Making Sense with Sam Harris - #102 — Is Buddhism True?

Episode Date: October 30, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Robert Wright about his book Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking with Robert Wright. Robert is an author, I think most famously of the book The Moral Animal, which was one of the first books that many of us read on evolutionary psychology. Robert has written many other books and for many journals.

He's written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Time, Slate, The New Republic. He's a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He's taught in the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania and in the religion department at Princeton. And he's currently a visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York. And Robert's new book is Why Buddhism is True, The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. And we talk almost entirely about the book. We start the conversation putting some of our checkered history to rest so that we can move on. the book. We start the conversation putting some of our

checkered history to rest so that we can move on. Those of you who know the history will know that it has been, as I often say of these kinds of things, fairly prickly. But we have a very collegial conversation on the topic at hand. We talk about the connection between meditation and morality. There's a fair amount about the harmony between evolutionary psychology and the Buddhist view of the mind. Also a lot about the illusoriness of the self and how to make sense of that claim. In any case, I now bring you Robert Wright. name. In any case, I now bring you Robert Wright. I am here with Robert Wright. Robert, thanks for coming on the podcast. Well, thanks for having me, Sam.

So you've written a fascinating new book, which I'm very eager to talk about. But before we dive into that, I need to say a word or two, or we should say a word or two about our history, because some of our listeners will be aware of it, and they, as a result, will be waiting for this conversation to run completely off the rails. I'm sure we're capable of that if we put our mind to it. I wouldn't count us out. There was a passage in your book on page 17, which made me smile. I'm going to read that. It gives us the right context, I think. You write, I don't have a hostile disposition toward humankind per se. In fact, I feel quite warmly toward humankind. It's individual humans I have trouble with. I'm prone to a certain skepticism about people's motives and character, and this critical appraisal can harden into enduringly harsh judgment. I'm particularly tough on people who disagree with

me on moral or political issues that I consider important. Once I place these people on the other side of a critical ideological boundary, I can have trouble thinking generous or sympathetic thoughts about them. I must say, that's the vibe I've been getting from you, Lo, these many years. What do you think accounts for that? Well, first of all, if you keep calling my book fascinating or whatever you called it, I will be able to think generous and sympathetic thoughts toward you. Yeah. It's funny how that works. The, uh, I don't know. I'm, I'm, I'm, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm a, not a, uh, I'm a, I'm a somewhat temperamental person in general, and I've always had a temper and, you know, issues matter to me.

I mean, it's funny because the book is about some of the cognitive biases that lead us to behave this way. I mean, that lead us to think the worst of people under some circumstances. So I'm aware of the issue. I don't know. It's interesting. Do you think you're kind of wholly free of this? Not that I'm interviewing you. You don't have to answer that question. Well, you should feel free to interview me because this is definitely a conversation more than an interview. Always fire away. But I feel like the dynamic has been fairly one-sided between us. It's not to say that I can't be a jerk in other circumstances, but I feel like I've been noticing, I mean,

not a ton of it and certainly not a ton of it of late, but I actually went back and looked at the history just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating or recalling in a way that was starkly self-serving. But I think the only two times we've met are both on videotape. You unearthed this interview you did with me more than 10 years ago and released it, I think, only like a year ago. So it's this time capsule interview,

which is kind of hilarious because it plays like a deposition. And it's kind of funny in relation to your current book because I now realize that your interest in things like meditation and Buddhism and the notion that the self might be an illusion and that it would be possible to be recognized as such all of those interests predate that conversation we had a long time ago where to my eye I was getting a fairly incessant attitude of skepticism from you toward me on those topics.

Our conversation ranged over other topics as well. I think the main issue ideologically between us has been, you have felt that my linkage between the specific ideas within Islam and jihadism, and therefore terrorism, has been inaccurately or unnecessarily direct. And you think that much of our entanglement with the Muslim world has very little to do with religion per se. It has much more to do with politics and tribalism and other more terrestrial issues. And so we've disagreed about that, but I feel like that gave kind of everything else you were hearing from me, a kind of lack of luster, which made you deeply skeptical on points, which now I see in your book, you know, you and I basically agree.

