Robert Wright || Why Buddhism is True

introduce my guest for today, Robert Wright. Robert is the New York Times bestselling author of The Evolution of God, Non Zero, The Moral Animal, Three Scientists and Their Gods, and most recently, Why Buddhism Is True. He's the co founder and editor in chief of the widely respected bloggingheads dot tv, and has written for The New Yorker, Atlantic, The New York Times, Time Slate, and The New Republic.

He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton University, where he also created the popular online course Buddhism and Modern Psychology. Thanks for chatting with me today, Robert, Well, thank you for taking the time to chat with me. Scott, No, I'm really delighted to chat with you. I've read your book now twice in its entirety, at one when you sent me the galley, and again in preparation for the interview.

And I have to say, and maybe this is you could connect this somehow to the principles of Buddhism or something or non attachment or distance or whatever. But the second time I read it, I saw things. I had a different perspective on it. I still liked it my a different perspective in that some of the criticisms I had the first time I read it are much quieter now. Good. I like that. That's a good direction to head in.

Maybe you should read it a third time. And before you're going to say that, And I don't just say that to appease you. I find that an interesting exercise for myself in the sense, you know, I was like, oh, I see what I really see what he's saying there. So even if you know, I still have some like things that I like, I think we can add to the picture. I really like see what you're saying. So

let's talk about a bunch of this stuff. So you start off with this idea of taking the red pill, you know, obviously liaking it to the movie The Matrix, and the idea that the only way to see the whole picture of reality is to see it for yourself. Now, how do you like in that to the process of meditation. Well, yeah, the idea in The Matrix is that people discover that actually they've been living in a world of illusion. They're actually in these little pods, and everything they thought they

were living is really an hallucination. Now, I wouldn't say that Buddhism makes quite that claim, although there are some strands of Buddhist thought that take things about that far, but those are not really mainstream strands. What is central to Buddhism broadly is the idea that we don't find nature see world clearly, and that that's what makes us suffer,

and that's what makes us make other people suffer. So a lot of reason to try to see the world more clearly, whether through meditation or whatever, in this view. And I basically defend the view in the book that indeed we don't naturally see the world clearly. Indeed, that leads us to sometimes suffer, and it also leads us to behave badly sometimes and make other people suffer. And I trace this to the way natural selection designed the

human brain. You know, our happiness was not high on natural selections agenda, and neither was our always seeing the world clearly. I mean the bottom line was, traits that will get genes into the next generation are the traits that natural selection favors. And in those cases where suffering or delusion will help you get genes into the next generation, natural selection will favor those things. So that's really interesting. I mean, you have this quote here, our brains are

designed to, among other things, dilute us. And you earlier right, evolution blessed us with a basically accurate view of reality. So I was confused what you meant by with a basically accurate view, But you're saying it distorts us at the same time. How are those two things true at the same time. Well, I think for certain things, clear perception has coincided with genetic proliferation, like a wall is here, or you know, some boulder that I might trip over.

Obviously it's in my interest to see that clearly. Now, even in the realm of everyday perception, there are distortions that seem to be natural. So, for example, when a big object is hurtling toward us in the modern environment, it might be a car. We tend to overestimate how

fast it is traveling. And that makes sense as something like if a wild animal is chasing you, you want to err on the side of caution, right, You want to think you know that if you're going to make a mistake, make it in the direction and a direction that leads you to be safe, not in a direction that leads you to be eaten. Right. So, even in the realm of raightforward perception, it doesn't always make sense for the brain designed by natural selection to give us

perfect clarity. And I would say that these departures from clarity get more pronounced in certain realms, such as thinking about ourselves and our own motivation and what the self is. And of course in Buddhism, this is a big claim about a whole area of illusion Buddhists. I mean, in the strictest form, the claim is that the self doesn't exist. But certainly the idea is that we exaggerate the extent to which there's a kind of a CEO conscious self

making all the decisions. So in that realm, I think I make the case that you know according to not just evolutionary psychology, but a lot of findings from just you know, garden variety psychology, there's reason to think that our conception of the self is confused in various ways, and so too with our judgments we make about other people.

I would say that's a big area where it makes sense that natural selection would get us to judge people in ways that were expedient in a sense for our ancestors in terms of getting genes in the next generation. And so that's another area where a lot of skepticism of your kind of intuitive perception might be warranted. So I think, you know, you go through the world and you know there's something there where the tree is for sure, and that is a paved road I'm seeing and so on.

