Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 95: Robert Wright, 'Why Buddhism is True' (Bonus!)

Episode Date: August 25, 2017

"Progress on the meditation path tends to involve moral progress. You tend to become a better person as well as a happier person... I personally think that you should not be allowed to call yourself enlightened if you're a jerk," said Robert Wright, a best-selling author with extensive knowledge on philosophy and religion. Wright, whose new book out now is titled, "Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment," offers his thoughts (and skepticism) on what it means to achieve true enlightenment and whether mindfulness meditation could change the world. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast.

I'm Dan Harris. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Coming at you with a bonus podcast this week, I'm especially excited about this one for a variety of reasons. Robert Wright is a really, really smart dude. He is a journalist and a scholar. He's written a bunch of best-selling, sciencey books, including the evolution of God, non-zero, the moral animal.

He has studied religion. he's studied evolutionary psychology, and he has provided a really important and interesting entry into what I think is one of the most interesting trends in modern global culture, which is, and this is just my opinion, by the way, but one of the most interesting trends that I see is that we're seeing this counterintuitive, yet robust embrace among some Western intellectuals

of ancient Eastern mysticism. And Bob Wright has just, as I said, provided us with what I think is a really important entry into this nascent phenomenon. He's written a book called Why Buddhism Is True, which is part, polemic, part memoir, part explainer, where this, he does what I love seeing. We have this incredible mind, who came up through the Western system at Princeton and other fancy pants institutions who got turned on to Buddhism and he really took a deep dive.

And what this book does is explain through his lens, particularly of evolutionary psychology, why Buddhism is true in his view. And it's funny and it's fascinating and it's deep. And I think it's another way in which these ancient technologies of meditation are going to be able to catch on with surprising groups of people because when somebody like Bob Wright comes out and says, hey, this stuff is working for me, I think a lot of people sit up and notice. And we're already seeing that because the book which just hit shelves recently is doing incredibly well. And I hope it continues to do so.

As you'll hear in this interview, he is an engaging fellow and has a lot to say. So I've said a bunch, and now I'll shut up and let Bob do the talking. Here we go, Robert Wright. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. Well, thank you for having me. You know I'm a fan of the podcast,

the book and the entire Dan Harris evangelical enterprise. So delighted to be here. I think this is a very important book. And I love seeing somebody of your intellectual horse power, but also sort of background, you know, coming from a scientific, secular background, turning your attention to Buddhism, slash mysticism, slash spirituality, whatever

you want to call it, we have a poverty of language in this area, I think. It's just, I think incredibly important, and as the potential to bring in entirely new grocery people into this, what I think is a really healthy form of mental hygiene. So Bravo from the job. Well, thank you. Nice for you to say that. So I always start with the same question, which is how did you personally get into this meditation thing? Well, I guess I had flirted with meditation ever since college. You know, you were supposed to kind of in college. You were supposed to read a little Eastern philosophy or something

and think about it as an or something. It had never worked for me. I have a very limited attention span. I'm not a natural meditator. So finally, what did it was a meditation retreat, a one-week silent meditation retreat that I did? Why did you do that? 2001, why did you do? What was going on in your life? You know, nothing in particular. I was having a conversation with some friends in Los Angeles. And somebody was plugged into this one place, the Insight Meditation Society, and recommended it.

I guess I- And we should say that's in Barry Massachusetts, grade RRE, where you will find my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, who comes up in your book. Yeah. Anyway, a great place where I go and retreat as well. So you decided to go. I did. And you know, the first two days were hell, as I anyway, a great place where I go and retreat as well. So you decided to go. I did. And you know, the first two days were hell, as I guess people know. I just, you know, couldn't focus on 10 consecutive breaths.

10 consecutive breaths is a lot, even when you're sick. It's a lot, but you would hope that after two days of solid meditation, you'd get into double figures. But then finally clicked. And in fact, I had some, by the end into double figures. But then finally, clicked, and in fact, I had some, by the end of the retreat, some very powerful experiences, and leaving aside independent, you know, specific experiences while meditating, there was just a kind of a transformation

of my consciousness. It was just amazing. Oh, that's a big, big phrase, transformation of my consciousness. Well, I don't mean permanent. I don't mean, you know, it just clicked and I never had to meditate again or that it stayed at that level for weeks and months after the retreat. But at the end

of the retreat, I did feel as if my consciousness had been transformed in what way. Well, I just saw beauty everywhere I looked and I'm not normally the type to do that. I felt kindly disposed towards humankind, another thing I wasn't in the habit of. You know, the standard thing is way less judgmental about people. I mean, I remember I called my wife at the end of the retreat. And before I'd even said anything about the retreat, she was like, I like this version of you. Just by the tone of my voice, I hadn't said,

you know, I hadn't, I hadn't uttered a meaningful sentence. She just liked how calm I sound. The buoyancy, sort of the... Yeah, and I just seemed like a nice guy all of a sudden. So we've saved to say baseline, you're a curmudgeonly? You know, I have my moments of transcending that, but, you know, I'm not... Who am I not? I'm not Mr. Rogers. I'm not. You know, there's a lot of good people I'm not.

