I loved this book. It was the final nail in the coffin of Buddhism for me. Along with Sam Harris’ “Waking Up” and Owen Flanagan’s “Bodhisattva’s Brain,” it broke the spell of secular mysticism. Because these books are written by brilliant, honest and diligent people, their attempts to create a secular, therapeutic Buddhism actually do a great job of outlining why the project is, if not pointless, then merely a hobby. Hobbies can be locally salutary for the hobbyist, but little more.
This narrowest slice of the Buddhism cake out of which Wright wants to make a worldwide meal — secular, Western, Theravada, Vipassina — seems to be a popular diversion for the aging atheist who wants a late-in-life grand project and some intellectual cover for wishful thinking. Trying to repackage, say, Catholicism, wouldn’t be exotic and inspiring enough. Instead, Wright enjoys the convert’s blindspots to an old (yet new) religion. Being a first gen Buddhist, he is unburdened by parents who serve as painful counterexamples. (Yup, I’m a second gen guy).
My biggest gripe with Wright is that he takes this narrowly defined notion, coats it in the novice’s zeal and then prescribes this “red pill” to the world. Yup, “The Matrix” is the best philosophical metaphor he can muster for the idea that “things are not what they seem.” Rather than a red pill, I’d see this as a red flag, a warning that the author can overlook some glaring and outlandish plot holes. (In the Matrix, the robot overlords use humans as batteries! They can create fine-grained illusory worlds, but can’t come up with better batteries than humans? Also, Keanu’s acting is about as lush and fruitful as a Zen rock garden.) I think Wright overlooks similarly large plot holes in the arcane, but sticky, spiderweb of Buddhist thought.
As far as I can see after reading this book, there really is no workable meditative practice (beyond the minimal self help version) that doesn’t rely on either 1) a personal preference that shouldn’t be universalized or 2) explicit or implicit supernatural beliefs. I’m pretty sure that, if there were a workable secular Buddhism, Wright would have found it.
He sure thinks he found it. In fact he thinks he's found nothing less than personal and global salvation. Tribalism, he feels, is the “biggest problem facing humanity.” And meditation is supposedly the end of that. But he’s too good a writer, and too rigorous a scholar not to reveal the holes in his own argument.
I’m not saying I’m going to surprise him with any of my objections. He’s done his homework. He’s even bravely interviewed quite a few “enlightened” meditators on his vlog. (Once they stop claiming to have quiet DMN and egoless minds, they describe what sounds like very normally middle class American lives.)
My whole argument is nothing new to Wright. Just as he remains enchanted with the “hard problem,” I’m sure he will not be swayed by my arguments. Instead, I’m hoping the astute reader will drink the last drop of skepticism that Wright cannot let pass his lips. Wright veers off at the last moment, losing a game of chicken with the truth. Excuse my armchair psychoanalysis, (he offers these anecdotes up in his book, so fair game) he loses his atheist nerve because he can’t disavow the memory of his mother and his own innate yearning for Jesus-style salvation.
The greatest counter examples to Wright’s most ambitious hope (the end of tribalism) are the millennia of Buddhist societies. Buddhist cultures are, on the whole, no better (though probably no worse) than any other culture. Certainly Buddhism and the Vedic traditions have proven themselves very compatible with war, tribalism, classism (Caste system!) and the oppression of women. The Tibetan word for “woman” literally mean “of inferior birth.” Also, Buddhism has not been a great incubator for science. Though the Dalai Lama is fond of science, it should be noted that he’s has to fly the scientists to him.
The move Wright makes to avoid this mountain of historical evidence is to narrowly define his project as “Western Buddhism.” It’s new and improved Buddhism! And it’s all about the mindfulness. Wright must slice the cake this thinly because, “Two of the most common Western conceptions of Buddhism—that it’s atheistic and that it revolves around meditation—are wrong; most Asian Buddhists do believe in gods, though not an omnipotent creator God, and don’t meditate.”