Yeah. I mean, first of all, you're right. There's a big there's a genuine ideological and slash philosophical tension between us at one level. I mean, I think you and some of the other new atheists are wrong about the relationship between religious doctrine and behavior generally. And that in the contemporary context, that leads to unfortunate policies that have exacerbated the situation. So yeah, and I continue to care deeply about that. Now, if that's led me to be unfair to you in the past, then I was wrong to do that. I actually haven't reviewed the record that much. I was thinking that review from, or the interview that I did of you 10 years ago, I was reasonably civil. I mean, I'm sure it was critical because I think you're wrong, but in any event, you're right. There is this broad area of agreement as well. I hesitate to say that it's worth watching, but it's worth watching just for, I mean, one,

we're both more than 10 years younger, which is unnerving in and of itself. Yeah. Well, I look 20 years younger. You look five years younger. That's what's unnerving. It's quite the picture of Dorian Gray I wish I had somewhere. But the way it's filmed, too, is kind of hilarious. It really does look like a deposition. It's like a two shot in what looked like it's like a wood panel, you know, legal office looking space, and everything conspires to make it seem uncomfortable. And then we had a debate actually on the issue that we disagree about with respect to Islam. And that was very, very weird for reasons that have nothing to do with you. In fact, there may even be reasons that you don't know anything about. But that was the one time I ever walked out on stage having just received a seemingly credible death threat

for that event itself. That event was streamed live on the internet and someone called the venue saying that they were going to shoot me at exactly seven o'clock at that event. And I don't know if you recall any of this, but the event started a little late. And the half hour preceding my walking out on stage, I had been standing in the company

of three officers from the LAPD and venue security and other security, all trying to assess whether this was a credible threat. And then I remember leaving their company feeling no total assurance. What's interesting in that video is you can actually see it on my face. The degree to which I'm scanning the audience while I'm talking is absolutely bizarre. So that didn't improve our vibes that night. I remember the security detail and thinking you must be a very important person. Also, I want to assure you that I had nothing to do with the death threat, Sam. It's a good method, though. If you want to win a debate, you can call in death threats on your opponent. Yeah, it would work. I mean, I'll keep it in mind for future debates. I remember a

wildly supportive audience for you, like rock star level, wildly supportive and being envious. But it was kind of I think it was an atheist. Yeah, it was some kind of gathering of like-minded folk. Yeah. Okay. Well, so now to the matter at hand, we'll put all of that behind us. And all is forgiven because you've written, as I said, a very interesting book on a topic that is dear to my heart. So let's just get into that. And well, I guess before we get into the book itself, just how would you summarize your interests and background

as a writer and a journalist? This book is not obviously in your wheelhouse, given everything else you've done. How do you describe yourself as a thinker? I think it kind of fits in, broadly speaking. I mean, I think I've always been interested in kind of cosmic, philosophical, slash spiritual maybe issues. And that's evident in really probably in all my books. The most obvious kind of precursor, I guess, of this is my book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal, where I noted in that I wasn't well-versed in Buddhism at the time. Just to be clear, it was the Buddhism part that seemed new. Obviously,

the evolutionary psychology has been your through line for many years. Right. I did note in that book and even emphasize two things. One, natural selection did not necessarily design us to see things clearly. You know, natural selection's bottom line is to get genes in the next generation. And if having an illusion or misperceiving something or having a tendency toward that will help get genes in the next generation, then natural selection will favor misperception. I even talked a little about, for example, the split brain experiment suggesting that we overestimate the extent to which we have our conscious self as kind of a CEO self. The second thing I mentioned is that we are not designed to be happy and that

in particular, gratification is designed to evaporate because that's what keeps us motivated, you know, to seek, you know, more food, more sex, more status, whatever it is that has been conducive to genetic proliferation. I didn't, I don't think I understood at the time, I did quote the Buddha saying something in that book, but it was kind of off topic. I mean, I don't think I understood at the time that these two things, having illusions about the world and being prone to suffering, are not only... Well, I knew that at least, maybe I knew they were emphasized in Buddhism. I didn't understand the way Buddhism links them up. understand the extent to which, as I now believe, evolutionary psychology provides a kind of a backstory for Buddhism and helps corroborate even some of Buddhism's most radical assertions. And also, I mean, I think modern psychology more broadly does. There are experimental findings

that have nothing to do necessarily with evolutionary psychology that also back up Buddhism. So I see the clearest connection with that book, but I could probably find some little linkage with other books. has written op-eds about foreign policy and so on, that's only connected to this book in the sense that I think if everyone in the world did see things more clearly in a way that I think meditation facilitates, we would have fewer wars and foreign policy problems in general. Well, so I should mention the title of the book. The book is Why Buddhism is True, the Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. And we will get into the significance of all those words. But I guess let's just linger on the title for a second, because this I can only imagine as an author who has tried to dust off the term spirituality and put it in scare quotes with really never a feeling of comfort.