You know, Mike Kinzley, who I worked for at the New Republic, once suggested that I write a column called the Missing Throat, you know. So anyway, at the end of this retreat, I felt very, very good. And I felt like I was a better person. I was a better person. Now, did you think you would become a Buddhist? Well, and would you call yourself a Buddhist, I still don't call myself a Buddhist. That's a tough call. I guess the reason I don't,

it may seem kind of odd for somebody who writes a book called Why Buddhism is true to say I don't call myself a Buddhist, but the reason I don't is I know that in Asia, Buddhism means something different to most people who are Buddh Buddhist. There's a whole kind of religious part in the traditional sense that isn't part of the Buddhism that I have gotten into, or the part of the kind of Buddhism that a lot of people in the

west have gotten into. What we do is sometimes called secular Buddhism or naturalistic Buddhism, but I don't believe in reincarnation and there's various senses in which I'm not a literally religious Buddhist. And so I just feel a little awkward kind of appropriating their, the term. But I'm fine with people who do, whatever. I just, I feel a little awkward

when I go into a meditation hall about like bowing to the Buddha. I usually don't, unless there's like overwhelming peer pressure to do it, it just seems a little fake or something. I have the same, I've read about it. I have the same sort of qualms and I find that generally the longer I'm on retreat the more comfortable I get with it and then I think I'm a joke in my book that eventually I was I just do it for the hamstring stretch

but it it does feel weird all the chanting and the bowing and there's not that much but there's enough so that it can feel a little weird at least to me. So why Buddhism is true? If I told you back in the 90s that you were ever going to write a book with that title, what would you have left? Well what have seemed unlikely? I would have had no real idea of what that would even mean. I mean, I didn't have a clear enough idea of what Buddhism is, I think, at that point. And in fact, after that first meditation retreat, I didn't have a very clear idea of the philosophical part of Buddhism. I mean, I guess I had heard of things like the not.

Self-doct doctrine and so on, but I didn't have at all a clear idea what the philosophical foundation of Buddhism is. And I didn't really understand yet the connection between meditation and that philosophical foundation, which I think is one of the most interesting things. And something I'm kind of trying to highlight, which is that even if you have what seems like a strictly therapeutic meditation practice, you're dealing with stress reduction

or addressing anxiety or whatever, and you think of it as therapeutic. If it's like mindfulness meditation, I think already on the path toward, if you want to follow the path, toward deep philosophical and spiritual exploration, there is a kind of a continuous path between just addressing anxiety, mindfully say, and concepts like not self, or so-called emptiness, these arcane sounding philosophical concepts. I think, I guess I would say, enlightenment is a more incremental process than it sometimes is talked about as being. I mean, people think of like, well, there are people

have meditated for years and then finally a switch flipped and they were awakened, they were enlightened. I'm sure that happens. But I also think you can get a little bit enlightened and then a little more enlightened and even if you never go all the way. And of course, this controversy over whether anybody ever has gone all the way or what enlightenment is and so on. But I think that's the way to think about the practice. That in the preceding paragraph, there are a lot of things that I want to go further on. I want to know whether you think enlightenment is real and what actually it is. But you talked about this concept of not self and how we, even if we're

practicing for a couple minutes a day to manage our anxiety or boost our focus or deal with our pain and our knee or whatever, that actually we're kind of on the slippery slope towards some deeper philosophical and spiritual concepts such as the one you mentioned, not self. What is that and how do we get there through meditation? Well, not self, I mean the experience, I've had kind of, you might say, glimmers of elements of not self. That's how close I've gotten, and that's been partly while on retreat

when you have the opportunity to go the deepest. But I've talked to people who have seen, too, have had pretty much the full on not-self experience. What does that mean? What does it mean? Well, I divide it into two parts, actually. There's the kind of interior, not self and exterior, not self. Okay, so like, as for the interior, not self. I mean, if you look at anxiety, you know, you just, you don't run from it, you just observe it, experience it, get close to it, which of course we don't, we don't naturally do. We naturally, you know, try to push unpleasant feelings away,

but if you're meditating and you just say, OK, I'm going to absorb myself in it. I'm going to experience it. You ironically, by getting closer to it, can get a kind of detachment from it, a kind of a critical distance from it, to the point where you no longer consider a part of yourself. So you have let go of a little bit of yourself. Okay? So you have let go of a little bit of yourself. Now, if you look

at the kind of original, the Buddha's original discourse on not self, that's actually kind of the way he handled. He kind of goes through all the parts of human experience and says, do you really, does it really make sense to think of this as part of yourself? I mean, he doesn't go, you know, just mention anxiety. He had, I mean, like feelings and the basic categories of human experience. And in fact, there are some people who interpret that discourse as strictly therapeutic.

They say, he wasn't even claiming that the self doesn't exist, which is the way it's now interpreted. And certainly, that's the way the doctrine developed in Buddhism. He was just saying, look, do yourself a favor. You know, these various parts of us, we can't control them. They make a suffer. Just let go, right? Don't identify with them. I mean, that's one possible reading of what he was saying.

But in any event, that's his approach. I mean so to explaining the doctrine is to say these various parts you think of as yourself, you don't have to think of as part of yourself. And the natural thing to do is to start with the most problematic things like anxiety, self-loathing, remorse, and meditate on them in such a way that they don't seem like you have to identify with them. And so you don't have to accept the discomfort that they've been causing you. So, so, and there's immense practical value in not taking your thoughts, feelings, emotions personally, because then they don't Yankee around as much. Oh, yeah. I I mean I think that's just a huge part of mindfulness meditation is getting

a kind of perspective on feelings and thoughts that in principle at least it's not always easy by any means but in principle allows you to decide whether you want to accept their guidance or just kind of let go of them. So I think of that as being the kind of, well, let me cut to the chase first one, say people who have experienced full on not self, view it as liberating. What does that even mean full on not self? Well, it gets hard beyond a point because asking them what it's like to be them doesn't always yield as clear and articulate as she was like. I will say this other part of it though what I call the exterior part. I think I got a hint of that on a retreat once when I was meditating and I felt like

