Episode 171: Buddhism vs. Evolution with Guest Robert Wright (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: So maybe we should slow down a little and turn back to the no self doctrine. In fact, Bob, you'd pointed us to an original text that you discuss at some length in chapter five of your book. Buddha's Second Discourse on the not self characteristic.

0:14 Robert: Right, yeah, that's a famous supposedly. Certainly in Theravadan tradition, at least, that's considered his second sermon after his enlightenment. I mean, the first sermon after his enlightenment is the famous suffering is the problem. These are the roots of suffering. This is what you do. And then as a kind of testament to what an important doctrine not self is, it's this discourse on the not self that is supposedly his second discourse after his enlightenment. And to further underscore its importance, it is said at the end of this that all the monks who listen to this immediately became so called arahats, which basically means they attained enlightenment by virtue of grasping the idea of not self. So it's an important document that seems

1:01 Mark: the punchline for a lot of those old documents is that they teach, teach, teach, and they're enlightened.

1:06 Robert: Yeah, well, this is, you know, by the way, if you look at the Satipatthana Sutta, the sutra that describes mindfulness meditation, sati being the term that has been translated as mindfulness. At the end of that it says if you do all this right, you can attain nirvana. So it sounds like, wait a second, what is it that brings nirvana? Is it grasping not self? Is it mindfulness meditation? Is it letting go of thirst, craving, as it says in the first sermon? Now, I argue that these various things can be reconciled and that, for example, letting go of craving could be identified with letting go of the conception itself. But maybe I'm getting ahead of the story. Maybe you should steer me back to an analysis of that text.

1:48 Mark: Well, so do we have this Anattalakkhana Sutta? If you have any idea, I know that Buddha himself was supposed to have been alive somewhere around 563 to 483 BC or perhaps 480 to 400 BC somewhere in there, 4th, 4th, 5th century. Do we have any idea, like when this sutra was written? Is it, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years afterward?

2:13 Robert: I don't know. And I think generally speaking, we have a less clear idea of what the Buddha actually said than we have of what, say, Jesus said or Muhammad said. And we certainly don't have complete confidence in those cases. I mean, there was a long period of sheerly oral transmission with the Buddha, and we know what can happen during oral transmission. I am agnostic on which things the Buddha actually said. I adopt the convention, you know, just as you say, Jesus said this, the Buddha said this. But I'm agnostic on how much of this particular discourse actually came from the Buddha. But it did become the seminal text.

2:53 Mark: I was looking around just for a date on this and couldn't find one on the web either. There's a very detailed cataloging system for all these sutras, sort of how they are related to other ones in terms of their historical discovery. But in terms of even somebody speculating on when exactly this was written, I at least couldn't find that out. Let me just read a little bit of it, since it's. The whole thing is like a page. Thus, I heard on one occasion the Blessed One was living at Benares in The Deer park at Isipatana, the resort of Seers. There he addressed the bhikkhus of the group of five Bhikkhus.

Venerable sir, they replied. The blessed One said, bhikkhus, form is not self. Were form self, then this form would not lead to affliction and one could have it of form. Let my form be thus. Let my form be not thus. And since form is not self, so it leads to affliction and none can have it of form. Let my form be thus. Let my form be not thus. Okay, so that's the first thing. And then he goes through the other form, feeling, perception, determinations, or mental formations. I think there's another translation of that. And then consciousness. But so let's just look at this one.

So form, he means your physical shape, right?

4:07 Robert: Yeah, form means physical stuff generally. In this case, he's talking about your physical body. And yeah, these five aggregates that you mentioned are thought to be exhaustive. That is to say, together they constitute everything about a human being's experience. So if he can go through and show that none of these five aggregates qualifies as self, well, then presumably there is no self. Right. That's said to be the logic of the argument.

4:36 Mark: So if form were self, then form would not lead to affliction. So it's just the fact that I don't have control over my own body. It's going to be diseased, it's going to feel painful. The doer, the thing that is me. Well, I might have a body, I'm associated with the body, but certainly that body can't be me.

4:58 Seth: Right.

4:58 Mark: Is that the whole of the argument?

4:59 Robert: Yeah. You have to kind of infer what his definition of self is from the analysis. Right. So yeah, when he says if form were self, then you could say about form, hey, form, do this, form do that. And then it wouldn't cause you suffering. Right. You could say to your body, stop hurting. And it would stop hurting, basically. But you can't. So it's not self. So there he seems to be saying that anything that qualifies as self is something that's under control. And clearly feelings, perceptions, form, they're not under control. You can tell because they sometimes make us suffer.

5:37 Dylan: When I read through this, it reminded me a lot of various forms of Western philosophy that I've read that amounts to saying that we get affected by the outside world. Therefore there's a struggle about where the integrity of, you know, pick your thing. Right. It could be a self, could be a soul, it could Be a rock. And that the central notion we were talking about this earlier, of things having essences had to do with them being unchanged or unchanging or unchangeable. And that was sort of the core notion of self. And there's a lot of commonness to me in this analysis with other ones where you would end up denying being because you didn't have this continuity, that because it could change.

It therefore didn't have strict limitations, only being. And that if you were, you know. And when you follow someone like Parmenides and go in to talk about. You go to this argument about the one you're always looking for. What's the thing that's not changing? What's the thing that stays the same, that has nothing coming in and nothing going out. And that is the thing that we can hold onto and we can say that's real. And that's the same kind of argument that's going on here, right?

7:02 Robert: He explicitly separate from emphasizing lack of control over these things. He emphasizes their impermanence. And as you suggest, the two are related. You're not controlling them. They're subject to outside forces. And that's why they keep changing. So it's generally inferred from this that two characteristics he attributed to the self that is said not to exist are persistence through time and control. Being under control.

