’ve worked for me.
Different people are different. Some people take to it very naturally and easily, but I tell people who have dabbled and not gotten much out of it that they might consider taking a more dramatic approach. I have to say, everyone who has gone on a week-long retreat at my suggestion—I guess there’s now seven or eight of them, a few are in my family—they were all satisfied customers. A lot of them thought, “I’m not a meditator.” A retreat experience can take somebody who doesn’t meditate very readily, or has trouble focusing, and show them what life can be like, in principle, if you do take meditation very seriously, and get something out of it.
TS: OK, so here you are. You’re a meditation evangelist now. How has meditation changed your view and your interaction with your thoughts and feelings?
RW: Well, I already—even before that retreat, I kind of knew that my feelings and thoughts were not necessarily reliable guides. I had written a book called The Moral Animal in the 1990s on evolutionary psychology, and one take-home lesson from evolutionary psychology is—well, actually there are two main take-home lessons. One is, our minds were not designed to make us happy, or to necessarily make us see the world clearly. Because, according to just standard evolutionary theory, the genes that build your brain were preserved by natural selection just to help get more genes into the next generation. Just to help spread genes. Brains can get their genes spread by not seeing the world clearly, by being deluded, and also discontent can be a ticket to kind of doing the things that get genes into our next generation. So for starters, according to evolutionary theory our minds weren’t built by natural selection to necessarily help us see the world clearly, or to bring us lasting happiness.
Then the second thing is that then we are living in a world that isn’t the world we were designed by natural selection to live in in the first place. So it gets even worse; our minds become even less reliable guides. You take something like anxiety, that I think most evolutionary psychologists would say is natural, it has a function, but you put it in a modern environment, and it behaves even less—anxiety makes things even less pleasant for us than it would have in a more natural, almost pre-technological environment.
So I already was suspicious of thoughts and feelings, but I didn’t have anything to do about it. It’s like, you can fly into a rage, and look back and go, “Oh, that was a mistake.” You can have a very unflattering view of some person who is your rival, and in moments of calm reflection you can go, “Well, I kind of have a biased view of them, I admit it.” Or you can surrender to the urge to eat too much, or whatever. You can go through life being kind of aware that feelings are misleading you in some sense, and are giving rise to thoughts that are not good for you, but that doesn’t mean you can do anything about it.
The thing I liked about meditation, and the Buddhist philosophy that undergirds the kind of meditation I was doing at that retreat, is that it actually offers a prescription. It’s not just a diagnosis. Evolutionary psychology had given me a diagnosis; it had explained why thoughts and feelings are not necessarily reliable guides, but meditation provided me with an actual technique for at least beginning to liberate myself from thoughts and feelings that are not wholesome.
TS: OK, but if I’m going to guide my life by something, and I’m going to question thoughts and feelings, how do I make decisions? How do I go about things? My feelings about this person, whether I like them or not like them, well, obviously I want to spend more time with the person I like, and avoid the person I don’t. I have to trust my feelings on that, yes?
RW: Yes; ultimately I don’t know anyone who is not at all guided by feelings. The question is distinguishing between feelings that are going to lead you to do unwholesome things, or things you’ll regret, or things that will make you suffer or make other people suffer, and feelings that don’t have those properties. It’s a question of kind of deciding which feelings are reliable guides, and kind of learning how to avoid following the feelings that aren’t reliable guides.
This can be very kind of trivial stuff. It can be like, you’re sitting on the meditation cushion in the morning and you just realize, “You know, there’s no point in sending that kind of mildly irritated email I had planned to send today. That’s not going to lead to anything good.” That’s not a very profound instance of reflection, but at the same time it’s a real accomplishment if you don’t send these ill-advised emails that we all at some point have the impulse to send. I think there are more profound examples, by the way, of how this kind of reflection can serve us well, but the object of the game isn’t to quit feeling things.
It’s not even necessarily to quit having the unwholesome feelings. It’s to experience them in a different way, and get some perspective on them, and just quit following the unreliable feelings.
TS: Tell me when you say “to experience our thoughts and feelings in a different kind of way,” what you mean by that different kind of way.
RW: There is this irony—and I talk about this kind of early in the book, because it’s really struck me—which is that if you get closer to feelings you can get a certain kind of critical distance from them. The first big what you could call meditative breakthrough I guess on my retreat was—it was like around the third day. I had had too much coffee; I’d cut back coffee from twice a day to once a day in honor of being on a retreat. That was my big renunciation was the afternoon coffee, but I was still drinking it in the morning. I had had too much, and that gives me a kind of jittery, kind of a clenched jaw feeling. There’s a real feeling of stress and irritation like in the jaw.
I was sitting down meditating. I was trying to meditate, and I thought, “Oh no, I can’t meditate because I’ve got this feeling in my jaw.” Then I remembered, well, the basic instruction is don’t run from unpleasant feelings the way you normally do. Don’t say, “How can I get rid of this unpleasant feeling?” Just experience the feeling, and in that sense, get closer to it. Just accept it. Embrace it. When I did that, first of all, I observed things about it I might not have normally observed. You can almost kind of in a certain sense see the texture of the feeling. You’re kind of experiencing it more closely.