By focusing on mindfulness and on the individual benefits of that practice, Wright can claim to rescue the baby from the historical bath water. In other words, rather than answer the question of why most Buddhists don't want to meditate (not a great endorsement), and why most Buddhist cultures are equally flawed to non-buddhist, he takes shelter in the idea that those Buddhist cultures are flawed because they are full of the wrong type of Buddhists. If you meditate, then you are on the right path, he says.
But even amongst those who do meditate, there are plenty examples of jerks.Examples of evil meditators are shockingly common. Wright has to deal with the “Zen Predator.” Sexual exploitation of students by masters is so common — around 30% of US Zen schools have had public sex scandals. Wright (and Sam Harris) have both had to awkwardly wrestle with these all too frequent violations. Bless them both for at least admitting that this problem exists.
There are two main strategies to deal with the Buddhist version of the "problem of evil" -- what I call The Problem of the Evil Meditator. You either bite the bullet and admit that 1) enlightenment is indifferent to morality or 2) adopt incrementalism. The second is Wright’s main move. These evil masters just haven’t meditated enough, or they neglected to meditate broadly enough. Just as Wright claims (wrongly in my opinion) that evolution tends towards greater complexity, he also claims that meditation tends to lead one toward a more moral life. Hmmm.
Most traditional Buddhist will use the universal spackle of reincarnation to cover these cracks. You don’t like to meditate? You’re molesting your meditation students? You just haven’t lived enough lives. But the secular Buddhist can’t avail themselves of this dodge. So Wright shrinks down the reincarnation dodge to an ideal on the horizon. You are on a path defined by an unattainable end. It’s the journey not the destination. Masters are more ideals than reality. (Stoicism uses the sage as the same escape hatch.) I’m not buying it. The ideal end doesn’t justify the failed means.
Okay, you say, what about all the people whose lives have been improved by meditation? What about all this fMRI studies that show they are happier, more self-controlled? Well, Wright himself doesn’t lean very heavily on this neuro-proof. Wright sidesteps the current batch of fMRI research, relying instead on his personal anecdote. This is a smart move, because nothing beats “this worked for me” testimonials and they are by their nature beyond debunking.
So why doesn’t he use the research? I think it’s because, there is a signal in the research, but it doesn’t yet amount to much more than the tautology that those who like meditating like to meditate. The most exhaustive meta studies (that Wright ignores) show very weak signals. And the research generally fails to make a very important comparison of meditation to other similar activities. For instance, if meditating about playing guitar brings benefit, wouldn’t actually playing bring even greater benefit?
Regardless of the size of adept meditators’ PFC’s, it’s a fact that most Buddhist don’t meditate, and most people who start meditating stop. So if it’s a medicine, it’s a medicine few people want to take, and once you take it, you stop. It will be interesting to see how long Wright keeps it up.
But wait (OMG, you’re still reading?) The greatest and perhaps most ambitious part of this book is that Wright is trying to place the Buddha in Darwin’s lap. This is Wright at his best, dropping some mad EvoPsych knowledge. He does a good job of showing how natural selection has not selected for happiness. So far so good. And the modal concept of mind is fascinating. This part alone was therapeutic to me in a CBT sort of way. But then he makes another false step. He implies that since the Buddha diagnosed the problem (I’m not sure that is true, but let’s grant it) then perhaps Buddhism has also found the cure. But why would that be the case? This is like trying to get the molecular structure of Dopamine by reading Democritus.
So why does meditation help us understand that which the Buddha himself could not have known: The problem that natural selection doesn’t give a fig about our happiness; it only programs desires that lead not to happiness but to getting genes into the next generation? Wright suggests that by meditating on the nature of our consciousness we can get an essential added dimension of understanding, a better window into the exact way in which Evolution screwed us. It’s sort of a Mary’s Room of suffering. You can understand it intellctually, but you don’t grok it until you meditate.