You don't have to imagine that, right? I mean... Yeah, no, I mean, I did that in Waking Up. In fact, we had the same publisher, Simon & Schuster. Right. So I can imagine this title, Why Buddhism is True, gave you a little trepidation. Well, for more than one reason. I mean, first of all, it just sounds kind of unbearably overbearing or something. I mean, I mean, you know, it's not, it's not a humble title. There's that there's like, who the hell are you to, to say that after,

you know, 2,500 years, you've come up with some, you know, some fresh insight into the question of the foundation of Buddhism's truth. Secondly, what are you doing using a word like true when there are even parts of Buddhist philosophical tradition that cast doubt on whether that word has ultimate meaning? Third, what do you mean by Buddhism? You know, there are lots of different, you know, Buddhism, like all spiritual and, in a way, philosophical traditions, has evolved over time and developed these different branches. In some cases, the different branches have different ideas. So isn't it

essentialist to act as if there's a single Buddhism? All those questions naturally get asked. I actually address those in a quick note to readers at the very beginning, or at least acknowledge my awareness of them. You know, I joked to friends in publishing before the book came out that the title may be a little hyperbolic, but I don't think it exceeds industry standards. But I, you know, honestly, I'm willing to stand by it. I mean, I also have an appendix where I elaborate on the specific Buddhist ideas that I think are corroborated and the extent of their corroboration I'm claiming. And I elaborate a little more on what I mean by true. But but, you know, with all that as qualification, I'm serious about the title. And I don't it's not that I've had some special insight.

Certainly, as you know, if you've read the book, I don't claim to be some kind of great meditator. I mean, Sam, you have much more meditative depth and meditative history than I have, and you've had deeper experiences. I just think that until the advent of modern evolutionary psychology and some findings from experimental psychology in general, it was not possible to nail some of this stuff down the way you can now. So it's like for almost all of 2,500 years, it hasn't been possible to make the kind of argument I'm making. Yeah. There's one thing you bring that is pretty novel, maybe entirely novel. I

don't know that I have encountered it anywhere, which is the piece that we'll talk about, the way in which evolutionary psychology really dovetails nicely with the truths as they can be gleaned from Buddhism, or specifically the practice of meditation. I guess the other caveat here is that you are not endorsing any form of Buddhism. You're not arguing that rebirth is true or likely to be true. And I don't think you talk about it in the book, but I would imagine you're not any more of a fan of Buddhism as a reservoir of political insight than I am. And if you look at societies that have been Buddhist historically, they have fairly unimpressive political fortunes. And the people who've argued that Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was made possible in large part because of

a Buddhist spirit of quietism that incubated that kind of extremism. I don't have a strong opinion about that, but it's just not obvious that Buddhism is the perfect operating system for a society to thrive politically or scientifically or in any other way. I guess people would want to remind us of what's happening in Myanmar right now and very strange career arc of Aung San Suu Kyi, who was everyone's favorite saint when she was under house arrest, and now she's not far from some bizarre angel of tribal vengeance in her not dealing responsibly with the Rohingya Muslim ethnic cleansing crisis. So it's not Buddhism you're really pushing for as any kind of ideology.

There are certain things in Buddhism, specifically mindfulness meditation and the truths about human experience that can be gleaned from it that you think give us an unusually good look at what it's like to be us and what the prospects are for bettering our lives by a deliberate use of attention. Would you agree with that summary? I'd go a little further. I mean, I'd say, first of all, you're right. I'm not defending things commonly considered supernatural or exotically metaphysical like rebirth. And I make that clear at the beginning, too. I'm talking about the naturalistic part of Buddhism, sometimes called secular Buddhism. I'm a little ambivalent about that phrase. But I would say I am defending, well, not just radical claims. Well, first, let me say, I think at the heart of Buddhism pretty broadly lies what I consider a kind of amazing claim, which is that the reason we suffer and the reason we make other people suffer is that we don't see the world clearly.

And that's, I say it's an amazing claim because it suggests that you can kill three birds with one stone. If you can learn to see the world more clearly, then you will suffer less. You will be a better person toward other people. That's the idea. And I think that's found pretty broadly across the Buddhist traditions. I certainly think you can locate that in both Theravada and Mahayana. And if you ask what they mean by see the world clearly, again, in both traditions, there are some pretty radical claims about the extent to which we're deluded. I mean, the idea that the self doesn't exist, or even that our conception of the self is way, way off base, that's a radical claim. The doctrine of so-called emptiness,

that our perception of the world out there is deeply misleading, in ways we could get into later if you want, That's a radical claim when you look at what the claim is. And I'm actually defending those propositions to a pretty considerable extent. And I'm certainly defending that first thing that, you know, the reason we suffer, you know, that our suffering and our bad behavior are related to not seeing the world clearly. Right. Well, I guess it says something about me that the truths of selflessness and emptiness and the connection between suffering and seeing the world clearly, those weren't among the radical claims that I was thinking about when I was differentiating you from the rest of the world's Buddhists. All of that seems now to me straightforwardly true. And we'll talk about all