a tingling in my foot and I heard like a bird song and it like genuinely felt as if the source of that bird song was no less a part of me than the tingling of my foot. So in other words, the sense of my boundary had dissolved to a considerable extent. And these two things, interior and exterior, are related in the sense that, I think what put me in a position to feel that was partly the fact that I wasn't identifying so much with the various things that were inside my body anyway. So that was all seeming a little more diffuse and less aggregated and I wasn't identifying so closely with tingling in my foot or anything else because I'd been on retreat a while

and I had a little of that kind of distance and that made it that somehow you know eroded the barrier between the things inside me and the things outside me. But in any event this this kind of this is another thing that is reported by people as as part of the not self-experiences a kind of dissolution of the bounds of the self and it is not self experience has, in addition to it being, you know, liberating blissful and so on, and in fact, in that first discourse on the not self, it says that the monks who heard that sermon were liberated immediately, attained, you know, awakening enlightenment. But in addition to that, to whatever bliss liberation is said to bring, there is a typically a moral dimension that is the idea is that selflessness in this kind of metaphysical sense,

in other words, not feelings if you have a self, leads to selflessness of the other kind. You know, if you're not identifying so closely with your own needs and demands and petty grievances and whatever, and if you feel more continuity with the world out there, then you become naturally enough, I guess, you know, a better person. a better person. So, enlightenment. Should we've waited longer to get to the enlightenment part? No, no, let's just get right to the crux of the issue, isn't it? I don't purport, of course. There are people I've talked to who are candidates, you know, you could argue.

Maybe they're enlightened, but of course't I don't purport to well We also have this new are you saying you're not purporting to be I'm not I'm not even purporting to be within You know the ballpark. I'm not I'm not even you know, it's it's like not Not insight you guys you and I have this in common, but there is this group of people the very controversial Group of people who are coming forward now to say that of people, the very controversial group of people who are coming forward now to say that they are enlightened. You know, we've got this guy, a friend of mine, Daniel Ingram, this doctor from Alabama.

Yeah, I know, yeah. So Daniel's great, I love him, but he created an endorsement of controversy by coming forward and saying, I'm enlightened. Right. Which is generally kind of verboten within the meditation community, there's a sort of omerta around this issue.

So that's kind of an interesting bit of cultural news, I think. But that being said, you have a view on whether, because you come from the same sort of secular scientific background from which I come, I'm not a scientist, but I'm the child of one, a child of two,'m the child of one, a child of two, and the husband of one, what lead you to believe that enlightenment is possible, because the word is freighted with the mystical kind of thing. I'm not sure it is.

In fact, I tend to have a kind of a conception of it that is so strict that I'm not sure there's anyone enlightened on the planet. And I think of you, I mean, I really think that that what comes out of kind of early Buddhist teachings is a pretty darn strict conception of enlightenment. For example, I personally think that it traditionally has entailed, and I think kind of should entail this moral dimension. So if you're enlightened, you should be a super good person and not not be causing problems for people and be like consistently generous in your disposition and not grasping and so

on. And, you know, some people, and Daniel, I think, doesn't have that strict conception of enlightenment. There are these, some people in his circle who say that, no, we shouldn't think of enlightenment as involving any particular degree of moral progress. The two, I think they would say the two, progress on the meditation path tends to involve moral progress. You tend to become a better person as well as a happier person. But they would say, well, first of all, it's true that that's not guaranteed. They're definitely very good meditators

who are not very good people. That's a biggest riddle for me. I mean, I've talked about it before on this podcast, but I just think it's so interesting that you can be a meditative adept and a jerk. Yeah, apparently it can happen. It has happened. Yeah, and it's true.

But I personally think you should not be allowed to car yourself in light and if you're jerk. I mean, I think I think one of the most amazing things about Buddhist philosophy to me is that is this claim that the reason we suffer and the reason we make other people suffer, in other words, the reason we're sometimes bad, is that we don't see the world clearly. And that if we will, if we see the world more clearly, we will become happier and better. That's an amazing claim because it's like three words with one stone, right? Truth, happiness, goodness, you know. And I think there's a lot to be said for the claim. I basically defend in the book, the idea that it tends to be

not guaranteed, but there is this convenient convergence between seeing the world more clearly, becoming happier, and becoming better. And I think that's really at the heart of Buddhism as traditionally conceived at least. And that's why I'm just not willing to say that someone's enlightened if they're not a pretty good person. So what would you say enlightenment is? Well, I mean, again, the way I conceive of it, you know, when you start thinking of Nirvana, which is of course is thought to correspond to enlightenment, right? The experience of Nirvana corresponds to enlightenment.

Yeah, I mean, that's the idea. Traditionally, the idea is like liberation, enlightenment, Nirvana. I mean, the actual Buddhist word that's sometimes translated as enlightenment would be more literally translated as awakening, I think. But certainly, the idea is that these things, if you really cross the final threshold, they come in, they're all there. And Nirvana is, you know, I mean, you're talking about something pretty blissful. And if you look at the mechanics that are said to lead to Nirvana, it's something, it's a threshold that I would

be pretty hard to actually cross because it involves, I guess you could say complete defiance of the levers that natural selection uses to built into us to get us to serve its agenda. I mean, this is the way I look at Buddhism, not the way the Buddha did, of course, didn't have Darwinian theory. But, and by that, I mean, you know, the basic lever is you pursue pleasurable sensations and you do whatever you can to get away

from unpleasant sensations. That is the mechanism control for animals, you know, and I take Nirvana to be what happens when you completely transcend that incentive structure. Now, people can clearly go a amazing distance in this direction. I mean, remember, in Vietnam, there were mucks who emulated themselves and did not move a muscle, okay? They sat there with complete stoicism while burning to death.