Then as soon as I did that, I kind of passed a kind of threshold where all of a sudden I thought, “OK, that feeling, I guess you could call it an unpleasant feeling, but it’s in my jaw, and I’m up here in my head, and so I’m just kind of observing it, and it’s no longer a problem.” All of the unpleasantness was drained from the feeling, and I suddenly felt I had a critical distance from it, but that had resulted from experiencing it more closely. It’s the same thing with anything, and any feeling.
One thing I tell people sometimes who have never meditated is, “Just wait for the opportunity to observe a feeling, then. Don’t even think of it as meditation. Just next time you’re really sad, sit down, close your eyes, and accept the feeling, and observe the feeling. Just ask yourself, ‘Where in my body? Is it in my head? Where?’ And more specifically, ‘Where in my head is the feeling of sadness?’ Just sit down, observe it, accept it, and I think you’ll find it starts making you suffer less.” As I said, it’s just kind of ironic, because you get closer to what is supposedly an unpleasant feeling, but getting closer to it offers you a degree of liberation from it.
TS: Now Robert, there’s this great quote from your work that I really want to unpack here for our listeners. Here’s the quote. You write, “I think of mindfulness meditation as a rebellion against natural selection.” Help us understand what you mean, and in light of this conversation we’re having about the feelings that we have, how is this move to get close to our feelings a type of rebellion, if you will?
RW: Yes, well it gets back to this idea that natural selection has a kind of agenda. All animals and plants in the world, according to evolutionary biology, and I include us among the animals, all of them were created by a single criterion, which is that those genes that were best at getting genes into the next generation are the ones who came to kind of constitute the blueprint for the species.
In our case—well first of all, in the case of many animals, that means that built into the animal is a kind of perennial dissatisfaction; a difficulty in maintaining happiness. Because, when you think about it, if you imagine an animal that eats a meal and then is eternally satisfied, never needs to eat again, well, then the animal would starve to death. Or, in a sexually reproducing species if we had sex once, and then just laid there and basked in the afterglow forever and never pursued sex again, our genes wouldn’t do very well compared to other people in our species.
It seems to be the case that the way natural selection got us to recurringly pursue these various goals that help get genes in the next generation, is to make us perennially dissatisfied; and not long after we reach some goal, whether it’s food, or sex, or social status, getting some promotion or winning some award, or some material acquisition, buying something that brings us gratification—not long after these things, we are again filled with the desire, the kind of thirst for more of the same thing.
That’s just one example of how natural selection gets us to play its game, to pursue its agenda. If rather than follow that guidance, if rather than surrender to the dissatisfaction, and follow the promptings of the urge that recurs not long after you eat, or have sex, or whatever else, get more status, whatever—if you examine the urge, and decide whether or not you want to pursue more of whatever it is, that is, in a certain sense, a rebellion against natural selection’s agenda. You’re not doing what it is that natural selection kind of built us to do.
You could say the same thing about a lot of feelings. Fear of social rejection or disapproval, for example. We, by design, according to natural selection’s kind of priority so to speak, we care deeply what other people think of us. That can be OK; that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but if you just live in fear of the disapproval of people whose values, when you reflect on it, shouldn’t be your guides, then maybe you don’t want to do that. Or, if you want to pursue social status at all costs, because that seems to be a kind of tendency that’s built into us, and you decide not to do that, that is in a sense rejection of natural selection’s agenda.
There’s a lot of different ways. Whenever you reflect on the feelings that kind of habitually guide us, and not necessarily reject them, but just decide whether or not you want to move in the direction they’re encouraging you to move, that’s a kind of rebellion against natural selection. That’s what I meant when I said that.
TS: In a sense, when we sit down to meditate, we’re making a counter-instinctual move. Our instinct is to go get more, and succeed, and survival of the fittest, but now I’m going to sit here, and relax, and be, and examine myself. You could call that counter-instinctual. Yet, so many of us are drawn to it, Robert. So, obviously there’s something in us that wants the kind of peace, and equanimity, and vision.
RW: Sure.
TS: How do you explain that part of us? That that’s obviously part of our evolutionary unfolding, to want that.
RW: I think, yes, I think there’s almost a cosmic sense in which part of our evolutionary unfolding brings us to seek a kind of a metacognition, a greater awareness of the way our minds work, and the ability to use that understanding of the way our minds work to achieve more peace of mind, and more kindness, and whatever else. What I mean by that, when I say that evolution in a cosmic sense is bringing us to this place, is that if you step back and look at the history of life on this planet, as if you were viewing it in time-lapse from Mars or something, you’ll notice that first of all, things starting out with a primordial ooze when you have these very primitive one-celled organisms, complexity gets built up. You get multi-celled organisms. You get societies of multi-celled organisms.