that. That's based on your experience, though. I mean, to the, you know, to reading public, it takes some work to even get them to take it seriously. And that's what I tried to do. I mean, I would quickly say on the political issue, yeah, you're right. I mean, that's a whole subject we could get into. But I think the first thing people have to understand when they ask, well, wait a second, what about Myanmar is, you know, in Asia, lay Buddhists by and large don't meditate. Many monks don't meditate. So right away, if, you know, if my book is talking to a considerable extent about how meditation can clarify both our literal kind can clarify both our vision of reality and our moral vision, that what's happening, the horrible things that are happening right now in that part

of the world are not all that closely connected to that claim. Yeah, that is something that is not often appreciated, that meditation is a very esoteric endeavor within the context of any Buddhist society, really. I would think this is probably true even of Tibetan society, such as it still exists, but it's definitely true of a place like Thailand or Burma. So, several doors open here that I want to rush through each at the same time. I guess, so just to summarize basically what you said about the point of contact between meditation or Buddhism and science, there is this alignment between what we can understand about ourselves largely through evolution and to some degree through neuroscience, and how Buddhism describes the

human condition. And understanding this both can give an impetus to a practice like meditation, and it can also both reduce our suffering and reduce the kind of suffering we produce for others. I think that second piece that speaks to goodness and morality, I feel like that connection, I feel like you've also acknowledged this somewhere in the book, that connection is less clear, which is to say there are people who seem at least to be very good meditators who aren't necessarily good people or haven't been good people. And so the connection between competence in meditation and being a good person is less direct than we might hope. And at least there's some evidence for that. It's certainly not automatic. Yeah. And I do say that in the book. And of course, historically, the Dharma, the Buddhist teachings have included a lot of ethical

instruction. The assumption seems not to have been that if you just meditate, you'll automatically become a better person. That said, I think there's a correlation, some kind of probabilistic correlation. I mean, I think you see this even at the beginning of a meditative practice. If meditation, you know, if you're just doing what you don't even think of as Buddhist meditation and you call it mindfulness-based stress reduction, and it calms you down a little, you'll probably be an easier person to get along with. I mean, you'll probably become what a utilitarian would call a better person just because you're causing less suffering, you know? And I think that correlation tends to be there. But you're right. There are a number of famous, very adept meditators who sexually exploited their students and things like that. So it's not automatic. And in principle, meditation is a tool. Adeptness at meditation could in principle be used to make you a more effectively bad person. As a general matter, I think you're absolutely right. When you look at the motives in yourself for being a jerk, they are fairly reliably undercut by your paying more and

more attention to the dynamics of your own suffering and well-being and questioning rather skeptically why you should follow each thought to its behavioral terminus. And I do think there is, as you said, a probabilistic correlation between time spent practicing something like mindfulness and being more ethically sensitive. Before we actually get into mindfulness and its connection to what we know about ourselves scientifically, how did you get into any of this? When was your interest in something as esoteric as mindfulness was? It's pretty current now, but 14 or so years ago, it was not nearly enjoying the public

moment it is now. How did you get interested and what form has your interest taken? Yeah, well, I guess, you know, probably ever since college, I had occasionally tried to meditate. It was one of those things, you know, you're supposed to dabble in Eastern philosophy and so on. So I tried it a few times. It had never clicked for me. I'm not a natural meditator at all. I have a very limited attention span for one thing. So I finally, on the advice of a friend, tried an actual one week meditation retreat in 2003, silent meditation retreat in the, you know, Vipassana slash mindfulness tradition,

you might say. Vipassana and mindfulness aren't exactly the same thing, but they're related. And, you know, it was just the first two days were hell. I couldn't focus on my breath, hated myself for failing. Most of our listeners will be familiar, I think, with this topic because I've had Joseph Goldstein on the podcast, although it's been a couple of years. But do you want to describe what a meditation retreat is like and how startlingly different it is from ordinary life for someone who hasn't done it? Sure. In fact, the first thing this friend did was say, you should go hear Joseph Goldstein talk in New York. And this was 2001, because I remember it was right after 9-11. And then it's, you know, it's his retreat center, the Insight Meditation Society that I went to in 2003. And, you know, these things vary from

retreat center to retreat center, how they're structured and so on. At IMS, it's like, uh, by my count, I think it was five and a half hours total of sitting meditation each day, five and a half hours of walking meditation. You do a little job in the morning that keeps the cost down for everyone. At night, you hear a Dharma talk by one of the teachers. You know, the meditation sessions are 45 minutes. There's no talking except like a couple times a week. You can check in with a teacher either in group or individual setting, but you're not talking. There's no news from the outside world. And if anybody goes to a retreat, my advice is do not bring your smartphone. Don't whether or not the retreat center emphasizes this, get off the grid, set your email on auto reply.