Now, obviously, they had reached a state that that you know, an indifference to physical pain that is very hard to imagine, but what that shows you is that amazing things are possible through meditation and maybe true enlightenment is possible, but in any event I would imagine Maybe true enlightenment is possible, but in any event, I would imagine enlightenment in the traditional sense to involve that degree of transcendence of this basic incentive structure of seeking pleasure, avoiding pain. Is it surprising to you, at all, that a guy with your background is even taking concepts like enlightenment and nirvana seriously? Well, again, I'm talking about them in a very hypothetical theoretical sense. I am not convinced that it's ever actually happened to anyone. I mean, the strict sense of enlightenment that I'm talking about, I'm not convinced that it's ever happened to anyone. So who is the Buddha in your conception?

Oh, I don't know. I mean, as a historical matter, I think we know less about the Buddha than we know about Jesus or Muhammad. And I think we know less about what he actually said. You know, there was quite a period when things weren't written down in a long time. So there was oral transmission and so on. So I don't, as you know, as a, I'm a little agnostic on which of the things attributed to the Buddha, he actually said, as I am with

Jesus in Muhammad, but in a way even more so. I mean, what's clear to me is that fairly early on, a very impressive philosophy developed that diagnosed the human predicament accurately, and the argument I'm making in my book is that modern evolutionary psychology validates that prescription in a new way, and modern psychology generally, and in addition this early tradition came up with a treatment, you know, not just a diagnosis, but the cure. So in your view, the Buddha is not a god or a prophet or anything supernatural. Well, I don't know. I mean, I assume he was a very impressive person, but I'm not.

No, I'm not. The kind of Buddhism I talk about in the book, and I try to make it clear, like on the first page, is what's sometimes called the naturalistic part of Buddhism. I'm not getting into reincarnation or anything like that. And there are arguments over whether the Buddha got into that, you know, how, whether he was more like a philosopher or a religious figure. I just think we actually don't have all that much evidence. Some of the most, you touched on this already, but some of the most interesting parts of what is a thorough goingly, is that a word? Interesting book. You have to do with how the mind bequeathed to us by evolution leads us astray.

Can you just kind of roll out your basic thesis on that? Yeah, reversing is natural selection. The top item on natural selections agenda is getting genes into the next generation. It designs animals, designs and quotes. It's not an intelligent process, but it designs animals that are good at getting genes into the next generation in the environment in which they evolved. It doesn't put a high priority on the happiness of the animals, and it doesn't even insist that they see the world clearly, and in fact, if delusion will help get genes into the next generation, then delusion

there will be. Some of these examples are very trivial, like if a large object is approaching us like a car or an animal, we tend to overestimate how fast it's coming because you know better to be on the safe side, right? But that's technically a warping of our assessment of the velocity of the thing, right? And, or to take something like fear or anxiety, again, better to be on the safe side. So, if you're walking through terrain where you know there are rattlesnakes,

you might very often hear something and go, oh, that's a rattlesnake, or even see some, go, oh, that's a rattlesnake, or even see some, oh, that's a rattlesnake. That's a false positive. And that kind of thing is built into a financial selection, apparently. And that's kind of a brief momentary illusion, you might say. And then in the modern environment, things actually get worse because this environment is so different from the environment we evolved in. So, like social anxiety is natural evolution or psychologists would say built

into us because, you know, in the environment or of our evolution are placing the group mattered, we wanted to be well thought of and so on. And that may itself lead to certain kinds of illusions and distortions, but then you put us in a modern environment where we do unnatural things like give and address to a bunch of people we've never met. And so people have deep anxieties about public speaking because it's not natural. So you take something that was designed to make us unhappy and maybe sometimes to mislead us in the sense of being a false positive by that I mean anxiety. And then it gets even worse in a modern environment. Or, you know, like of course, you know, parents naturally

grow anxious about their kids. Like if your toddler wanders off and you realize that, you might briefly have some fantasy about something horrible having happened to them because that motivates you to run and find out. That presumably was happening in the environment of our evolution. But then in the modern environment, you leave your kids in a daycare center and on the first day, you don't know anybody there you know that's unnatural so that's an even so so natural anxieties so that was natural selection did not care about our happiness to begin with or strictly speaking about our seeing the world clearly and then in a modern environment the problem is even worse and you know again this is the Buddhist diagnosis, we don't see the world clearly.

We aren't naturally happy, indeed, we're prone to suffering. So I think there's a real correspondence. And, I mean, the most pervasive example probably is just the fleetingness of gratification, right? I mean, you talk a lot about powdered doughnuts. I thought it's your Gidonets to me, you know, kind of epitomized pleasure. I mean, they just seem very well designed to make me lust after them and You know The first one's great and you're truly blissed out the first one you ever have But then before long you want another one and then as time goes on

You're paying less attention. You're getting less pleasure out of them and wanting the next one You know sooner and more and more. It's just like a mindless process of scarfing them down. Well, that basic dynamic seems to have been built into us by evolution. The fact that enduring gratification is hard to come by makes perfect sense from natural selection's point of view, right? Because natural selection wants you to pursue things like food and sex, to stay alive and reproduce. But obviously, if they brought endless gratification, if the gratification never dissipated, you would never pursue them again. And that's not what natural selection wants.