Then in our species, these societies start getting complex, and technology creates more and more complex societies, and now here we are on the verge of having an actual global community, and yet we also seem on the verge of blowing the whole thing apart in various ways, whether with environmental degradation, nuclear war, [and] just this kind of tribal in-fighting that you see both between countries, and within countries. It seems like if we’re going to sustain what has in some sense been the direction of the whole process, and achieve some kind of cohesive global community that involves mutual understanding among different kinds of people, I really think more and more people are going to have to get better at this kind of—again, you can call it metacognition if you want. My own preferred path toward it is meditation. That may not be the only way to gain the kind of equanimity that helps you interact with people in a more constructive way, but for me meditation seems to be the most powerful way to do that.
In any event, I think if the species wants to kind of sustain this direction, then it’s going to have to be drawn toward these kinds of contemplative practices and forms of awareness. As you suggest, when we do this—and there are certain things you can’t escape. It’s not like you’re entirely escaping your biological heritage. There must be within us this capacity. There must be within us this kind of, first of all, this desire for a higher level of awareness, and the peace of mind that can bring, and there must be the capacity for achieving it.
By the way, I’ve been giving natural selection kind of a bad rap, but it’s important to acknowledge that natural selection built into us things like compassion, and love, which are very good things. The problem is natural selection inclines us to sometimes not bestow things like compassion in a kind of equitable or defensible fashion. We may shower compassion on members of our family, or in some sense our tribe, or whatever, and have a correspondingly harsh stance toward people outside those groups.
It’s that tendency to kind of mis-deploy our gifts, like compassion, that I think is worth fighting. But at the same time, I want to recognize that these gifts are products of natural selection too. The fact that we have compassion, and the capacity for love, the capacity for understanding, and forgiveness, and so on. It’s kind of a question of using some tools natural selection gave us to work against some of the more unfortunate biases it built into us.
TS: And, I’m curious if you think it’s fair to say, and I think you were implying this, that our very future depends on our ability to do this.
RW: Absolutely. I mean, you see this in American politics right now. You see kind of tribal psychology run amok within the country. The country’s more politically polarized than ever. Along the religious dimension you see sectarian conflict, you see national conflict, and when these things are unfolding amid technological evolution that is giving us more and more ways to destroy the planet, something has to change. If we don’t get better at getting along with one another, we’re going to misuse these technologies in a catastrophic way.
I think further challenging us here is the way the evolution of information technology is changing the texture of our life so rapidly. Just like adjusting to things like social media, and keeping those things from kind of driving you crazy is a challenge. I think humankind is approaching a big kind of test, and I think either we cross through what you could call a spiritual threshold, or a threshold of self-awareness in larger and larger numbers, more and more people around the world, or, I think we could pay a very steep price.
TS: In your book, Why Buddhism is True, you call this potential, this threshold, a “metacognitive revolution” that we need. First of all, I really liked calling it a metacognitive revolution. I thought that might be more popular, people would like that better than maybe some of the other ways of describing [a] mass spiritual awakening, or something that would seem too, for lack of a better word, magical to people. But metacognitive, that sounds like a really smart thing to do. You used that language to describe what it would be like to step back and become aware of how our minds work. Seems pretty straight ahead. My question to you is, if you were to imagine a metacognitive revolution, what does that look like?
RW: First of all, I think you’re right that [for] some people ,words like spiritual with some people is off-putting, but I think there are other virtues as well in the word metacognition. I didn’t come up with it, but I do think it’s a good word. One is that it’s kind of a nod toward the fact that cognitive science, psychology, and related sciences, cognitive science is showing us, is illuminating more and more how the mind’s normal operation involves various kinds of cognitive biases. Some of them are just strictly economic, like you know there are weird kind of glitches in the way we think through economic decisions, but some of them are distortions in the way we look at other people. And how, whether you put somebody initially on the kind of enemy side of the line or the friend side, whether they’re part of your tribe or not part of your tribe, that influences how you process all kinds of information about them.
We’re leaning these kinds of things. We’re learning from psychology, and not just evolutionary psychology, but the mind as it normally naturally operates can be a very unreliable and even dangerous instrument. Part of the revolution is this growing foundation in science for practices that aim to do something about the problem, like meditation.
I guess I would say and answer your question what does it look like, I think there are two main parts. One is to spread awareness that science is showing us that the mind is in some ways an unreliable instrument. Then the second part is encouraging people to follow a practice that helps them address the problem, and that doesn’t have to be a Buddhist practice. I emphasize early in the book when I say why Buddhism is true, first of all I’m talking about the kind of naturalistic parts of Buddhism: Buddhist psychology and Buddhist meditation. I’m not really getting into what some people would call the religious or supernatural parts, or whatever. I’m leaving that aside.