7:28 Dylan: So we have either it is a self in that it has permanence, or it doesn't have self because it doesn't have complete permanence. Same thing with the notion of control. You either have control or you don't have control. And that notion of control, of being able to do anything, is just like it is often in discussions about Western flesh philosophy. I'm thinking of free will. That it's either you're completely free or you have no free will. And there's this middle ground, which to me, in Bob's book, this is a refinement of the notion of self. Because in the end, there is something that is partaking of practices.

There are boundaries of self, even if there are physical boundaries. And those are somehow distinct from some of our psychological boundaries. But that the notion of self as being a nexus of interaction rather than something that is a complete whole that has no ins and no outs. An unmoved mover, right. That an unmoved mover is the only notion of self seems like an ancient starting point to me. It doesn't read as a annihilation of self, even though there's a way in which to read it that way. And it educates your. Your practice of it, but that it is a refinement of our notion of self to one that incorporates something short of control, but something less of nothingness.

8:59 Robert: Yeah, and we should say there's some people who don't read this discourse as the complete annihilation of self. There is a minority view that if you look at this closely, he never states unequivocally that the self doesn't exist. He says it makes sense to view these things as not self. And one interpretation is that this is almost therapeutic guidance that if something is making you suffer, just don't think of it as part of yourself. And in meditation you can actually do this. You can actually take something like anxiety. And by just kind of, well, ironically, by experiencing it more fully, by not running from it, you can actually get a more kind of detached view of it and it can cause you less pain, even no pain.

And there are people who think that the best way to make sense of this discourse is just pragmatic guidance and that the metaphysical idea that the self doesn't exist in this view actually developed later in Buddhist philosophy. I mean, another notable thing about this is that he doesn't, you know, he goes through the five aggregates and says, you know, you should think of this as not self. This is not self, Feelings, perceptions, and so on. He never says, and by the way, these five aggregates are exhaustive. That's all there could be to a self.

Now again, it later became an explicit part of Buddhist philosophy that the five aggregates are exhaustive. So if you can show that none of them are self, then then there is no self. But this is one interpretation of what he says, and in a way, it simplifies things.

10:39 Dylan: And I think that you see that minority view probably most explicitly in the last couple of big paragraphs. Bhikkhus. When a noble follower who has heard the truth sees, thus he finds estrangement in form, he finds estrangement in feeling. He finds estrangement in perception. He finds estrangement in and determinations. He finds estrangement in consciousness. When he finds estrangement, passion fades out. With the fading of passion, he is liberated. When liberated, there is knowledge that he is liberated. So that to me reads like you find that things have more ins and outs, that there is more flow and transition in all of those things that you thought were solid and whole, you see that estrangement, right? And with that you are liberated. And in being liberated, you are conscious that you are liberated. To me, that all reads is a transformation of self, right?

11:39 Robert: And the fact that he says that there is a he to be liberated suggests that there's some sense in which he now, as it happens, that pronoun he is inferred. It's not explicit in ancient Pali.

11:53 Dylan: Damn that English.

11:54 Robert: I know.

11:55 Mark: So the original actually is better translated as it puts the lotion on its skin.

12:00 Robert: Actually, I wish it were that simple. There are people who say that the appropriate translation is more like the mind is liberated or maybe consciousness. I'm not sure if that is sometimes used, but Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation I think has it that way. But even there you still have the same question, which is, wait, if there's anything at all left to be liberated, then in the end there's something even after you've stripped away everything that's not self. Right.

12:31 Wes: Let me draw some analogies. I think that would be helpful. So, I mean, I think the fundamental question we're struggling with, we should bring up Descartes, because the Cartesian argument essentially that the self cannot possibly be an illusion because just to have an illusion is to, you know, it's I think, therefore I am. Or as St. Augustine put it, I err, therefore I am to have an error. And even if that error is about the existence of the self. So for instance, so to have an illusion is a sufficiently complex sort of experience that it doesn't matter if it's veridical.

The standard is not whether it corresponds to anything in the world, including some metaphysical substance that we call the self. It's the coherence of that experience is what we mean by the self. The illusion of the self just would be the self. So I think we have to search for some, and as you do in the book, some sort of way to make the concept of no self not suffer from that sort of incoherence. And I think there's some parallels. So for instance, in existentialism, the idea is that existence precedes essence, where existence is just that sort of bare Cartesian subjectivity.

And the importance of that, the fact that it precedes essence. And you could think of essence as something like our character, either human nature or our specific character, the things that. And it could include evolutionarily derived traits, but the things that sort of drive us to do what we do, that are really not subject to our free will or difficult to subject to, or our free will. In that sense you could, you know, for the existentialist, the liberation is just realizing, and this is sort of a free will argument, that my pure subjectivity does transcend all that stuff.

I'm not actually defined by my. The fact that I'm curmudgeonly or something like that. I'm not predestined, based on that essence to live out the pattern of curmudgeonliness, because just the fact of being a perceiver, just the fact of being an entity with an internal existence always opens up possibility. It's what makes us a Dasein. There are always new possibilities, and I can always be, in some sense, an observer of those possibilities. So that idea is one way of getting at liberation. And what we've looked at in our podcast with Lacan and psychoanalysis, it's just the idea that our sense of self is more.

We attribute more coherence to it than there really is. So I think that's a very coherent way of getting at this doctrine of no self. It's not that we don't have a self in some barest sense of the coherence of an illusion or something like that, or Lockean subjectivity that persists through time. It's that we attribute to it more essence and more coherence than there really is. And so for someone like Lacan, you're not really a self, but you're a subject. A subject has a less metaphysically committed sort of meaning. And it gets to the sense in which we can actually have an illusion about how coherent our self is.

And that illusion is tied to our existence, again, as social beings.