They want you to be on this endless quest. And this is, of course, central to the Buddha's diagnosis of the problem. This is what's called ton-ha in ancient terminology or kind of, you know, just thirst craving, always wanting more, and not appreciating the fleetingness, the fact that what right now seems like it's going to be the answer to your problems is actually not going to last long. So that is itself a kind of illusion that natural selection built into us. An exaggeration of how enduring pleasures are going to be.

For you, as a guy who has a mild, maybe north of mild addiction to powdered sugar, no nuts, and who describes himself as at least being in the neighborhood of Commergen Lee how what kind of effect has mindfulness meditation had on on what has been what has been left to you by evolution and Family and all of that Well first of all powdered sugar donut thing is totally under control really? Yeah, not so much as a result of meditation, but just that I prefer to expend my, you know, a lot of sinful behavior on dark chocolate.

Oh, okay. So you just switch. There's more, I guess I justify that by thinking that there's more utilitarian value in dark chocolate. You can always convince yourself that it'll help you get work done. That's a true system. Yeah. Yeah. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellas.

And I'm Sydney Battle and we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Disantel, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Britney and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support. It angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices

taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondering app. Are you a happier dude now that you're meditating?

Yeah, I think so. You got to use 16 years. I might quick math. Yeah, well, okay. So the first were two 2003. 2003, I thought it was 2001. 2003, between 2003 and my next retreat, 2009, there were some years of lapsed lapsed meditator. But since 2009, I've been pretty good about it. And I've gone to

retreat, not quite once a year since then, but close. And I would say, definitely, I'm, I'm happier. And the more I do it, the happier I am. And as you know, it's a challenge. It's, you know, to get on the cushion every day, a thing I'm trying to do more and more is appreciate the value of, you know, having done my morning sitting, appreciate the value of little doses of meditation during the day.

Like those moments when you're having trouble working and you're thinking, maybe I should eat something or maybe I should, you know, what I've discovered is actually usually meditating works better in terms of getting you back on track and doing the work. It feels better. The good feeling lasts longer. And yet, it's surprisingly hard to remember that and keep doing it. It is. What is your daily morning sit? How long is it? And what are you doing in your mind as you do it?

I do it for at least 30 minutes in the morning. It's pretty much standard Start by concentrating on your breath to establish some some equanimity. I sometimes do, I guess slightly offbeat things. Sometimes I will concentrate on the breath on the inhale and maybe sounds in the environment on the exhale. I did that on my very first retreat and I don't know how I got into it, but it was working for me. I still do that sometimes, but it's, I do pretty standard mindfulness meditation

once I've gotten some equanimity. I often focus on feelings, especially if I'm having problematic feelings, but sometimes I just bliss out on some sound, like there's a refrigerator right near where I meditate, and the hum is just kind of turns out to be amazingly rich. I never ever would have discovered. Had I not started meditating, that a hum, a refrigerator's hum is just kind of turns out to be amazingly rich. I never ever would have discovered had I not started meditating that a hum refrigerator's hum is actually not a monotonous sound. There are actually different elements of it. There are different things generating noise within the refrigerator. I mean this is not- and this can produce bliss for you. Well, yeah, because it just sounds beautiful. I mean part of I mean Because it just sounds beautiful. I mean, part of, I mean, this was one of the, you know, things that most struck me on

my first retreat was that, you know, paying a new kind of attention to things just accentuates their beauty. I mean, I was on a retreat once and there were these, they were building a door and so there was these construction noises buzzed on and so on. And I just, at first, of course, you're going, I can't believe it charging this money to come to a retreat when there's all this noise going on. But then you realize, you know, you can actually turn that into music pretty literally. And this is, again, you know, I was saying that casual everyday

practice is not as far removed as you might think from deep, Buddhist philosophical concepts. And I think the kind of thing I'm talking about now is connected to the so-called concept of emptiness, which is a misleading term. It doesn't apprehending emptiness. By the way, many of our listeners wouldn't know what emptiness is. Well, right. I mean, and understandably, because I think the term is misleading. It's commonly thought that you think, oh, everything out there is empty and it's meaningless or something.

What it means is more, well, let me give you another experience I had on my first retreat. I was walking the woods, I looked down, I saw this weed that I'd spent a lot of time trying to exterminate over the years, because it's a common, it's the plantain weeded in Fessalons. And I just thought, wait a second, that's as pretty as anything else in this forest.

Why do we call it a weed? And what had changed is that I was no longer sensing essence of weed when I looked at the weed. And it wasn't just a strictly cognitive recatter-garization of it of the wheat. When I no longer thought of it as a weed, there was an element of feeling that had changed, you know, in my perception of it. I mean, I think perceptions are very subtly infused by feelings. And I think more than we realize, when we look at things, you know, trees, people, people we like, people we don't like, we get this kind of vibe that's kind of an essence

that we're sensing in them. And what the doctrine of emptiness is, is the assertion that actually things do not have inherent essence. That to think of this as a weed, and that is a non-weed, is it's a category we're imposing. It's not actually intrinsic in the thing. And I think when I'm enjoying the sound of my refrigerator, I'm kind of not really thinking that's a refrigerator sound.