But secondly, the things that I’m saying are true about Buddhism, those are things that could be accepted by anyone of any religious persuasion, I think. In other words, you could be a Christian, a Muslim, a practicing Jew, a Hindu, and have your own way of addressing the challenges that science is highlighting; the challenges of seeing the world more clearly, and suffering less, and make other people suffering less.
I do—one thing I like about the kind of Buddhist philosophy is that I think a lot of it can be boiled down to that, that the reason we suffer, and the reason we make other people suffer is because we don’t see the world clearly. That’s in a way good news, because however hard it may be to see the world more clearly, it’s kind of nice to think that by approaching a truer view of the world, by clarifying our vision, we can become happier people, and we can become better people.
That’s a message that I think is consistent with all religions, and different religions may have very different ways of clarifying vision. It may involve prayer; prayer can be a way of self-reflection. Prayer can be a way—like my own background is Christian, and I know that Christian prayer can be a way of deciding which voices inside you [that] you want to pay attention to, which urgings. You can pray for that, and there are various contemplative practices in Christianity and other schools of religion that have as their goal kind of deciding which interior voices to listen to. That’s—as we just said, that’s what a lot of meditation is about.
By the way, entirely secular people can clarify their vision in various other ways. It may be a purely secular form of meditation. It may involve, I don’t know, cognitive behavioral therapy. There are different ways to clarify the mind, and to get better at deciding which feelings and thoughts to accept as guidance. I just think it’s important that people around the world do it more and more, regardless of what tradition they’re doing it within.
TS: In your book, Why Buddhism is True, there are two core ideas that meditators begin to discover that are part of Buddhist philosophy that you go into in quite some depth, and I want to talk about them, Robert. One is you talk about the discovery of no-self. That there’s actually not a singular CEO manager, hierarchy, guy at the top who’s inside each one of us, or woman at the top, whatever, telling us this is—there’s not one, big, capital-S Self. Tell me what we know from science, from the science side, not so much the meditative side, and then we’ll get into how they come together, about whether or not there’s a CEO-self inside.
RW: Yes For some time, psychology has been moving toward the view that the conscious self is not really running the show nearly as much as we think. We all have this intuition that I, this conscious me, Bob, I make the decisions. I’m the CEO. Well, Buddhist scripture going way back, Buddhist texts going way back cast doubt on this idea, and it’s taken psychology a while to get to the point of casting doubt on it, but it’s started to happen.
For example, there are experiments in which they say to people, “OK, whenever you get ready to press the button, press the button.” They are monitoring the people’s brains, and their physiology, and it seems to be the case that the physical stuff that leads to the pressing of the button, that drives the pressing of the button, the physical stuff in the brain actually precedes the point at which the person is aware of making the decision to press the button. There’s all kinds of different experiments that similarly suggest that the conscious self is not really in touch with a lot of the actual motivation behind our behaviors, and not really making the decisions.
There’s a model that is more and more widely accepted, I think, within psychology, certainly within evolutionary psychology, called the modular model. In this view, the mind really consists of a bunch of different actors, and they’re kind of build by natural selection to do different things. There’s the actor, there’s the part, there’s the self that wants more food. There’s the self that wants more social approval. There’s different kinds of little modules that focus on different things, and they do a lot of the work below the conscious level. We’re not always aware of them, and we’re not aware that there may be competition among them in deciding what we do next. Do I go for that food? Do I stay here and talk to this person, or whatever?
What’s interesting to me about this modular model of the mind is how closely in accords with something you hear from meditation teachers sometimes. I mean, like at a retreat, sometimes you’ll hear a teacher saying, “Thoughts think themselves,” and what they mean is that if you reach a point of sufficiently kind of calm observation, that’s the way it may start to seem to you. Whereas you’d previously thought of the conscious self as this thing that thinks the thoughts, that from a very contemplative kind of position you start seeing these as, no, the thoughts kind of just float into the mind, and then the conscious mind kind of grabs them as its own, and claims them, and says, “I thought this,” but actually no. It’s more like thoughts are being injected into the realm of consciousness.
This is very consistent with this kind of modular model of the mind that a lot of psychologists are paying attention to. It’s just interesting to me that very deep and sustained meditation leads to a view of the way your own mind is working that is so consistent with a view that psychologists have been moving toward just through laboratory experimentation. I think it’s one of a number of ways that kind of a meditative approach to understanding the mind actually converges on the scientific approach.
TS: Now, Robert, I get it when you talk about having enough meditative awareness to see, “Oh, god, I don’t know where these thoughts are coming from. Are they coming from the person across the room? I have no idea. They’re just emerging. They stay for a period of time. They might come with a whole train filled with stories. Then they go. The train leaves. OK, I don’t know where thoughts come from.” I get that. I think a lot of people could relate to it.
At the same time, there does seem to be some part of it—you could call it the wise self, or the higher self, or the knowing self—that if I sit for a while, and just let all the thoughts be, let all the feelings be, it kind of knows the right thing to do, the right action to take. There’s this sort of inner knowing. How do I understand that if it’s not a “self,” but it feels like something inside me that’s coherent and wise?