This is just unfounded. Even if you are just talking about our inner minds, there is no good reason to believe that meditation reveals anything more real than the meanderings of an unskilled mind. Wright makes the weaker claim that it only reveals something true about our consciousness. Mystic Buddhists on the other hand, including most who call themselves secular, implicitly make the claim that meditation is revealing something not just about the mind, but about the nature of reality, but Wright kinda demures on that point. However, to the extent that he is a mysterian about consciousness itself, when he claims that meditation reveals something fundamental about consciousness, he is making an implicit ontological claim. This is in my opinion a hidden mystical claim. Certainly the idea that merely examining subjective consciousness reveals something more than subjective consciousness is questionable.
To show you why this is wrong, let me tell you something that happened to me during a guided meditation called a “body scan.” The instructor was focusing our attention on sensations in the body. Through her ignorance of anatomy, she suggested we should focus on the empty ventricles in our brains. There are no empty areas in the brain. But I felt them! I focused on them!
Since then I’ve experimented. You can create all sorts of false sensations just by suggesting them to yourself. I’ve meditated on lungs in my forearm. Try it. You will feel them there too. Little lungs in your forearm expanding and contracting with each breath. This should lead you not only to be skeptical about the accuracy of focusing on sensations, but the viability of this project at all. If we are to escape illusion, how can more illusion get us there? If you can suggest a sensation that isn’t actually real, if you can feel things about your body that are demonstrably false, by what lights do you argue that merely reflecting on the subjective experience of consciousness will reveal something truer and more real about consciousness?
It's the qualia dodge, the idea that by focusing on a subjective experience you are ipso facto having a subjective experience. But in this case it actually works against itself. If it's all false perception all the way down, on what foundation does your meditation instructor say "ah yes, you have entered the stream." There is no standard by which you can prioritize the authenticity of one meditative experience over another. Why is one illusion more insightful than another?
No, you say, the meditative focus is on something more primitive than this. You tune in to the field of consciousness itself. It supposedly exists between thoughts, between feelings, between sensations. You examine these entities to see that they are, like all of reality, not what they seem. And most importantly that there is no "self" doing the experiencing.
Sorry, I’m not buying it. Wright is mixing up his types of seeming. Being a self is not the same sort of seeming as, to use a Sam Harris example, when you see a coiled rope and think it’s a snake. Upon further inspection you realize it’s just rope. This is not an illusion, it is a misperception. There is objective standards by which you can evaluate this concept. The sense of being a self, however, is not a misperception of this type. It is a locally valid -- and irrefutable on its own terms -- perception. Why? Because we have skin and skull. These are not arbitrary boundaries. We have cell membranes. There is a lot of chemical self-making going on in our bodies. It’s not an illusion. Beyond the Hume style intellectual interrogation of self, I don't see how meditation can add anything.
Yes, get bored enough at a month long silent retreat, and you can start to hallucinate that you don’t end at your skin or, in Wright’s personal example, that your foot tingling is as much a part of you as a bird singing. But this is like saying by spinning in circles long enough you can sense the intrinsic spin of the universe. Biology can explain why we have a sense of dizziness after spinning. We are not feeling the universe, we are feeling the fluid in our ear. Presumably, biology can also explain someday why meditators have fairly predictable experiences. But then it will be an explanation like, spin around in circles enough, and your inner ear will get confused.
Being a self is not a misperception like mistaking a rope for a snake. It is an accurate perception like thinking the world is flat. You see, thinking the earth is flat is not actually an illusion. It is a perspectival truth. The earth is actually flat if you live on it. My cup stays on the table, the coffee stay in the cup. My level is level. It’s only if you want to look at Google earth, or launch a rocket, or wonder why you can see a ships mast over the horizon before the ship, etc. — it’s only under these situations that the world being round means something useful to you. But there is no normal human sensory input of the roundness of the earth, just as we can't see molecules.