If that makes sense, I'm not categorizing it. And consistent with what I'm saying, that like this, like, relaxing our sense of essence leads us to appreciate the beauty of things more. Consistent with that is the testimony of people who, again, these are the kind of people who experience full on not self. Some of them will also tell you, yeah, I emptiness is part of my everyday perception. And they report the world being luminous,

beautiful, exuding some kind of positive energy. Just by dent of seeing that everything has no core, everything. It doesn't have a clue that we've been projecting on it. And as sometimes has been said, it's real, but not really real. Yeah, I mean, a phrase you hear is things don't have inherent existence. In other words, well, the essence we're sensing

is not really in the more imposing that on it. And, you know, in some realms, this becomes very consequential because I think one thing we sense is like essence of enemy, essence of good person, essence of bad person. And once we put people in those categories, you know, that I think triggers all kinds of cognitive biases that can lead to trouble,

which isn't to say we shouldn't kind of identify the troublemakers or punish criminals or anything like that, but I think the machinery by which we categorize people in particular can get us into trouble and intensive meditation can relax that a little. You've probably had the same experience. I mean in a way I'm saying you're less judgmental. But again, what I'm saying is just being less judgmental as mundane as that sounds, that's actually connected to a deep

Buddhist philosophical concept. And progress toward fuller apprehensions of emptiness, if that's what you're after, is an incremental thing. And the more you meditate, the closer you'll get. So that leads me to the question I wanted to ask you, and I think this is one of the big important parts of the book is what impact Buddhism could have and meditation could have on the world? Well, I mean, I may be a little apocalyptic by nature in my view of the world, but I'm kind

of concerned about where we are. And I think if you look at various things that are problematic, whether it's political polarization in the United States, sectarian conflict in the Middle East, national conflicts and tensions. I think driving them all to some extent is what I would call the psychology of tribalism, which is by which I just mean the evolved psychology for you know, for group conflict and for favoring your own group over other groups i think it's a very subtle thing and it's you know

i mean people think when they say his war inevitable i mean is a part of human nature they tend to think like are we naturally aggressive you know and they think of like rage and violent and pages it's all subtler than that i I mean, it starts with biases such as so-called confirmation bias, that you just see the information that supports your argument and you're oblivious to the information that supports your opponent's argument.

Now, I think that's a kind of thing, the kind of problem that can be improved by mindfulness meditation. Because I think more than people realize that is governed by a feeling. It's like when you see that information that supports your argument, it's like it feels good. The reason we click retweet and share is because it feels good, right? And sometimes it feels good because even though we haven't actually, and here's where fake news comes in, even though we haven't actually examined the story that we're sharing, it reflects unfavorably on our ideological enemies or favorably on our group. And we just, it feels so good, you know. It may be factually untrue, but it's emotionally true.

Right. And I think, you know, mindfulness meditation can make you generally just a little more aware of the way feelings are governing your thought and your behavior. I mean, one area where I think kind of ancient Buddha's psychology converges nicely with modern psychology is appreciation of the fact that this this separation of cognition on the one hand and feeling on the other is very misleading. I mean feeling in a very fine grain subtle way influences thought and infiltrates it and I think

that's typically the dynamic And I think that's typically the dynamic that drives a lot of the cognitive biases that in turn are constitute the psychology of tribalism. And I think mindfulness meditation makes you less susceptible to that. Especially if you become aware of the problem as a problem, and thankfully there is more discussion of this problem like political polarization, fake news, and so on. And I don't, you know, I don't sound too melodramatic, but it may be that the planet has reached a point where the species needs to become more aware of how the mind works, you know, some sort of like metacognitive, we need to pass through some sort of metacognitive threshold. And there are various ways to do that, but I certainly think mindfulness meditation is very well suited to becoming more aware of how our minds work and doing something about it. Do you have any optimism that people will adopt mindfulness meditation in large enough

numbers and at large enough doses to make a difference given the gravity of the problems we face as a species right now. Well, you know, he starts small movements do spread, you know, I mean, historically, whole religions have come to, you know, dominate entire civilizations and so on. So it's A, it's not impossible. B, one thing I would emphasize is that I think this is a realm where sometimes you might say unilateral disarmament works. In other words, I actually think that sometimes emotionally driven very strong reactions to Trump play into his hands, convince his supporters that, indeed, everyone hates him in the media,

is biased against him, and so on, and have various other unfortunate consequences. I actually just set up a website called MindfulResistance.net, which is going to put out a newsletter. I think this is a prescription that would be good for the world. There are a few other aspects of the book I'd like to talk to you about. Talk to me about the title,

because it's a strong and provocative one. Yes, it is. So why Buddhism is true? It's not, I didn't have that in mind when I wrote the book, but what did you set out to do when you'd start writing this book? I'm, you know, my book proposals never look anything like what I produce. And I don't even remember what this one looked like. Because I've learned a lot about Buddhism since I did the proposal to put simply

why I think it's defensible. And you know, I wrote the book, I realized, well, this was the argument I was making. I was arguing that both the Buddhist diagnosis of the human predicament and the Buddhist prescription are right. And moreover, some underlying philosophical core assertions are accurate. I was defending these by reference to modern psychology, evolutionary psychology.