RW: I kind of talk about this in the book when I look at the Buddha’s most famous discourse. It’s called The Discourse on the Not-Self, where he kind of makes an argument that the self doesn’t exist. He goes through and he says, look at the various parts, the things that you consider kind of the self, or parts of the self. You know, feelings, and so on. Do you really want to identify with these? Are they really under your control, and are they really bringing happiness, and so on? He says if not, let them go.
He goes through all the things that according to Buddhist philosophy together constitute human experience. I won’t get into the different names for these five so-called aggregates. He goes through them all and basically says let them go. He says, not in so many words, but then you will be liberated. I raise the question, well wait a second, if you let go of everything that constitutes the self, where is this you that gets liberated? What was that? If you’ve let go of everything, what is there doing the letting go?
This is kind of a paradox in the doctrine of not-self. At least superficially it’s a paradox. Now, there are people who reach such meditative depth, I guess, who say they have the full-on not-self experience, and it just kind of makes sense, even if it’s hard to explain. But, in any event, you’re right that there’s always going to be—I mean, certainly for me anyway. I don’t have realistic hopes of doing what Buddhists call attaining enlightenment, which is a very rare attainment. For me, certainly, yes there’s always going to be something there that, in a way, I’m thinking of as myself, but as you suggest, it’s a very different version of the self.
When it’s at its best—let’s say it’s eight days into a two-week meditation retreat or something. When I feel it is giving me the most reliable guidance, it’s a very different self from the self that exists if my meditation has lapsed, and I haven’t meditated in days, and I’m out running around in the world. That’s the other end of the spectrum. And you’re right, it’s just a more trustworthy guide. It just feels calmer, more in a way dispassionate, which doesn’t mean you’re not having feelings or that you’re not getting joy out of life by any means. If anything, the opposite; I’d say you get more joy out of life when you’re in the state of mind I’m describing. But, there’s a kind of a calmness about it that just makes it a good judge. There’s irony there, because relaxing judgment, not making judgment is of course part of the path that gets you there.
TS: So here we are, we’re day eight of a ten-day meditation retreat, and you’re in this space. How do you experience the “self” in that space? Meaning there are all these mental modules at work. I might think of them as like sub-personalities, or whatever, but still, what’s your sense of selfhood at this point?
RW: I guess the main thing—and this is something that has payoff even just in everyday meditation, leave retreats aside, but I think the biggest thing is that there are parts of me that I might have considered part of the self that I’m not considering part of the self.
You just take something that a lot of people have trouble with: anxiety. I remember not long after my first retreat, I was about to give a talk. The next day I was going to give a talk in front of a pretty big audience, so it’s the kind of thing that makes me anxious. One thing that happens to me sometimes is the night before a big talk like that, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night, I’ll be anxious about the talk, and I’ll start thinking, “Oh wait, what if I can’t fall asleep? Then I’ll do a really terrible job.” So, I’ve got this anxiety. I just sat up and meditated. Sat up in bed, meditated on the anxiety, and my relation to it just suddenly changed fundamentally. I was just looking at it as if I was looking at piece of abstract art in a museum.
It’s like, “Well that’s interesting. It’s kind of in my abdomen. It’s kind of like a knotted rope in the middle of my abdomen. That’s what the anxiety looks like,” but I was really no longer considering it part of myself. I guess the main, one way to talk about what it’s like to move at least toward this not-self experience is that there’s parts of you that you used to identify closely with that led to suffering, that you’re no longer considering part of yourself. That can be unwholesome feelings, it can be the thoughts that are sponsored by those feelings. Like, “Oh, I’m going to screw up,” or, “Oh, that guy’s a jerk.”
I guess I’d say that the progress—the kind of, if you want to call it spiritual progress, or therapeutic progress, or whatever—it consists partly in having a more and more selective view of what is the self. Letting go of some of the baggage that you used to just automatically identify with, and even follow the promptings of. Then, the more of that you let go, the calmer a place you’re in.
TS: You draw moral implications from this, that the more we’re moving in this direction of no-self, that it changes how we act. Since we talked about the metacognitive revolution, I want you to unpack that for our listeners. How do we act differently when our sense of self dissolves to a certain degree?
RW: Yes, I mean—and this is the fascinating thing about the Buddhist claim, is that the path toward lessening your own suffering actually makes you inflict less suffering on others. It makes you a better person, and as I said also the idea is that it gives you a clearer view of the world.
Now, I want to emphasize, I don’t think it’s quite automatic that as you become a more effective meditator in the therapeutic sense—that as you use meditation to give yourself more peace of mind, I don’t think it’s quite automatic that you become a better person. There are definitely cases that are well known in the history of contemplative practice where, for example, there are very adept meditators who are exploitative as teachers. They may sexually exploit people. They may exploit people in other ways. I don’t doubt that these people are very good meditators, and in fact they may even use some of their meditative skills to exploit people more effectively.