15:47 Mark: As Bob says in the book that what we think of as the conscious self is actually the public relations manager. It's not the thing that's doing the doing. It's the thing that makes up the excuses after the thing is done for why the doing was done.

16:02 Wes: It's the extra coherence to ourself that we attribute that may not really be there, has something to do with our thoughts about what other people think of us.

16:14 Robert: Sure. And I mean, what I'd add from a Darwinian perspective is that some of that connection may be designed into us. But there is, you know, more evidence from psychology that the conscious self is less in the way of a CEO than we intuit and more of kind of an observer that's under the impression that it's a CEO. And, you know, I spend a certain amount of time on that in the book. The point you made early on about Descartes and, you know, the fact, I think most of us would share Descartes' intuition, Right. That for there to be thoughts or perception, there must be a thinker or perceiver or however you want to put it.

That does make sense. You know, there are people who can credibly claim to have passed through some threshold such that their everyday experience is different from ours. There are brain scans that show that there's something different about these people. And to a surprising extent, some of them want to make the case that not self is really, you know, a fair description of what it's like to be them. And it's hard to make sense of what they're saying. I will say that I've had a couple of meditation experiences on retreat when I was kind of in the depths of retreat, where I got a little bit of a sense.

There was this one time where I was feeling a tingling in my foot. And I heard, like, a bird singing. And I thought, you know, that bird, the source of that song, doesn't feel like any less a part of me than the tingling of my foot. It's hard to explain what that felt like, but it felt true. Like the bounds of myself had kind of dissolved. And at the same time, the interior constituents of myself, the feelings in general, felt more diffuse and less part of me than they would normally. There was another case where, I mean, these things sound like crazy New Age cliches.

But anyway, you know, there was a sound of rain outside, and I Just for a second, I felt like my apprehension of the rain was where the rain was. And that's a little different from the first experience in a way that's hard to convey. But anyway, it's. These are the kinds of experiences that make me intrigued by these people who sincerely report that there's a sense in which they don't. You know, they'll say things like, well, why would I hurt you if there's no difference between you and me? And if you say, well, wait a second, but aren't you viewing things from a particular vantage point?

Some of them will say, well, you know, the kind of. And then another formulation you hear sometimes is. Is. It's like there's a universal field of consciousness. And I am just one point of access to it. My location is just one point of access to it. And now I'm able to relate to the whole field maybe more fully. And I don't think we should dismiss this testimony. I mean, who knows what to make of it? But, I mean, just based on my understanding of what evolution has done to us, it's entirely plausible to me that when you undergo these meditative disciplines, that kind of free you from the forms of influence that generally we're subject to in particular, like you know, obedience to feelings and thoughts and so on.

It's not implausible to me that you are getting what is in some sense a clearer view of the mind, body problem. I mean, maybe on the one hand, you have to have these complex beings. To have rich, complex consciousness. But natural selection as a way to bring complex beings into being. Just tends to, in some sense, warp their view of kind of deep metaphysical structures or something. I don't know.

19:49 Seth: Let me propose a slight alternative to this specifically, about the body is not self. Consciousness is not self. Perception is not self, et cetera. What kept coming to mind when I read this and when I was reading your book. Was the traditional Western notion of intentionality. And all the metaphors of possession and ownership, grasping, penetrating all of the typical things that we are used to saying that knowledge, or a traditional Western approach to knowledge. Entails that it's somehow this ability from the position of the self. To grasp or encapsulate something that is other and then make it the same.

So it's essentially saying, whatever is different or external to me, I am able to internalize it. And in that way I grasp its essence and I'm able to know it. Right? And then all of the metaphors of knowledge are typically violent or sexual in some way. So when you give up the notion. When you talk about emptiness. Which is the idea that there's no essences to be grasped. What breaks down is, yes, in some sense, maybe the notion of the self. But really what first breaks down is the notion of intentionality. And the idea of this relationship between two separate things.

There's kind of an intermediate step before you go straight to, okay, well, the self is not any of the aggregates. Because it can't maintain control over those aggregates. There's an intermediate step between, well, there's no self. To that there might be a relationship that is not a relationship of control. Between the self and the aggregates. Or the self and other things, whatever they may be. And in our episode on Levinas. I think that we got to the point where we understood that Levinas was trying to get at something like that. An authentic relationship between two individuals.

Which wasn't based on possession or control or ownership in that respect. And that's important to me only because I think that's in some way a bridge to the ethical component of what you tried to bring up. And I know you were hesitant to delve into it too much. Although it's pretty clear that you have some strong opinions. That you didn't articulate in the book about that. But you know, I'm just suggesting that maybe there's a reading of this that isn't so one end or the other end around the notion of self or not self. That's suggested by possibly breaking down the relationship when it's defined as a relationship of control.

22:30 Robert: Well, certainly this is, I think somewhat relevant to your observation if you talk to these people. I mean, I'm thinking of somebody in particular that I talked to. Who? His name's Gary Weber. He's meditated deeply in both Buddhist and Hindu traditions. But he's interesting because, you know, they do these brain scans and they find that the so called default mode network of your brain, which is what's going on when your mind is wandering, gets very still when you meditate. And in Gary's case, they found it was already still. He didn't even have to meditate, it was just not there.

And he reports having none of the traditional kinds of thoughts that constitute most of our lives, you know, kind of self oriented thoughts, which is hard for me to imagine. But in any event, he just says like, yeah, it's very much a, like, let go. I've let go. It's just I'm on autopilot. He's saying, you're all on autopilot. You just don't realize it. And when you let go of intentionality, which involves, you know, ceasing to grasp the various feelings, ceasing to seek pleasure in a grasping way, and seeking to avoid pain in a, you know, in this desperate way, when you let go of the grasping, you wind up letting go of the intentionality.