And to summarize them, I mean, there's this, first of the idea that, again, the reason we suffer, and the reason we make other people suffer is because we don't see the world clearly. I think that's right. And I think meditation is a very straightforward response to that diagnosis that can be effective if you're diligent in your practice. But beyond

that, if you ask, well, in what senses do we not see the world clearly? Buddhism, I think you can kind of divide the answer into two parts. They say that we don't see ourselves clearly and we don't see the world out there clearly. And those roughly correspond to these doctrines of not self and what is misleadingly called emptiness. And toward the end of the book, I mean, I save this for the end because it's, you know, it's maybe the toughest sledding. I mean, much of the book is about the mechanics of meditation, how it works, why it works, and how thinking about the way the mind evolved can reinforce a

meditation practice. Because, you know, mindfulness meditation evolves a certain kind of skepticism toward our feelings, right? You examine them and decide which ones are worth following and which aren't. And I argue that evolutionary psychology really drives home why that makes sense. Evolution didn't design our feelings to be trustworthy in our in our sense in the way that matters to us and in some cases it designed them to dilute us. So I do most of the book is all that but by the end of the book I've. I've taken on these two kind of core, and argued, I mean, not self, two core philosophical ideas you're talking about,

not self-induced. Yeah, the idea at the self, at least as we traditionally think of it, as we naturally think of the self, does not exist. There's a lot of studies and psychology, and so on, showing that our intuitions about what's going on in our head and the intuitions of the role the conscious mind plays in our thought and our

decisions is wrong. This isn't just evolutionary psychology. Psychology has been saying this for a while. And I think that's useful and it's very consistent with what you hear from meditation teachers. You've probably heard them say things like thoughts think themselves, right? Well, I've never understood that. Well, I mean, I think it makes sense in light of what I think is the best model of the human mind to have emerged from evolutionary psychology, so-called modular model where,

you know, the unconscious mind consists of all these little specialized kind of agents that are in a way competing for your attention, competing for control. And so the idea would be the winning modules kind of inject thoughts into your conscious mind. And then the illusion is that they kind of emanated from the conscious mind. So who are the modules like jealousy and jealousy would be an example of a specialized mechanism. You know, just hunger eating would be another. I mean, you can slice it up in a lot of ways, but the whole, say the whole, the mode of being that is triggered when you see an attractive romantic prospect, you know, that there's a whole range of things that you, kinds of things you'll start doing that you wouldn't do

if you were trying to impress a boss or something. I mean, so different, and again, here, if you pay close attention, it's typically feelings that trigger these modules. But anyway, the point is that the new model of the mind is that it's much more decentralized than we might think, and that the action is not really emanating from the conscious mind. There are reasons that it makes sense for us to think of the conscious self as the owner of all this

and the doer of all this. You can think of reasons that makes evolutionary sense to think that way and talk that way to other people. But there's a lot of evidence now that that's not the way it works. So that when people say thoughts think themselves, what is really going on is that different modules think thoughts and inject them into your consciousness. I mean, as for what teachers mean, by that, I think they're advanced meditators.

I've gotten here occasionally where you're observing your thoughts and they do seem to be kind of passing by. I mean, that's the idea of that phrase. But I have an easier time getting that kind of perspective on feelings than on thoughts myself. What is your experience? Same time. Yeah, I think I can't tend to just believe the thoughts because I feel like they're coming from quote unquote me.

Right. I think that's common. And in the book, I talk about why I think it's natural that that be the progression of progress, that first feeling, you get a little distance on feelings. And then that can help you get a little distance on thoughts. Yeah. Once in a while, I'll see a thought come and go.

But it's a murky process. Right. I think that's common. And that's my experience. Modules. Actually, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, I don't know if you'll see this is related. But there's this meditation teacher that I'm actually writing a book with that's coming

out at New Year's about how to meditate. And his name is Jeff Warren. He's a really funny guy and really smart. And he had me do this thing that I thought was very corny and didn't like it. Where he said, you'll notice that you have these kind of neurotic patterns that recur. And he said, you know, you may be named them. So he said that one of his neurotic patterns, he called it El Grandioso. And it was this thought pattern

that was talking about how great he was because he actually felt insecure and in some ways excluded by his family, et cetera, et cetera. So he had this module of that was a grandioso and talking about what a great guy Jeff is. And I noticed that I have these various inner characters, one I call Robert Johnson named after my grandfather, who was not a very nice guy. And I noticed that I have these various inner characters, one I call Robert Johnson named after my grandfather,

who was not a very nice guy. And I'm pretty, you know, I have this kind of judgmental guy, usually judgmental of myself, who pops up in my experience and now, actually, even though I thought it was Cornie at first, I find myself saying, internally, oh, that's Robert Johnson. Welcome to the party. And I just have to kind of continuously disarm him in that way.

Is this another way, this is a long way of saying, is this concept that Jeff is pushing similar to the idea of the modular mind? Yeah, I think so. I mean, and this is, you know, one of the modular mind. Yeah, I think so. I mean, and this is, you know, one of the booties main arguments against the traditional conception of the self,

is he points out there's nothing that really persists. We think of the self as a solid thing, you know, yeah, I'm the me I was when I was 10, but if you actually look at the way life unfolds, you're a completely different person, one moment than you are are the next, depending on the circumstance. And you know, one way you could say it is, well, it's me, I'm just in a different mood. You could kind of gloss over the problem that way, but I think modern psychology, certainly one

very prominent model within modern psychology, the modular model, suggests that what's really going on is there almost literally are different cells in there that occupy center stage at different times, depending on the circumstance. But I struggled with that a little bit, and maybe I'm just playing that was advocate, but if they ate you rolled me, I get that that was a very different dude. But if somebody killed me, I would not be here now. So it's in some sense, some very real sense that was me. Yeah, and you know, it gets back to you

who you were saying, well, what do you mean by why Buddhism is true? I was gonna say, I mean, there are different parts of Buddhism that I feel like in more confily assert, you know, truth of than others. Not self is a particularly nebulous problematic concept subject to different interpretations. I feel in a way more strongly about a lot of other parts of Buddhism than not self in

the strictest sense of the you know the assertion that the self does not exist because if you you know I mean that just tends to lead to paradoxes if the claim that the self doesn't exist such as you know the ones you're suggesting but I would say that we have tremendous misconceptions about our the nature of our self at a minimum. Meditation can lead us to a clearer view of what's really going on in there. Clear review of the mystery of the mystery and of some of the dynamics that we had been seeing in a different way. Right.