So I don’t want to say you become an automatically better person. And this is the reason that in the Buddhist tradition, there’s a lot of moral guidance that comes along with the deal. They don’t just say meditate; there’s a whole list of things that are encouraged like right speech, and so on. But I do think that even if you aren’t getting this explicit kind of moral instruction, I do think that there tends to be a correlation between using meditation to become a happier, calmer person, and becoming, on balance, a better person, a more considerate person, a person who is less likely to get irate with someone just because you’re in a hurry at the checkout line, and they drop their credit card, so they’re slowing you down.
I think you are likely to be less harshly judgmental of a spouse, or a partner. I remember after my first retreat, my two daughters who were very young then, did something that really bothered me. I felt the urge to yell at them, and I saw the urge rise up, and I just looked at it and went, “You know, I don’t think this is going to make me happy,” so I didn’t follow it. I didn’t yell at them, which would’ve been an unproductive thing to do. That kind of thing was just almost a natural consequence of having gone to a meditation retreat for my own good. I didn’t go to the meditation retreat because I thought, “I’ll become a better father.” I thought, “Maybe it’ll make me happier, more whatever,” but in pursuing what you can call therapy, and just seeking peace of mind for yourself, I think on balance you do tend to become, not quite automatically, but you tend to become a better person.
TS: One of the things you’re pointing to is how meditative discoveries do and don’t translate into how we act in the world, and into our everyday actions. Sometimes they do seem to translate, and you point out other times they don’t. People can be incredible on the cushion, but not bring that into their actions in life. What do you think makes the difference?
RW: That’s a tough one. I guess what I’ll say is, I see the challenge in my own practice. I see like—so I meditate every day, and I am working to kind of convert that into a more constructive relationship with, say, my wife, or my kids, and I’m very conscious of that. Then, I’ll be reading the news or something, and I’ll read about somebody whose ideology drives me nuts, and whose ideology I think is a threat to the world; like in my case this would be like some militaristic, you know—I won’t name names, but people who’ve helped get the United States into a series of military misadventures. It’ll just take more reflection to realize how automatically my hostility toward them is just shaping the way I think about them.
That doesn’t mean that my goal is to get to a point where I decide that actually their ideology is fine. No. It’s just to get to a point where I don’t hate them. It’s not constructive to hate the individual people espousing the ideology you don’t like. At least that’s—in my view it’s not. It just leads you to overreact, and to often play into the hands of the ideological enemy, so to speak. I’ve actually started a thing called the Mindful Resistance Newsletter that’s partly about this. How do you resist political forces that you find abhorrent in the most effective way? Which I think is in the mindful way, in the literal sense of mindfulness, of just kind of paying careful attention, not being swayed too much by your emotions.
In answer to your question, why do some people become exploitative meditators, all I will say is that if you look at the urges they’re surrendering to, in some cases those are sexual urges—they’re strong urges. And so is the urge I was just describing, the urge to hate someone that you think is screwing up the world. They’re very big challenges, and so it is tempting to apply your meditative equilibrium to some parts of your life, and let the more difficult or more subtle challenges go, and I suppose that’s what happens with the people we’re talking about.
TS: Robert, at one point you mentioned that when it comes to enlightenment that you didn’t have any hope in your own life of “attaining enlightenment.” I thought it was interesting that the subtitle of your book, Why Buddhism is True, is The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. I think a lot of people have commented that the title of your book is bold, that you would use a word like “true.” I thought the subtitle was bold, that you would use a word like “enlightenment,” and that you could explain enlightenment and not be enlightened. I just wonder, first of all, what you think about that as an interesting challenge for a writer in your position.
RW: Well, it is a challenge. I think a lot of people have, you know, professors of Buddhism who don’t meditate at all have felt that they are capable of describing what according to Buddhism enlightenment is, so I’m not the first person to tackle that. But I’d also say, I mean enlightenment in two senses. I mean enlightenment in the traditional Buddhist sense, of the kind of end-state that is by Buddhist reckoning illusive, hard to get to, not many people have gotten there. The Buddha got there, but not many people do, and it involves the complete liberation from suffering, and viewing the world with perfect clarity. There’s that, there’s enlightenment as kind of the end-, and that’s the version that I don’t have realistic hope of attaining myself, in the strict sense at least of enlightenment.
But there’s also enlightenment as the process, which is to say just seeing the world a little more clearly today than you did yesterday. That is, you are a little more enlightened. If you, for example, see somebody behave in some way, and you go—and your feeling is you kind of sense like, essence of jerk in that person. That person’s a jerk, and you kind of perceive essence of jerk. It’s a feeling as much as a thought when you, in your kind of perception and cognition, as you apprehend that person.