I mean, I don't know if that sounds like kind of what you had in mind.

23:48 Seth: I think it does. I guess my question is, and this kind of leads to the second part of the thesis in the book is if you cease the grasping, you cease desire, you cease suffering because you give up on desire. Actually, I think you articulated there were the three different movements of suffering. Then does it automatically result in the dissolution of the self? In other words, is the self a thing that does that and without doing that you cease to be a self? Or is there a possibility for a different way of having a relationship with other things?

24:24 Robert: I think the short answer is something close to yes. I mean, I think if you ask. Well, wait a second. In the first sermon after his Enlightenment, at Deer Park, he says that the path to enlightenment and liberation from suffering is to let go of craving, of thirst. Whereas in the second discourse, he says the path to liberation and enlightenment is to let Go of the concept of self. Well, wait, which is it? Yes, I think that they are the same and it makes perfect sense. I mean, I think what holds our sense of self together is wanting things, wanting certain kinds of feelings, wanting to escape other kinds of feelings.

You know, I mean, there's a philosopher named Miri Albahari in I think Australia, whom I quote in the book, who makes the point that our conception of the bounds of self is implicitly invoked whenever we want to either obtain something or escape something. If we want to run away from something, we want to create distance between the bounds of ourself. And that if we want to obtain something, we want to bring it into contact with the bounds of ourself. So it makes sense to her that if you let go of the desires, the boundedness of the self would tend to dissolve.

And I think that is very much the dynamic that leads to these reports. It isn't just the boundedness of the self that dissolves, it's also the sense of internal solidity of self because you're no longer grasping and closely identifying with any of the things in your, your so called internal experience, the feelings, the thoughts. So yeah, I think they're very much the same thing. I'm a little curious, by the way, what you meant when you said there was some ethical preference I had that I didn't quite express.

26:11 Seth: Oh, just at the end of the book you're like, I'm not going to get into it, but I think if we all did this, it'd be a lot harder to have wars.

26:17 Robert: And oh, I totally, I mean, I make the claim, I don't. It's not a book defending it, but I absolutely believe that if people were more mindful, in the Buddhist sense of the term, more aware of their feelings and in a certain sense more skeptical of the guidance their feelings give them. Which isn't to say you wind up having no feelings or you have no joy, but just aware of when your buttons are being pushed, aware that these people who are identified as enemies, I mean, if you ask yourself why is it that before we go to war, the people who want the war go to such great pains to demonize the leader of the country they want to invade.

And often these guys don't need much help in demonizing. Often they're bad people. But if you ask them why did they want to drive that point home so thoroughly, it's because once you have that feeling, once you have that sense of essence, of enemy, then that's going to govern the way you interpret Their behavior. And there's a particularly interesting cognitive bias where with our friends, if they do something good, we attribute that to their basic nature. If they do something bad, we explain it away in terms of circumstance, like they didn't get their nap or they had had a bad day.

With enemies, it's the other way around. If they do something bad, it reinforces the fact that they're enemies because it's essence of them that did it. Whereas if they do something good, then we explain it away as, you know, well, they're just trying to impress people. They're whatever. And if you look at how we get into these war. I mean, I don't want to turn this into a big political sermon, but the feelings that trigger these specific cognitive biases, I think are sometimes subtler than we realize. And I am. I do believe it's the feelings that do it.

And if you're aware enough of them to not let it happen, then that's going to give you just a more objective view of what these people do. But anyway, you're right. I have. This is a big part of the motivation for writing the book, is that I think the planet may be at a point where if people on a larger and larger scale don't become more aware of the way their minds work and don't develop more in the way of a capacity to be selective in buying into their feelings, then we may have a very bad ending.

28:40 Mark: So we had last fall, Peter Singer on the show, who also is talking about this sort of transpersonal perspective that you would gain through meditation. You quote Sidgwick, who is also a favorite of Peter Singer's. And Peter Singer just describes this moral impartiality as just a basic. If you consider the various available foundations of morality, impartiality is the one that he thinks wins. It is the dictate of reason. You know, we get different versions of it in Kant and in Utilitarianism, and. But we have very few ethical views. I would say Nietzsche is an exception.

But a lot of Nietzsche's point is he's really not giving an ethical view that he has something suspicious about ethics itself. So it seems like this realization that my interest does not objectively matter any more than yours is not something that at least intellectually, we need anything like meditation to capture. You know, that Peter Singer thinks it's just any reasonable person that considers the available bases of morality is going to agree with you. And it's just that we have such a thoroughly unreflective baseline.

29:56 Robert: The problem is we think our View is the view from nowhere. Or as Sidgwick put it, the view from the point of view of the universe. Right. I mean, that's our brains, I think, are designed to convince us that we are seeing objective moral truth when we're just doing special pleading. And Peter's actually the one who brought the Sidgwick stuff to my attention. I was. One of the highlights of my very limited teaching career was to co teach a seminar with Peter. It was called the Nature of Ethics and it was about the biological basis of moral intuition.

But yeah, I agree that you can get a lot of people to accept the idea that morality should be about impartiality of perspective. The problem is getting us to appreciate how often we think our perspective is like a God's eye view when it's not. And I think mindfulness meditation can help make you more aware of the feelings that are subtly guiding your moral pleading in, in your kind of selfish direction.

30:57 Mark: I'm merely not having the patience for mindfulness meditation. At least if not felt, go to a retreat.

31:05 Robert: Should I give you all my retreat pitch? You should all go on a one week silent meditation retreat.