I think first we see that dynamics. Right. And then we started to get a sense of the mystery, at least for me. Yeah. That's the way it's worked for me. Yeah. And that's first I started to see,

oh yeah, like rage just comes up in me when I'm cut off. Right. But actually, if I sit and watch it, I can watch it arise and pass. Right. But then after a while you start the mystery of the emerges of like, who's the me that's watching it arise and pass. Well, I mean, at some point, you start the mystery of the emerges of like who's the me that's watching it arise and past.

Well, I mean, at some point, you start talking about consciousness, you know, subjective awareness. And at that point, I think mystery becomes a useful word. I don't think we have a satisfactory account of consciousness. And I mean, I mean, there's no view on, I don't know how deep you wanna get here. I mean, I don't know if I'm gonna get this. That's what this podcast is.

Well, like I raise the question in my book. I go through the Buddha's not self discourse and he goes, you know, is this self? Is this self? Is this self? And one of the parts is consciousness. That's the translation at least. And he says, you should view this as not self.

And I'm like, wait a second. Who is viewing consciousness as not self? I can imagine all thoughts and feelings being viewed as not self by kind of part of me, but that part would have to be the consciousness. Right. So, I mean, you get into these paradoxes, but in the Buddha's defense, I think there's no modern view of consciousness that does not suffer from problems in paradoxes. I mean, to take a very common view of consciousness, and one thing is in some ways appealing to me, which is just that it's what's called an epiphenomenon. In other words, an epiphenomenon of the physical workings of your brain.

So in other words, it is to your brain kind of what your shadow is to you. It's something that is caused by the processes in your brain is influenced by them, but does not in turn influence them. Okay, so it's just pure, I don't wanna say byproduct, but it exerts no influence on the world. That's a very common view of it.

And I can understand that, but if that's what it is, if it has no influence on the world. That's a very common view of it. I can understand that, but if that's what it is, if it has no influence on the world, then why is it here? That's another way of saying consciousness has no function. If you're scientifically oriented, you would like to think that everything about a person has a function. Intriguingly, consciousness is just the fact that it is like something to be alive. We have subjective awareness, we experience pleasure and pain and so on. You know, that's for my money, what gives life meaning. You know, if we were just robots and it wasn't like anything to be us, then I just, you know, who would care what happened to this planet, right?

So it's just interesting to me that the thing that seems most clearly to give life meaning is one of the most mysterious things in the world that we are farthest from understanding. Are you nervous about this book? I'm always nervous when I publish a book. No, but this one seems... Oh, you know, I'm trying to... No, you're right.

I mean, it's not the first time I've invited Ridicule. I mean, this title maybe is the worst yet, but you know, I and have you received it ridicule. I actually did get a little. Yeah. And how are you dealing with that? It's meditation helpful. Well, first I went through the the stages of author's grief. This person did not read the book, this person, which I still believe, but anyway, I am trying to deal with it in a Buddhist way, which is really hard. Some feelings are easier to deal with than others. It's like the feeling, the dislike of the person well up, right? Intervening between that and the revenge fantasy is really hard.

It really is. It's actually, I think the point of intervention to give yourself a break, to give you a break, should come between the revenge fantasy and the actual taking of the revenge. Well, I have succeeded. This person is still living. No, actually my revenge fantasies are not violent. The time. It's more like, it's more like, oh, well, this is what I'm going to say about that person and some public forum or, you know, you actually think it through.

Of course. I don't think, I don't, I don't, I think that's setting the bar too high. I think the revenge fantasies are going are gonna come at usually catch it you know seven paces down the road mentally it's if you can catch it before you're down the road physically on the way to bludgeon them or on the way to your computer to send the nastiest we'd ever devised that i think is the victory just in my view i have not mentioned this on twitter partly because i i think it wouldn't be tactically wise to give any more attention to this, but it's hard. It is really, it's amazing how hard it is, but so

far I've refrained from doing anything regrettable in response to this particular piece about my book. Where, if people want to learn more about you and your previous books and this book and everything else you do, where can they do that? There's actually a website for the book, YBootismisTrue.net. On Twitter, I am at Robert Reiter, W-R-I-G-H-T-E-R, and I actually have a Twitter feed at Darwin Dharma

that originally grew out of an online course on this stuff I taught that in turn was grounded in a seminar I had taught about it at Princeton. And there's a Facebook page for that course if you search for Buddhism and psychology, I think you'll probably get it. That course is on the Coursera platform. And then I'm doing this mindful resistance.net thing I mentioned. And I don't know you mentioned the book, that's the main pluggable thing in my life right now.

Well it's a great book. Well it's very nice of you to say that. And if you mean it, I'm getting even more gratification out of it. I do mean it. As I've said, big fan of your mission, keep it up. Thanks for being a great guest. Well, good. Congratulations.

Thanks for being a great host. OK, that does it for another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. If you liked it, please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also if you want to suggest topics, you think we should cover or guests that we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B Harris. Importantly I want to thank the people who produce this podcast Lauren Efron Josh Cohan and the rest of the folks here at ABC who help make this thing possible. We have tons of other podcasts you can check them out at ABCnewspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday.

Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.