If you develop the ability to just say, “Wait, I don’t really know. I know almost nothing about this person. I’ve been observing them for five seconds. For all I know, whatever they did that annoyed me, they did because they just found out that their spouse has a terminal illness or something. Who knows? They had a bad day. I just don’t know.” If you recognize that, and because you’re meditating every day, have the ability to just shift your perspective, and no longer see kind of essence of jerk in that person, I think that is an increment of enlightenment. That is a more enlightened view than the view you had before that perceptual shift.
I think even if I have no realistic hope of attaining enlightenment in the sense of the end-state, I do have the hope of becoming more enlightened than I am, and in that sense undergoing as much enlightenment as I can. I think we all have that potential, and I think thinking about the end-state can actually be helpful. Not necessarily pursuing it, but just—in mathematics, there’s this idea of something called an asymptote. It’s something you can get closer and closer to, but never attain. Even if you don’t ever attain enlightenment as an end-state, thinking about what it would be, I think, can maybe be helpful in orienting you as you try to move in the direction of it.
TS: I want to talk more about this end-state, because I think the other definition of enlightenment, a little more enlightened after this experience or that experience, or as I continue to practice and go on retreats—I get that, a journey of enlightenment. I think most people probably do. This idea of enlightenment as an end-state, I think it’s a lot trickier. Robert, part of where I’m coming from is here I’ve worked at Sounds True with so many different spiritual teachers and authors over three plus decades, and it used to be that people would ask me, “Do you think so-and-so’s enlightened? Is that person enlightened? Who’s enlightened, Tami? Please tell me.”
I realized, I don’t know if I’m qualified to say this person has reached a “end-state” because some beings seem more free in this area, but less free in that area. I don’t know if I’ve ever really met anybody who couldn’t stand to grow in some way or another, in some way. I’m curious about this end-state notion, what it means to you when you write about it.
RW: Well, I think I agree with you in the sense that, I’m not convinced that anyone on this planet right now is enlightened in the strict and all-encompassing sense. I have kind of maybe what is an old-fashioned view of enlightenment. People define enlightenment in various ways. There are people I know of who say they’re enlightened. They have attained awakening, but sometimes when I start talking to them I find that they have a narrower definition of enlightenment than I have. They might say, for example, “Well, enlightenment doesn’t necessarily have a moral dimension. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you are a good person in the way you treat everyone.”
Well, call me old-fashioned, but I actually think that the original idea in Buddhism was they would. It’s as much a moral attainment as it is a kind of personal attainment. That’s just a difference of opinion, but certainly if you define enlightenment less strictly, then it’s easier to imagine more people having been enlightened. I think of it as almost this ideal where the way I think of enlightenment, you would lose every ounce of selfishness, and I don’t know anybody who’s lost every ounce of selfishness. Maybe you do.
In Buddhist doctrine, the idea is literally not-self, no-self is part of enlightenment. By that, they mean the metaphysical apprehension of not-self, the recognition that the self is an illusion. But, the idea is also that selflessness in that sense, in the sense of recognizing that the self is an illusion leads to selflessness in the moral sense. At least that’s my understanding of the kind of early Buddhist teachings.
Maybe I’m using a kind of old-fashioned and strict definition of enlightenment, but I basically have had the same experience you seem to have had where you look at people who are very accomplished meditatively, but you can point to areas where maybe they can stand to grow a little.
TS: It sounds like you write about enlightenment in this one sense as an end-state as an ideal that’s helpful for us to point towards.
RW: That’s right. I don’t rule out the possibility that there are people around who have attained it, or that there are people who will. I’m just not confident I’ve ever met anybody I’d say that about, and I feel completely safe in saying I will never reach enlightenment in the strict sense, but you’re right. Because in the book I make the argument that if you did attain that ideal, that that would be complete moral clarity. You would have completely abandoned the selfishness in your perspective, and so that would be moral truth.
There’s an argument that, yes, enlightenment, whether or not anyone’s ever attained it, it deserves the term. That is the apprehension of both the truth about the world, kind of in a metaphysical sense, but also it’s the apprehension of moral truth, and just thinking about that in an abstract way. Just thinking that, well, whether or not you’re going to attain it, that would be the ideal state both in terms of your own happiness, and in terms of your moral conduct. That motivates me to want to move in that direction, however hard it is, to get very close to it.
TS: There’s one final thing I want to talk to you about, Robert, which is towards the end of the book there’s a final chapter on meditation and the unseen order. You quote the American philosopher and psychologist, William James. William James says, “Religion, in the broadest sense, can be thought of as the belief that there’s an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”
That really caught my attention, and it really caught my attention because I think from a young age I’ve always had this sense that there was an unseen order, and it’s something that has inspired me. In many ways, I think it has inspired Sounds True for the last three-plus decades. I’m curious to know if you have a sense, with all of the writing, scholarship, research you’ve done, that there’s an unseen order afoot.
RW: Yes. Well, you can mean a lot of things by that, of course. James, he was writing at a time 100 or so years ago when he was aware of the challenge science was posing to traditional religion, but he very much wanted to preserve some conception of spiritual truth, and spiritual pursuit. And, people can mean different things by the unseen order. They may mean god in a fairly traditional sense, or they may mean something very different. Yes, I certainly think that in some sense of the term, there is an unseen order. In fact, maybe in at least a couple of senses. I guess I’ve alluded to them both.