That's an important part of the experience. Um, so you're there, you're not taught, you know, so those first couple of days I'm like, you know, everyone there looks like they're doing better than I am. Uh, and most of them were, I'm sure they, uh, you know, they were mostly veterans probably. I couldn't focus on 10 consecutive breaths. I mean like all day, the first day. Uh, and, um, like I said, finally, it clicked. Had you meditated for some considerable period before you sat your first retreat, or did you just jump right into it? No, I had not. I had not. I had tried it a few times. I went to a couple of

meetings at a place where they did Zen in DC like 25 years ago. I had gone at a Unitarian church to a Unitarian church here. I mean, to sessions after the church service a few times, but no, I just, it had never, I had never understood why anyone would meditate. Hadn't got an inkling, like zero positive reinforcement. That's interesting because not many people jump into a retreat without having experienced enough benefit or seeming benefit from meditation to feel like they want the full immersion experience. Yeah, I honestly don't know why. I mean, as you probably know, I was brought up religiously.

And so I don't know, maybe there was, you know, and then I lost my Christian faith. Maybe there was some kind of void, you know. And also, I mean, as I acknowledge in the book, I'm not a person wholly without improvements that could be made to my psyche, you might say. And that's what brings a lot of people to meditation, you know, just ranging from mild anxiety to severe self-loathing, whatever the issue may be, you know, it often begins as a therapeutic thing. I think in my case, it was more than therapeutic. I don't think that was the bulk of it. I think I was, you know, I probably in some sense wanted salvation. You know, I mean, that's I was I was brought up to want salvation. And I don't know. But but I recommend meditation retreats. They're not guaranteed to work out wonderfully, but they you know, I call them

extreme sports for the mind. I mean, there can be harrowing times and deeply gratifying and awe-inspiring times and profoundly illuminating times, but it's a serious thing that I encourage people to do if they're at all inclined. Yeah. I guess, I don't know if you would agree with this, but when I recommend that someone sit a retreat or if someone comes to me wondering whether or not they should sit a retreat, I tend to say that they shouldn't sit a retreat shorter than five to seven days. I feel like the first two or three days of any retreat of really any length, and it can be two or three days, or it can be three months are the hardest. And if you only sit for a weekend, you basically have had the full experience of hitting the wall of your own restlessness and disinclination to be there without giving yourself any time to settle in for what it's like to actually be there. Does that resonate with your experience? Absolutely. Absolutely. I say like when they say, what about a weekend retreat?

I say, well, if it's a good way to scout out a teacher to see if you want to spend a whole week with them. Yeah. Otherwise, I would not expect very dramatic results. So I would not have gotten anything out of a weekend retreat. And yet by the end of a week, you know, and I described some of this in the book, but by the end of the week, it felt transformative. I mean, there had been both individual experiences while meditating that were, well, in one case, mind blowing, in one case, really arresting. But beyond that, there's just this transformation of your consciousness. I mean, not just when you're meditating, but you're like walking around in the woods and seeing beauty in

places you've never seen it. And I remember in this first retreat, I came upon a weed called a plantain weed that I had actually spent a lot of time trying to kill, usually by pulling up because it's the kind of weed that had afflicted a couple of front lawns I had had. And I just suddenly thought, why have I been trying to kill this weed? And now that's going to sound like this touchy-feely, oh, you know, but there's a significant point I was experientially apprehending here, which is that, and it sounds trivial when you say it as a point, okay, which is just that weed is a human imposed category. It doesn't say weed on the DNA of weeds. It's a cultural thing. And there are plants that in some cultures,

people have decided they don't want on their lawns or their flower beds. And that's what we call a weed. But that doesn't mean that there's any kind of objective, rigorous rule that separates weeds from non-weeds. And it doesn't mean that weeds are a trivial point that humans categorize things. Obviously, it's a human category. But Sam, you probably know what I mean. When you feel it as a perceptual shift, you know, you realize that how subtly these human conceptions and like stories we tell infiltrate your perception normally. So like I had been going around apprehending essence of weed in this subtle way that I didn't even understand. I wasn't aware of doing it, but when it's gone and it's just a plant, that's a really dramatic perceptual shift.

And I personally think, I mean, it depends on what you mean by the Buddhist concept of emptiness. And there are different interpretations of this within Buddhism, but I think the perception I had is related to one common interpretation of the idea of emptiness, which is just that the things we see in the world actually don't have essences. world actually don't have essences. We impose those on them. And to see emptiness is to truly experientially appreciate that things don't have essences and that the essences we perceive reflect kind of human imposed categories. So that was on my first retreat. And again, it would be hard to appreciate from what I've said how powerful it felt to look at a weed that I had always hated and go, that's as beautiful as the other stuff in the forest. But I think it was a highly non-trivial apprehension. Yeah, well, before we get into the topic of emptiness, which I definitely want to touch, I think we should just remind people what the practice of mindfulness is so that they can understand what it is you were doing that could have produced an epiphany like that,

and others will talk about. And this also speaks to why there's nothing unscientific about this enterprise. There's a lot that can go by the name of meditation or spiritual practice that can seem starkly unscientific because it comes freighted with specifically religious concepts and iconography and things that are being added to your experience, ritualistically or by virtue of what you're visualizing, or the mantra you're chanting.