Yes, the world is actually round, but when we see the world as flat we are not being fooled by our senses. It is, locally, actually truly flat. No amount of meditation on the actual roundness of the world will give you a vision of its actual roundness. There is no sense data for the roundness. You can meditate on the Earth’s roundness, you can conjure an image, but just like the lungs in my forearms, you will have “an experience”, but not really of the roundness. If you meditate on the Earth’s roundness, you are merely creating a suggested fantasy. This is exactly why there was no Buddhist science. The only reliable and productive way to see past seeming, to see past the Matrix, is not the red pill, it’s science. So sorry, you can't escape the notion of self on an experiential level. You are just being a good little suggestible participant in a very old scam.
We are stuck in our skull, like it or not. Buddhist meditation is simply replacing our perspectively valid sense of self with a hypnogogic implanted illusion. When meditators say they are experiencing that, they are certainly experiencing "something" and something that can be produced with reasonable frequency. However, they aren't actually experiencing what they say.
How do I make this claim? If you want there to be something being observed beyond the normal sensory welter, then it is actually on the Robert Wrights and the Sam Harrises of the world to explain what a brain can access that is getting into the skull. What exactly is the input? Sam Harris wants there to be a "field of consciousness" but then he's participating in a slightly more nuanced version of Deepok Chopra's "universal consciousness." This is not the sort of stuff for serious people.
In short, if everything is an illusion, how can you claim that the experience of "no self" isn't also an illusion? Wright wants to say that you are having the experiential dimension of the Darwinian truth. I buy the Darwinian part, but I see no good reason to buy the claim that highly contrived brain states (most people cannot attain it) are any more authentic than, say, an acid trip.
Most readers are reading this book for the more practical claims. For happiness and well being. If you love Buddhism and meditation, keep loving them. This book will preach wonderfully to your choir, though you might want to skim the parts where Wright whistles through the graveyard of spirituality. But If you do want to be a Buddhist, remember What Owen Flanagan makes beautifully clear in his book: if you want to be a Buddhist, you are having a mere preference for a type of happiness. It is not an ultimate, universal or superior happiness. It is a Buddhist definition of happiness. Actually, its only one type of Buddhism’s one definition of happiness.
When Wright’s instructor cautioned him, “I think you may have to choose between writing this book and liberation.” Wright obviously chose writing the book. “I’m a writer” he says, “and I consider pretty much everything I do grist for the mill.” Turns out Wright doesn't’ really want Buddhist Nirvana. Robert Wright’s nirvana involves writing books. It is no less of a Nirvana than his instructor’s, and I’m so glad that he didn’t let her talk him out of it. And I applaud him loudly when he says in the acknowledgments about his daughters, “If being enlightened would mean not seeing essence-of-wonderful-daughter when I look at them, I’m glad I haven’t attained enlightenment!” So please buy this book and read it carefully. Wright does a heroic job of trying to place the Buddha on Darwin’s lap. He lucidly explains the current understanding of evolutionary and neuro psychology. Where he fails is in his attempts to show that meditation is 1) a cure for the pains bestowed on us by natural selection and 2) a window into a deeper understanding of that world.
Feel zero regret if you don’t like meditation. You will have to be strong in your convictions though, because we are in the midst of a culture-wide mindfulness onslaught. If you don’t want to meditate before class or a work meeting, you will be putting yourself at a distinct cultural disadvantage. This is, after all, the new salvation of the cognoscenti, so if you reject it, you are likely to be branded a philistine or a wanton.
You should feel no more insult from these supercilious attitudes than you would from any hobbyist who condemns you for not enjoying their hobby. Wright doesn’t admit it (though I think he kind of does), but he likes Buddhism the way an avid ping pong player likes ping pong. It’s okay if ping pong is your thing (and should they ever do an fMRI study of ping pong nuts, they will see that their brains respond accordingly), but those of us who don’t like ping pong are off the hook.
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