One sense is this claim that there is kind of a natural convergence between seeing the world more clearly, becoming happier, and becoming a better person. That those three things kind of tend to align. That’s a kind of order. The universe didn’t have to be built that way presumably, right? You can imagine a universe in which the more clearly you see things, the more horrible you become. Or, in various other ways those three things are not aligned. But I think that’s a kind of order.
There’s another, well it’s a related kind of order, I guess you could say, that I talked about in a book of mind called The Evolution of God, which is just that—well, I won’t try to articulate the whole thing, but it gets back to this thing I mentioned about evolution in the cosmic sense. Not just the biological evolution of the human species, but the kind of evolutionary trajectory that technology has kind of taken us on. Where we get more and more interconnected with people at greater and greater distances, and so social organization grows and grows, and now it’s on the verge of kind of a global community. I think that something [that’s been] driving that. Again, you can imagine a universe that didn’t have that.
What’s interesting to me about that is that what we’ve been driven to is this point where the preservation of the whole social structure, which presumably we’re in favor of—the preserving an orderly and harmonious social structure demands moral progress, I think, of the kind that could be furthered by what we’ve called metacognition. Again, if you look at it not just in the everyday sense of me becoming happier, and then maybe becoming slightly more considerate to people, and those two things being interrelated, and seeing things more clearly.
If you don’t just look at it in the immediate sense, but look back in the cosmic historical sense, you could argue that we’ve been driven to this point where our very social order, and the preservation of the whole species demands that we see things more clearly, and make moral progress. You again see, in this deep cosmic sense, a kind of aligning of kind of moral truth, or a closer approximation of it, and our own welfare. It just seems like we’ve been driven to this point.
When I say that, I’m not departing from the kind of conventional evolutionary biology explanation of how we got here. I’m not necessarily positing any kind of non-material thing that’s guiding us, but even if you’re a strict materialist, and you just think, “Well, it’s just kind of nuts, and bolts, and stuff that’s driven us to this point,” you have to ask the question, why is the universe set up such that the nuts and the bolts, the materialistic process drives human kind toward this point of reckoning—well, creates human kind in the first place, and then drives it to the point of reckoning where we are strongly encouraged to more closely approximate moral truth and a clearer view of the world. Why is that?
In that sense too, I know I’ve said a lot, and it may not be very clear, but that’s another sense in which I think you could say there’s in some sense an unseen order. Things are set up in this very morally interesting way, and we don’t really know why they’re set up this way.
TS: I want to try one thing on you here, Robert, which is, Sounds True published an audio and video with Ekhart Tolle called The Flowering of Human Consciousness. In it, Ekhart compares a teacher like Buddha or Jesus to an early flower that has appeared. He uses this metaphor from the natural world. That at one point on the earth, there were no flowers. There was green biological life.
But then a flower appeared, and then more flowers appeared, and before you know it there were flowers covering different parts of the world. And that these great “enlightened teachers” were early flowers, but that over time we’ll have more, and more, and more flowers. I’m just wondering what you think about that as a metaphor for an evolutionary process you could say spiritually, or from a metacognitive viewpoint that we might be in. What do you think about this flowering idea?
RW: Yes, and if you wanted to get kind of hardcore analytical about it, and use a term that is common these days, the term “meme” has become used to describe just something on the internet that catches on, but originally it was coined by this hardcore Darwinian atheist, Richard Dawkins, to refer to any cultural idea or product. I mean a song, a religious tradition, a moral idea, anything. And he pointed out, I think rightly, that with our species, the real action in evolutionary terms is evolution among memes. It’s cultural evolution. It’s competition among ideas, and so on.
So yes, I think what you’re describing is when a species of idea flourishes, and just like a successful species of flower leads to flowers all over the place, it’s the same way with ideas. There’s something about the direction of the drift of organic evolution that gets us to a point where some of these very good ideas, like you heard from Jesus, or the Buddha, or whoever, do find fertile ground. They spread. I think again, they need to spread more, and more, but I think it’s a perfectly apt metaphor for where we are.
The important evolutionary action now is cultural evolution, and I think that’s the contribution we can all make now, is to help in our own backyard, so to speak, nurture the ideas that the great sages came up with, and in some cases that science is continuing to reveal or support, and just try to make them flourish in our own backyard, in our own neighborhoods.
TS: Robert, I’ve really enjoyed talking with you. You’re so well informed, and thoughtful, and clearly coming from a warm heart. I really, really appreciate your work. Thank you.
RW: I really appreciate the opportunity, Tami, because I know you’ve done so much work in this area, broadly speaking, and have done so much good. I’m really delighted we could have the conversation.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Robert Wright. He’s the author of the new book Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. Thanks everyone, for listening. SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey.