All of that can seem like a departure from empirical rigor. It's not to say that all of those practices need be a departure from empirical rigor. There's a way to stand with the Hare Krishnas and chant without being a religious lunatic, I would argue. But with something like mindfulness, the connection to science, at least potentially, is very direct. All mindfulness is, is paying very close attention to experience without adding anything to it. There's no mantra, there's no visualization, there's no necessary belief framework. It's just in each moment you are making an effort to clearly notice whatever you in fact

notice, whether it's a sensation in the body or a sight or a sound or a thought or a mood arising in the mind. You're noticing these phenomenon, the contents of consciousness, as clearly as possible. And that clear noticing is different from the way you're tending to live in at least two respects. One is you're tending to live your life, and this is something very few people notice about themselves until they try to meditate, you're tending to live lost in thought. You're thinking every moment of the day without noticing that you're thinking. And your experience of the present moment and your experience of anything you can notice is coming to you through this veil of discursivity that is in fact not noticed by you. So that's the first thing. It's just hard

to pay attention because you are thinking every single moment of the day and you're not aware of it. And so you'll try to follow the breath as an initial exercise in mindfulness. And this is a very common experience that people will pay attention to the breath and then feel that they're doing it for even minutes at a time. And then say, well, you know, when you ask them what that was like, well, you know, I did it for like five minutes, but then I got distracted and then I came back. Whereas, you know, and as everyone discovers on their first retreat, you know, if their life depended on it, they couldn't stay on the breath for anything like five minutes. It's hard enough to follow five breaths in succession without getting carried away by

thought. Yeah, I actually was once on a retreat with the Burmese meditation master Upandita Sayadaw, whose name I think is familiar to you. It was like a two-month retreat, and it was set up in such a way that you could hear the, as you said, that you would have a daily or every other day interview for 10 minutes with the teacher. And this retreat was set up so that you would have a daily or every other day interview for 10 minutes with the teacher. And this retreat was set up so that you could actually, you could hear the interview that was happening before you on the retreat. So you're kind of waiting in line, you're in the vestibule waiting for your chance to talk to Upantita. And so I could hear the person in front of me every time I went for an interview. So I was hearing this person say in the beginning, you know, in the first few days of the retreat, that he could, as I just said, he could stay with the breath for maybe five minutes and then get lost, and then he

would come back to the breath. And, you know, I just recognized at once how absurd that was, because this was not my first retreat. But then over the course of maybe six weeks, I could hear his experience getting more honest, where he would say that, you know, now maybe he can get 10 breaths in succession and then he's off. That's not a description of a person's ability degrading. That is a description of what it's like to actually equip yourself with the tools to notice how powerfully distracted you are in each moment. And so just to bring one other element in here. So once you can pay attention to experience closely, again, without adding anything to it, you then begin to notice the difference between merely being aware of phenomenon and

reacting habitually to phenomenon, as described in the Buddhist lexicon, with desire and aversion. And so your tendency to grasp at what's pleasant and push away what's unpleasant, that begins to seem, as in fact it is, a powerful source of disturbance in your mind. And as you know, the Buddhists link that to basically all forms of psychological suffering. But at minimum, this is an automaticity you can relax by merely paying more careful attention to the raw qualities of experience, non-judgmentally, not grasping at what's pleasant and pushing away what's unpleasant. And when you do that, a door into a very different kind of experience of a sort that you just described with the hated weed opens. And again, at no point

have you stepped away from the spirit of scientific empiricism. You're not believing anything on insufficient evidence. You're not pretending to know something you don't know. You're actually just paying more careful attention to what it's like to be you in each moment. actually just paying more careful attention to what it's like to be you in each moment. Right. Now, I can see people doubting this. People haven't done it, doubting this and saying, well, so you say you went off and meditated and you're claiming that the view of reality you had after that is truer than the ordinary view. Why should I privilege your claim? I think you and I both feel on the basis of the actual experience that there are reasons to believe that it is a more objective view you're getting when your mind calms down. You can kind of feel the layers of a story fading away and so on. What I try to do in the book is to provide actual arguments