31:09 Mark: Yes, I have received the pitch, but I couldn't help going through this like. Well, even given the benefits that you're describing, would not almost any reflective discourse. I think you should for a half hour a day listen to some classical music. That would really chill you out, that would make you less grasping, that would make you, or I think that engaging in a rigorous program of physical exercise, that is going to make you less stressed, that's going to make you less reactive, less willing to demonize people. There's a whole lot of other sort of, you know, just look at Thoreau. He wasn't doing mindfulness meditation, but he was certainly contemplating nature and digging the soil and doing a lot of the kinds of things that at least are in the general neighborhood of what you were talking about. Yeah, but I guess I'm not asking.

31:58 Robert: I mean, it's true. Look, I do exercise and stuff. It helps. But I want to emphasize that mindfulness meditation is about more than calming down. I mean, these days that's what gets the attention is mindfulness based stress reduction. But it can get much deeper than that. And again, you appreciate it more on retreat because that's when you can get deeply into it. Like I recount in the book a time when I was at a retreat and this guy apparently fell asleep and started snoring. And naturally it's annoying me. And then I just thought, wait, I felt the wrath well up.

And such is the power of concentration on a retreat sometimes. That you can just literally kind of look at the wrath and vaporize it. I mean, it's that dramatic. It's like focusing a laser beam on it and it's gone. But moreover, you're more likely to become aware of that and subtler feelings in the first place. And again in everyday life, even though I'm meditating my 30 minutes each morning. That's hard to do. But it's somewhat easier to catch myself making unfair judgments of people. And in any event, having had the more dramatic experiences on retreat.

It's just an important thing to have in mind. It's an important reminder for me. So I'm going into evangelical mode here. So clearly you should divert me.

33:17 Dylan: One question I had about this, and maybe it's related to Marx. Is the relationship between mindfulness that is focused on. I am in no way particularly familiar with meditative practices. But in your descriptions of it. And then my passing familiarity with it. There's a couple different versions of it. Often, in order for the less sophisticated of us meditators. Or in mindfulness. Involves some kind of point of focus for it. You know, it might be focusing on your breathing. And then in a more sophisticated way, you might not need those crutches.

It made me think of just other kinds of activities that one does. Where, really the key is that you've been completely absorbed into it. That you are utterly and deeply present. And now I'm using the language that's used in mindfulness kind of meditation. That you are there and engaged. And in that way, you also, in my experience, for a number of different kinds of activities. You do lose your sense of self in the commitment and the involvement in the activity. And it made me think that, well, one of the advantages of something like meditation.

Is you have a whole history of refined practice with it. So that, yes, maybe you can get that sense in other ways. But because you have a refined practice to it. It allows you to. Well, for lack of a better term, it mechanizes the way in which you can heighten that attunement. I would say for myself that while I don't do those meditative practices. Those experiences where I'm utterly absorbed and in tune with something that doesn't feel like it's me. I just feel better afterwards. And so I gravitate towards those kinds of experiences. Even if they're not part of a daily practice and part of a meditation ritual.

35:22 Robert: Right. And that gratification is what can keep you Coming back to the cushion. I mean, once you focus on your breath and get absorbed in it a little bit, it's rewarding, it's calming, it's nice. But in mindfulness meditation, that's not the end of the exercise. The exercise is to use that equilibrium, that mental calm, to observe other things you wouldn't normally observe closely. More closely, they could be sounds, they could be the feelings, the thoughts that we've talked about.

35:53 Dylan: Well, just let me give you an example. So I have a friend at work. He's an amazing mechanic. And talking with him about this, he enlisted in Vietnam when he was 17 or whatever. And he talks very explicitly about having to learn, in coming back from that, a kind of meditative practice and a way of sort of calming his mind. And for him, it is through the activity of doing mechanical work. And it's clear in talking to him about that, that it is that deep focus in losing himself in solving this mechanical problem or doing this work on a car or whatever it is that provides him that mental calm and that clarity of self. And, you know, there are other examples that I could give that would result in that kind of.

36:54 Wes: So the feeling of flow from being absorbed in one's work, how does that compare to meditative practice?

37:01 Dylan: Yes, and the thing in reading in the book that I would sort of. The way I would put the quantity, besides the way Wes just put it, is I would say, what is it about focusing on disturbing thoughts or on any other particular thing? What is the distinction of the thing that you're focusing on that in your experience or in the testimony of other people that you talk to makes the difference? Or is it a distinction that has a fairly small amount of difference?

37:28 Robert: All kinds of focus and flow can be good things. Things like getting absorbed in a sport or, you know, fiddling with a car or something. I mean, those are, in a way, relatively easy things to do. I mean, it gets back to this thing I mentioned, the default mode network. It's this. It's not a region of the brain. It's a bunch of different parts of the brain that, to one extent or another, tend to get active when the mind is wandering. If you ask, when isn't the default mode network active? If you're absorbed in something, a sport, or if you're on deadline and working hard or you're reading a novel or whatever.

So. But what's hard to do is shut down your default mode network when you're not doing anything in particular, which is the situation when you sit down and cross your legs and close your eyes, right? There's no task that you're just naturally engaged in. And that's why to shut down that network, you have to find something to focus on. It doesn't have to be the breath, it can be something else. But you have to try to focus on anything that will shut down the wandering of your mind from thought to thought to obsession to obsession. You know, the point is just that you then can get absorbed in things you normally just don't naturally get absorbed in from a vantage point.

That isn't natural in a way. I mean, so it's just like as much as we have all felt anxiety, we don't naturally examine it, right? I mean, you might have a sense for where in your body it occurs or something, but the idea of really appraising its structure in a precise way and almost seeing a texture to it is something we don't naturally do. And the claim is that there's benefit in doing that. Not just in the sense that you can make the anxiety quit hurting, which you can if you succeed in viewing it in this particular way. But then the deeper claim is that, of course, this is ultimately the path to metaphysical truth.

Now you may say, well, you're losing the sense of self when you're, you know, absorbed in fixing a car. Isn't that, according to Buddhism itself, a kind of accurate metaphysical apprehension? I mean, maybe. Maybe so.

