What You Will Learn From Why Buddhism Is True

This week, Ashto and Jonesy venture on a journey through psychology, philosophy, and meditation practices and learn how Buddhism encourages moral clarity and enduring happiness. Written by Robert Wright, Why Buddhism Is True uses the concept of evolutionary psychology and progressive neuroscience to explain the relevance of Buddhist philosophy in improving our lives. According to Wright, Buddhism presents an opportunity to liberate ourselves from the delusions in our minds. How do we stay consistent with our mindfulness practice? Like Neo in The Matrix, you can start by imagining your meditation as a rebellion against an oppressive overlord – the natural selection that perpetrates the delusion to compel you as a slave to its agenda.

The Science and Philosophy of Meditations and Enlightenment

Living in the matrix

‘You are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, into a prison that you cannot taste, or see or touch – a prison for your mind,’ Morpheus says. He offers Neo two pills: A red one and a blue one. Neo can take the blue pill and return to his dream world, or take the red pill and break the shroud of delusion. Neo chooses the red pill.

That’s a pretty stark choice: A life of delusion and bondage or a life of insight and freedom. In fact, it’s so dramatic, that you’d think a Hollywood movie is exactly where it belongs. When the movie came out, a number of people saw it as mirroring a choice they actually made. These people were Western Buddhists. Some of our happiest moments come from delusion. For example, believing the Tooth Fairy would pay a visit after we lose a tooth. Delusions can also produce bad moments that you might perceive as reality. For example, lying awake at night with anxiety.

An everyday delusion

Let’s take a simple but fundamental example. Eating some junk food, feeling briefly satisfied, and then only minutes later feeling a kind of crash and maybe a hunger for more junk food. This illustrates how subtle delusions can be.

Junk food makes a good example because it’s fundamental to Buddha’s teachings. One of the Buddha’s main messages was that the pleasures we seek evaporate quickly and leave us thirsting for more. We spend our time looking for the next gratifying thing but the thrill always fades and leaves us wanting more.

Unhelpful insights

Knowing the truth about your situation doesn’t necessarily make your life any better. In fact, it can actually make it worse. You’re still stuck in the natural human cycle of ultimately futile pleasure-seeking, what psychologists sometimes call the hedonic treadmill. But now you have a new reason to see the absurdity of it. In other words, you see it is a treadmill specifically designed to keep you running without really getting anywhere.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan meditation teacher says, ‘Ultimately happiness comes down to choosing the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.’ If you want to liberate yourself from the parts of the mind that keep you from realising happiness, you first have to become aware of them, which is unpleasant.

The Truth about mindfulness

The evolution that has produced a distinctively Western, 21st century Buddhism hasn’t severed the connection between practice and ancient thought. Modern mindfulness meditation isn’t exactly the same as ancient meditation. But the two share a similar philosophical foundation.

The real-life Matrix is the one in which we’re actually embedded and came to seem more like the one in the movie. Not quite mind-bending, but profoundly deceiving and ultimately oppressive; something that humanity needs to escape. The good news is that Buddhist practice and philosophy offer powerful hope if you want to escape the matrix.

As Morpheus says to Neo, ‘I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it.’ This book is an attempt to show people the door – give them an idea of what lies beyond it and explain it from a scientific standpoint. Why what lies beyond it has a stronger claim to being real than the world they’re familiar with.

Who’s really in charge of our minds?

The ‘you’ that experiences feelings and perceptions and entertains thoughts aren’t really in complete control of things. If you think there is some kind of supreme ruler inside your head well there’s some question as to where exactly you’d find it. 2,500 years later, the science of psychology is talking the Buddha’s language. There is unanimous agreement among psychologists that the conscious self isn’t some all-powerful executive authority.

So if the conscious mind isn’t in control, what is in control? Nothing in particular. The closer we look at the mind, the more it seems to consist of a lot of different players. Players that sometimes collaborate but sometimes fight for control. In other words, it’s a jungle in there, but you’re not the king of the jungle.

The good news is that paradoxically, realising you’re not the king can be the first step toward getting some real power. It’s hard to admit you’re not king. We’ve always felt that our conscious self is in charge of our behaviour, deciding what to do and when. However, a number of experiments over the past few decades throw doubt on this intuition.

Conclusion of Why Buddhism Is True

Life as ordinarily lived is a kind of illusion, and you can’t be truly free until you pierce the illusion and look into the heart of things. Until you ‘see it for yourself’ as Morpheus put it to Neo, ‘you will remain in bondage.’ But there are important differences between The Matrix and the Buddhist scenarios.

The Matrix is easier to describe. Neo had a clear picture of robot overlords putting humans in gooey pods and pumping dreams into their brains. That imagination is easier to visualise than the idea that the self doesn’t exist. Namely, they give Neo something to rebel against, and rebellions can be energising. This would come in handy with meditation because meditating consistently can be a struggle.  But there’s good news; if you would like to think of your meditation as a rebellion against an oppressive overlord, we can arrange that.

Just think of yourself as fighting your creator: natural selection. After all, much like the robot overlords, natural selection engineers the delusions that control us. Natural selection perpetuates delusion in order to get us to adhere slavishly to its agenda. Just like Neo, we have every right to decide that our values differ from the force that controls us. But first and foremost, we need to liberate ourselves from the delusions through which that control is exercised.

Browse Our Library for similar books

Explore our library to discover more books about Buddhism and mindfulness practice. Some of our popular selections include The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, Karma by Sadhguru, The Art of Happiness by Dalai Lama, and more.