to the effect that it's a clearer vision. I mean, to take what you mentioned, the emphasis in Buddhism on both aversion on the one hand and a particular kind of attraction on the other, a kind of a clinging, you use the term desire, a kind of a, you know, a craving for something, however you want to put it. I think that is just a very deep insight into the way human psychology works and how it blurs our vision. And, you know, if you pay attention, and again, it's hard, as you say, you know, it's easy to think, well, if I want to see things clearly, I'll just look at these curtains and stare at them and not look at anything else. And there's some sense in which you're seeing them more clearly than you were five minutes ago. But I think when you meditate, you realize how subtle the things are that are keeping you from true clarity. And they tend to boil down

to very subtle manifestations of aversion and kind of clinging or desire, right? I mean, it's like that weed. There was an element of aversion in my perception of that weed that was coloring that perception in very subtle ways. And I argue that if aversion is coloring your view of something, that is inherently suspect. If you really want to talk about what is an objective view of the world, you have to remember that the aversions we have are their products of a particular evolutionary process, natural selection, as manifest in a particular lineage, namely human evolution. And then, you know, on top of that

particular experiences we have in our lifetimes and so on. But the point is aversion and desire, there's not necessarily anything wrong with either of those. And in fact, both of them can be very valuable survival mechanisms and can be a great pragmatic value and can also bring you pleasure that is not to be denied. That's all fine. It's when you start, when they color your view of the actual truth of things, that I think they are just, that they are philosophically suspect. So I think, you know, I think this, this, the, the, this Buddhist, this cutting to the core of it, like more than a couple of millennia ago, that this emphasis on aversion and, you know, kind of clinging attraction or attraction, it's, it's astute and it's profound. I mean, when you think about it,

since the very origins of life, to approach or to avoid is the fundamental behavioral decision. If you look at a bacterium, that's what its behavioral algorithm is all about. So since we were, I mean, who knows when sentience, subjective experience as we think of it, dawned, but in some sense, at its very core are these two experiences and they infiltrate our emotions, they infiltrate our perceptions more subtly. And I think that's why I think that one perspective from which to appreciate Buddhist philosophy is the evolutionary perspective, if that makes sense. Yeah, well, let me just flag a possible point of confusion here. So it would be easy to respond based on what you just said, that of course desire and aversion have been hammered into us by evolution, and they're absolutely necessary for our survival.

You're just going to wander off a cliff if you have no desire to stay alive or not suffer some horrible injury. So there's this, I think, understandable sense that a life without desire and aversion would be a bad thing, or in fact, just starkly untenable. You just wouldn't survive a day of it. There's something, I guess we could call a kind of status quo bias here. It's not well understood that the mind, in terms of its kind of raw attention, the powers of attention, can be trained or that a person can be more or less talented in paying attention. Now, it's obviously in a kind of a physical domain, it's obvious that there's a difference between an Olympic sprinter and someone who can't even get off the couch, right? I mean, there's a range of athletic abilities is undeniable. And there's a range of

intellectual abilities we also recognize, but these run more in the direction of knowledge acquisition and an aptitude for it. So it's not really well understood that just by, you know, looking at the drapes, as you say, most people aren't in a good position even to begin to pay attention. And there really is a scope for real training here, even to get to the starting line in terms of understanding what there is to pay attention to and what the consequences of noticing it might be. And so this is a real barrier that a lot of people never surmount, which is they hear that meditation is a good idea or it has all of these health benefits or psychological benefits, and they want to look into it. And so they try it for five minutes or an hour, and they look inside and they

just see nothing of interest, really, because they're really just sitting there thinking, whether the legs are crossed or not, and they're not actually able to do the practice to a degree to reveal anything at all. The fact of that failure isn't obvious to them, and this is why taking psychedelics has been the doorway to a real commitment to something like meditation for so many people in the West, because many of us wouldn't have been convinced that there was a there there, but for having our normal levels of psychological unhappiness overridden for a time by one or another drug. It's not to say that drug experiences are always a perfect surrogate for what there is to be experienced through meditation, but at a minimum,

if you take 100 micrograms of LSD, something is going to happen. Now, it may be very unpleasant. It could be pleasant or unpleasant, but very few people walk away from that experience thinking that it's impossible to change a human experience. I mean, they may think that it was just a drug experience and has no implication for the rest of what's possible in human life. But with meditation, you really do have the problem where you can recommend it to a skeptical person. They can think they've tried it, and they've come away thinking that it doesn't work for them, or this is just a totally fraudulent enterprise. People are practicing some elaborate form of self-deception by meditating.

Yeah. And I personally think that the fact that I've gotten something out of it means that just about anybody can. Again, I tried various ways to do it. It never worked. But there was a way I finally found to try it. It did make it work, even if it took like a one week silent meditation retreat. But I think there are very few people who can't come to see that, oh, yes, this is giving you a different view of the world.