39:39 Dylan: Well, but just hearing you describe it, it seems to me that there's two distinctions. You know, one would be these other activities of getting absorbed where you're really focused on an activity and you're getting absorbed in it. That it is just like meditation, except that it is, at some level purely therapeutic. That it is, you know, you are calming yourself. And to that extent it has that advantage. But it is not necessarily providing you the higher level of change in your default mode network. The way you described that your default state isn't adjusted as a result of that necessarily.

And that meditation, because even if it has a key that involves focusing on something, ultimately it's about really addressing what yourself is like and has therapeutic aspects, which. But is. It sounds like the argument is that it's not ultimately merely therapeutic, but involves a kind of state change of your self.

40:48 Mark: Let me throw it at a bit of skepticism to bolster what Dylan just said. That I might see that these other things, like listening to classical music or getting involved with cars as actually being preferable to meditation. If I think that meditation is. Is really just a matter of kind of like daily affirmations that you have a whole tradition of alleged insights about human psychology. On the other hand, we know from modern psychology how bad people are introspecting, how we think that there is a CEO self in charge. But psychological tests show in ways that you point out in the book that we don't have to go into that, that is illusory.

So why would we necessarily think that just by sitting and contemplating your various moods and pains and things that you're actually gaining knowledge and successfully, you know, maybe you're fooling yourself. So you do end up feeling better, but potentially you're just, you know, you started with some beliefs that I will eventually see no self, I will eventually see emptiness. And the more you kind of the process of meditation, unlike where your mind is distracted by fixing a car, is focused on reinforcing this received dogma again and again and again and again until you start to see it.

How do you know that it's not merely self deceptive? It seems there are no self verifying experiences. We always wear when we experience something in the regular world, the external world. We're relying on social conventions, on epistemic norms and things to decide this is a veridical experience, this was an illusion. But it seems like when you're merely introspecting, well, you're referring indirectly to this received tradition of beliefs, but how do you know you're actually confirming those things as opposed to going in there? And just like as you say with the mystical experience, is it a feeling of no self, or is it a feeling of I am the cosmos, or is it a feeling of I'm standing in the presence of God?

Well, clearly, and this is as you correctly attribute to William James in Varieties of Religious Experience, he says that, yeah, this mystical experience is probably a thing that we commonly have across many creations, across many historical things, but people come to it with different religious baggage in tow. And so of course, they confirm whatever beliefs that they came into it with. So how is meditation not doing that same thing with particular ideas about the psyche?

43:29 Robert: Right. I mean, that's a good question. And I'd like to think that my book is different from many books in this very regard. I mean, the typical book or many books about this are by someone who has attained much deeper meditative achievement than I have. And they're basically asking you to take their word for it. And what I've tried to do is show that in certain respects, the kind of classic claims of Buddhist meditators, they're not proved by modern science, but they are consistent with certain aspects of Modern science in ways that are arguably at least corroborating.

So for example, I spend a lot of time on the modular model of the mind, which this wasn't developed by meditators. The version I'm talking about came to some extent out of evolutionary psychology, was championed by Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and others. And I argued that it had reason to take it seriously to begin with. And then in turn, it's quite consistent with Buddhist psychology and with things you hear from meditation teachers like thoughts think themselves and things that sound like a little weird but make sense in this light.

44:43 Mark: Well, let's fill that in for the listener. A bit like one of the examples you give is of jealousy. So we've talked about this already in terms of affect. Emotions have effects on the way we perceive things, on our patterns of thinking. And the way that you talk about the modules of the mind are different affect relations that might have been developed for different evolutionary purposes, kind of take control in different situations. So we're all familiar with the image of jealousy taking control of you and kind of making you into a different person.

You would never act like that. And so that seems to capture, well, this idea of these competing modules of the mind. I mean, besides being just consistent with the idea of different parts of the brain evolved at different periods. And so really there are sort of independent thinking. I don't know if you want to call them thinking because they're not all conscious at the time. But why not? You know, there's processing going on and then these things are sort of struggling for dominance both within your awareness. And so that's kind of how you explain what your mind wandering is, is.

Well, it goes to the lust of the person that. Well, there's a lust module in there that is kind of vying for attention. And so there's a question. Is it actually going to take over and dominate your thinking and maybe even bring about behavior? Cast the ruling vote in this composite that we really are made up of. We are not a unified self. We're a composite of organs that kind of are pulling at each other. Yeah. So that it seems to explain the kind of thing that you're observing in meditation of how different thoughts are pulling at you, thoughts thinking themselves.

As you just said.

46:21 Robert: Well, I mean, as you described there, the idea in the modular model is that there are these specialized parts of the mind. It wasn't built to be a general purpose computer. I mean, they're not in different regions of the brain. They're kind of all over the place. Distributed systems, but they are functionally separate. And the idea is they may in some sense compete for dominance, and the winning module is kind of what shapes consciousness. So if the jealousy module is dominant at one point, you are seized, you know, in a fairly literal sense, by jealousy.

The point is that this does mesh closely with meditative observations that were made independently. So that's what I've tried to do in various places in the book. Because one thing I've been frustrated by is the fact that so many books ask you to just take their word for it. My basic perspective is an evolutionary one, which I think makes sense, since that seems to be what created the brain. I'm lending credence to these ideas legitimately by reference to existing science in a Darwinian framework.

47:25 Mark: Well, you're also interpreting them certainly on the conservative side of the tradition. I'm not pulling a bait and switch. I really am giving you some version that is related to what's been passed down the tradition. But the obvious version being emptiness, which you admit that your take on that is original, idiosyncratic, however you want to put it. You can't have an experience that proves that metaphysically Berkeley was right or something like that. There's no. What we call matter, like the dispute between folks like Berkeley and Locke is not something that a simple experience would resolve.