I mean, let me give you a trivial sounding example, but I think a significant one. So where I do my morning meditation, there's like one of these little, you know, a significant one. So where I do my morning meditation, there's like one of these little, you know, kind of mini refrigerators. And sometimes it starts humming. And one thing I've discovered while meditating and listening to it is that actually this refrigerator's hum, at least, definitely consists of at least three different sounds that are coming from different parts of the refrigerator's mechanism. And they are, you know, varying apparently independently of one another. So they're kind of weaving this little symphony. But anyway, I maintained that it is an objective fact

that if I consulted with the makers of the refrigerator or somebody, they could confirm that, yeah, actually the hum is these three different things. Now, I am sure that if I had never started meditating, I would have gone my whole life thinking that a refrigerator's hum is a, you know, it is just one thing, right? And annoying in the same way that that weed of yours is annoying. Well, right. That's the other thing is when you're, when you're listening to it during your meditation, it's beautiful. That's amazing in itself, but that part you might say is subjective. What's not subjective is that I think you could confirm, actually, I was getting closer to the truth when I said, no, there's at least three different things going on in the

machinery here. Now, kind of relatedly on the thing you mentioned first about, well, aversion and desire or attraction are pragmatically useful. That's true. But even then, I think it's important or it can be useful to anyone, including someone who does mindfulness meditation, to get clear on when feelings are actually useful to anyone, and including someone who does mindfulness meditation, to get clear on when feelings are actually useful to you, the person, as opposed to when they were useful merely from natural selection's point of view. And then third, as opposed to when in like a modern environment, you're having a feeling like anxiety that might have been more

useful in the environment we evolved in, but is not so useful now because you're reacting to a novel environment that we're not designed to react to. And this gets back to the fact that we're not designed to see the world clearly, right? Like if you look at something like fear, you know, if you're taking a walk and you've been told that there are rattlesnakes around and somebody died of a rattlesnake bite while hiking, every time you hear the grass rustling, you're going to think there's a rattlesnake there, right? You're going to entertain that hypothesis very seriously, even believe it. If a lizard darts out, you may briefly, literally see a snake. You're going to be wrong 99 times out of 100.

And you're also going to suffer, by the way. Fear is unpleasant. And both of those are designed in features by natural selection, apparently. And the logic is clear that it's better to be safe and sorry, better to have all these false positives of fear than to be insufficiently vigilant and die of a rattlesnake bite. Now, that's a case where your interests and natural selection interests coincide. You look at something else, like our drive for status. Well, status during evolution seems to have been correlated with genetic proliferation, so we tend to seek it. On the other hand, the seeking of it seems to be subject to that general tendency of gratification to evaporate. So we get the promotion or we do whatever, we rise in people's

esteem and before we enjoy it for a little while, and then we want more. So there I would say, look, if you love it, go for it. But if the status game is causing you suffering on balance, then you might remind yourself genetic proliferation. So there's all kinds of absurdities that a modern environment creates. And finally, if you look at something like anxiety, natural emotion. But first of all, there is the false positive issue. So like, yeah, it's natural to think, oh, where's my toddler? Something horrible must have happened. That's a natural false positive. Fine. And maybe it's good. You know, you want to be vigilant about your toddler. But then you look at something like public speaking anxiety or the anxiety that a parent feels upon dropping their child off at a daycare center for the first day where they're going to be tended by somebody, you know, the parents don't know. somebody, you know, the parents don't know. Well, these are, these are unnatural things. I mean, it's, you know, in, in, in, in the environment of evolution and the kind of hunter gather type environment, they didn't do public speaking and address a bunch of people where it really mattered. And they had never met any of the people they didn't, they didn't leave their children in the

care of people they had never met. And so these are cases where if you're lying awake at night before a big talk, or if you're sitting there worrying about your kid at daycare, when it's not going to motivate you to do anything that's going to help, these are unproductive anxieties that they're causing you suffering. They are, in many of these cases, they lead to actual illusions like catastrophe scenarios. So I think you're right that our feelings were designed to be pragmatically useful, but sometimes they were useful from the organism's point of view, and sometimes just from the point of view of genetic proliferation. And sometimes in the modern environment, they're not useful from anyone's point of view. And so I think, you know, I try to provide this backstory in the book because I think it is useful for some people when they're

doing something that, as you know, mindfulness meditators encourage you to do, which is just observe your feelings as they kind of appear and disappear and see them as these transient phenomena and as nothing more. In other words, don't invest them with the meaning that we're naturally inclined to invest them with. Here again, I think the evolutionary story can help a meditator appreciate that, yeah, you might be getting closer to the truth if you just drop the meaning that you've invested feelings with and just watch the feelings. One thing you make very clear in the book is that nature didn't equip us to know reality. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at

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