It's different stuff at work. It's not an experiential truth. But if you're saying that what essence amounts to is not whether the thing has essence in the Aristotelian sense, this is kind of the version I had gotten out of the Mahayana tradition that we discussed in the other episode, where allegedly we think that everything has this absolute existence, not actually causally related to other things. It has an eternal core. And then we discover by experience that that's not the case. I mean, not only does that sound like a straw man, like, really, is that our normal experience of things as having this, what we called in the other episode svabhava, is having this inherent existence.

And all you have to do is realize that actually everything is connected in a causal network. You don't need meditation to figure that out. But the way that you put it specifically that essence is the emotional affect, the characterization that not just people, although certainly we do label people as enemies, as you said. But even you use the example of a tape measure, that there's an effective take that you have on tape measures. I recall seeing some online, I think it was a blog that somebody had, where he would just rate things, like, in other Words, the way he would rate movies.

Or maybe it was the A through F of, like, rating the color red. I think it's a B. And then he would kind of disguise what he likes about, like, and how absurd that is. But there was something that resonates about that because, as you say, we actually do make these effective, fairly irrational judgments on everything. And so that is, you might say, perhaps normally unrecognized part of the phenomenology of everyday experience. We might think if you ask somebody, well, what are you experiencing? Well, you know, I see shapes around me. I see these objects.

They don't jump out at the fact that everything has some sort of emotional charge, you know, often because the emotional charges in question are not particularly strong. They don't jump out like a scary snake, the things in front of me. But the fact that that really is an essential component of our experience of just about everything and that doing, whether it's meditation or whether it's something else, getting rid of this illusion, changing our personal phenomenology to have a more, as you say, objective view from nowhere, God's eye view, something that's more metaphysically accurate in that sense.

If this is a correct analysis of emptiness, that emptiness is grasping the absence of these weird essences that we push on things, then, yes, that is moving us in the direction of actually recognizing truth. Not metaphysical, deep beyond human experience truth, but just having a more rational personal phenomenology.

50:39 Robert: Yeah. And maybe having some metaphysical significance. I mean, I should say, as for Berkeley, there are different Buddhist takes on emptiness. The extreme case, sometimes called mind only, is that it's all an illusion. It's not out there at all. That's not what I would call the mainstream. The mainstream interpretation, I think, is phrased more conservatively to say things don't have, you know, inherent existence. They're not, like, self sufficient. That I defend. That's a mainstream doctrine. I mean, as you suggest, I'm defending it, but in a different way.

I almost think Buddhist philosophy is kind of. I'm not sure it's really an ultimately productive path to defend emptiness on grounds that all of these objects actually interact with their environment and part of a causal flow. To me, and again, this is a place where I am drawing on science to corroborate a meditative experience. To me, it seems that if it's true, as a certain amount of psychology suggests, that we do perceive these subtle essences of things and that is that affectively shaped, then if you can argue as I do, that affect is not a valid guide to anything like what you would call an objectively true view of things, then you've argued for the credibility of the original meditative experience.

So that's. That's the path I'm taking there. But again, I'm not asking you to take the meditator's word for it.

52:02 Mark: What did you other guys think about the thing that everybody's been waiting for? Does Buddhism actually reveal truth? Seth, what do you think?

52:11 Seth: So I think there's a couple of different things at work here, one of which is this notion of coming to truth through enlightenment or the idea of some kind of an apophantic experience. And we've seen in many, many, many episodes and many, many, many things we've talked about where there's a challenge with this notion of having some kind of experiential knowledge and connecting that with kind of a practical, moral, or ethical directive. So I just was out earlier today with a friend of mine who's a therapist for the Veterans Administration, and he specializes in post Traumatic stress disorder.

And he uses mindfulness meditation both to deal with his own job, himself having to take on all these other people's trauma and. And work through it, but he also uses it in his practice. And so I have no doubt, like, there's a certain sense in which I'm not capable of being skeptical about the possible therapeutic outcomes of meditation and also about the fact that it has the type of effects that Bob describes in this book, even though I myself have not personally experienced it because I don't have a meditation practice, I have enough personal connection.

You know, just like in the book, he references people he's interviewed who have these kinds of experiences, I can in no way doubt that meditation provides the kind of insights that the people claim. What I can't do is verify from the perspective at which I stand whether they have more knowledge of the truth. And even to ask that question makes me feel like we're still caught in the semantics of absolute truth that don't really make sense in this context. I know that, Bob, you. After hearing several interviews, you know that this title, somewhat provocative and maybe was even suggested by the publishers.

I can't remember if I heard that.

54:13 Robert: I actually thought it up, and I defend it. I mean, you're right that it seems at odds with certain strains of Buddhist thought that have expressed doubt about the possibility of ultimate truth. I mean, on the other hand, we talk about the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism. So whatever any given Buddhist philosopher's position on the idea of ultimate truth, there's no doubt that the basic idea is that in Buddhism, awakening brings you much closer to a true apprehension of the world than you had before. And I defend that. I mean, I think it's most clear cut in the case of emptiness.

It's a basically fairly simple argument I'm making, and I stand by it. Not self is a little trickier because not self means so many different things. But certainly some of the things it means in Buddhism, I think, are corroborated by modern science. There's a lot of evidence that the conscious self isn't the CEO we had thought that it was. And I also you alluded to, I think, the connection between metaphysical truth and ethical truth. I think the emptiness is a truer view of things in a kind of metaphysical sense, and I would say tends to lead to better behavior, which I describe in the book and is actually a fairly essentially utilitarian view.

Probably. But I'm certainly not saying, by the way, that everyone who becomes a great meditator becomes a better person. There are people who, I guess they're like sociopaths or something, and they become very adept at meditation and use it to sexually exploit their students and so on. But I do think that the Buddhist claim that clearer apprehension of the world tends to make you suffer less and tends to make you a better person morally. I think broadly speaking, that is defensible, at least as a kind of a correlational assertion. So I stand by the title.

I mean, I'm very, you know, I have both a note to readers in the front and an appendix trying to clarify exactly what I do and don't mean. I certainly not talking about reincarnation. And I'm mindful of, you know, all the debates you could have about whether the word truth ultimately is defensible. But to the extent that it is, I'm willing to stand by the title. Can I say one more thing? I don't mean like I'm coming down from a mountaintop like I had this revelation. It's just that until fairly recently, we didn't have much in the way of, I mean, Darwin only happened, you know, in the late 19th century.

We developed tools much more recently than that, several decades ago for trying to explain a lot of human emotions and cognitive tendencies in terms of natural selection. So it's only been since then that it would be even possible to try to do some synthesis of that worldview. I'm just saying, why is Buddhism true? Because we're animals designed by natural selection. And early Buddhism accurately more or less diagnose the implications of being animals that had been created that way.

57:10 Mark: Well, and I like your connection to Catholicism. Both of these had the idea that there is a fundamental misalignment in our moral Setup. It's page 260. Both Buddhism and Christianity say that at birth we inherit a kind of moral confusion, the dispelling of which is one object of the game. You end the book by saying, isn't it awesome that rightly perceiving truth through Buddhist teachings and acting well and being happy. Isn't it nice that all these go together? Whereas that kind of unity is usually. We've seen that in Boethius. We read recently, really back to Plato, these folks that said there's a unity, there's not a fundamental tragedy to the universe.

It's not that if you pay attention to what is most desperately you that you end up in fundamental conflict with other people. Like that sounds like a fundamentally Darwinist view that like to be true to yourself. Right. This I think is where Nietzsche was coming out of this. Or you could see it back. We've talked about Sophocles in these terms as really thinking that there are situations in which there is no right thing to do. That the way in which we're misconstructed is not something that can be corrected merely by reflecting on rationality.

Even if that means you have to engage in some routine ongoing meditative practice to bang rationality into your. You know, to see it more thoroughly. You have this kind of original sin view that Buddhism has, but it ends up not having a tragic outcome for somebody like Schopenhauer, who is very much a follower of Buddhism in terms of its basic picture, he ended up a pessimist by reflecting on the moral progress one can make through meditation. It wraps up all the potential tragedy in a non pessimistic picture.

59:02 Robert: Yeah, I mean the question of whether Buddhist practice carried far enough, by which I mean farther than is realistic for almost anyone. The question whether that could lead to nihilism or whether there is a nihilistic implication in Buddhist philosophy. That's a good question. An interesting question. I think it's a practical matter, it's not anything to worry about. But you're right, there are other philosophies that hold that seeing clearly, being happier, being better aligned. I had this conversation with Massimo Pigliucci about Stoicism and he said the Stoics felt the same way.

And I think it's a great feature for a universe to have. Right. I mean if you're gonna inherit all the bad stuff, we're already familiar with. We already know that there is suffering and injustice and so on. It's nice to think that in principle, you can kill three birds with one stone. You know, if we are deluded, if we do suffer, if we are sometimes bad, it's nice to think that the solution to those three problems is the same solution. And I don't want to sound too naive or oversimplify it, but I do think, again, kind of correlationally, the prescription that Buddhism offers tends to bring progress along those three dimensions.

1:00:12 Mark: All right, well, thank you so much, Bob, for coming on.

1:00:16 Robert: I just want to thank you guys. I mean, this is great. I love this. I could do this all night. When I blogged The Atlantic in 2012, I wrote a little thing where I listed my, I don't know, five or six favorite podcasts, and you were among them.

1:00:28 Wes: Yeah, we saw that.

1:00:29 Robert: Okay, well, I'll tell you, it's taken a while for you to pay me

1:00:31 Wes: back,

1:00:34 Robert: but thank you.

1:00:35 Wes: Thanks, Bob.

1:00:36 Robert: My pleasure.

1:00:37 Mark: Next time, we're going to have some more psychology, and we're actually going to have radio legend Dr. Drew on with us. Dr. Drew Pinsky. So he is having us read a few articles on the psychology of emotions like empathy and attachment. For instance, attachment and the Regulation of the Right Brain and Right Brain Affect Regulation by Allan N. Schore. And Attachment and Reflective Function, Their Role in Self-Organization by Peter Fonagy and Mary Target. Today's closing songs by Anton Barbeau was featured on Nakedly examined music episode 50. But you can get@nakedly examinedmusic.com the song, like Robert's book, is a westernized eastern slogan of sorts.

Make of it what you will. It's called alfalfa bong. Everybody should go weigh in on what you thought. We want to hear your input on this. We'll try to get Bob to answer some more of your questions. If you go to partiallyexaminedlife.com, you can make a comment on the blog post or you can go to our Facebook group and comment there and fight it out and achieve nirvana, hopefully. All right, good night, everybody.

1:01:38 Wes: Good night.

1:01:38 Unknown speaker: Good night.

1:01:39 Seth: Good night.

1:01:58 Unknown speaker: The wind was right, the rain was wrong the sun shone through Alfalfa bong the kids left home the folks stayed on to find themselves Alfalfa bong, alfalfa bong, Alfalfa bone the earth revolved around itself the books were flying on the shelf the words within were strange and strong in love but not alfalfa bong. The rabbit finally won the race the tops of carrots fell from grace the kids came home to find the moment and at a top alfalfa bong. The kids were shocked but not surprised. They'd always had their mother's eyes. But daddy should have known to lock the door. But dad, you should have known to lock the door.