That's what I meant by basically accurate. I gotcha. Yeah. So, you know, in visual cognition they distinguish between top down processing and bottom up processing. It seems like you're saying a lot of meditation is to get us more in touch with that bottom up before the top town storts it in a way. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. Actually, I mean, it seems to be the case that you know, rawy input kind of

gets processed from the get go. I mean, even to create a three dimensional view of the world, you have to impose certain assumptions on the data. Because, after all, your eyes, the surfaces of your eyes are just two dimensions. So to build a three dimensional model out of that, you've got to start processing the data right away. And then in some realms, especially judging other people or thinking about things we've done, you know, the processing gets a

lot more elaborate. I mean, we tell these elaborate stories about ourselves and about other people, and this is, you know, a bad person, and this is a good person. And we now know that which category you put these people into will shape all kinds of things that you think about them. It can trigger certain cognitive biases and so on. But you're right that bottom up you mean starting with

the raw sensory information. Yes, And by top down you mean kind of the imposition of assumptions and constraints on the information that lead to coherent in some cases narratives. Yeah. I see. The goal of a goal of Mindphon's meditation is to move a little closer to the raw sensory input. I mean, I tell a story in the book about when I was a meditation retreat and there was construction going on. They were building a dorm at the retreat center.

And this is considered kind of unfortunate because it meant there were these loud construction noises when you're trying to meditate. But through meditation, you can just reconceptualize the sound. I mean, if you start thinking about it in a different way, it becomes beautiful. You know, you don't have to think of it as this unwelcome interruption. That's the way we tend to think of construction noise, especially if we're trying to meditate. But you can do the exact opposite and

think of it as beautiful. And that's what I did. And that kind of thing is possible through meditation to in a certain sense, bring a different story to the perception. Yeah, so it's really kind of seeing things as they are, not as you want them to be or as your prior expectations lead them to be. But isn't there some instances where it's like really a good thing to be oriented or biased in a certain way with the people

in general. Like I'm just thinking, like, you know, I've done some research late that shows that people who tend to see the best in people. That's correlated with a lot of really positive outcomes in life. Is that really such a bad thing to have that bias that you actually like lead with. There's going to be a strength in this person. No, I mean, I'd say a couple of things. First. There are all kinds of illusions that

I'm fine with. I think, within certain limits, it's fine for me to think that my daughters are more important than other kids. You know, not that that's morally true, but just that, you know, it's a reasonable way to structure society. That you have these houses, they have these families in them. There's a certain efficiency. Everyone takes care

of it. It works, The system works. I'm not like trying to you know, even though the idea that your children are special is in a certain sense an illusion that natural selection imparted to us. I'm not here to you know, I'm not quite that big a revolutionary now. I will say, you can go too, and you should.

When you're judging other people's kids because of the way they've interacted with yours, you should strive to, you know, to attain something approaching objectivity that can be helpful, and you certainly should try to avoid building up intense ill will because somebody else's kid got some cheerleader slot. You know, there's this famous case in Texas where the woman plotted I think the murder of her daughter's cheerleader rivals mothers. Anyways,

who's going too far by any reckoning? There's that. Now, to get back to what you're saying, I would say, thinking the best of people, I would say, first of all, if that's an illusion in certain kinds of contacts, it could be a healthy one. But secondly, given the kinds of judgments we naturally make in some cases that may be moving you toward a more objective view, it may be that your bias would have been unduly negative, right, Because there's all kinds of things people can do that

just set off negative judgment, right. I mean, they can just be taking too long to order their coffee. It's Starbucks, right, and you start thinking, you know, if you're not careful, like what a jerk? You know? And when you think about it, that's pretty slim evidentiary grounds for concluding that someone's a jerk. And or they can say things because they're just not very diplomatic, or they're just not thinking

about the way about your perspective whatever. There's all kinds of ways people can set off an undoly negative judgment, So it could be that, you know, the bias you're talking about is actually not a bias on balance, it's moving us closer to it just kind of objective, non judgmental view. I really like that. I really like that. I was just thinking about, like you kind of talk about, what would it be like to not judge anyone is good or bad or you know, and just take all

it to be one hundred percent category free. I mean that I don't know if we really should aim for that, And it sounds like you're saying that, You're not saying that's what we should necessarily aim for. But there are these filters we have on the world. You know, when you mentioned a lot of this, I tend to think of have you read a lot of Abraham Maslow? No? I mean, I know about the hierarchy, but I haven't

really read much written by him. I've read a lot of his personal writings, and he really believed that self actualization as he was calling it, which I think is just very similar to what you're talking about or what the Buddhists are talking about with nirvana, that the self actualizers no longer these categories break down and you actually get to a point, and I think that it can be taken too far. But you know, sometimes like can evil be beautiful? Like he's like if you look in

a microscope. He has this article where he says, if you look in a microscope and you look at a cancer growing without any notion that it's cancer, it's actually quite beautiful. And you know, that's a very controversial thing to say. I realized that for most of my listeners.

But I think that there's a lot of wisdom there, you know, with things are just as they are, and then we as humans, you know, in a lot of cases rightly, so if someone's running with you with an ax trying to kill you, it's not to your survival benefit to stand there and say, wow, there's something really beautiful about the situation right now. But nevertheless, I think there's some wisdom to when Maslow was saying that, I think it dovetails with what you're saying, right, Yeah, I

mean I would say two things. First of all, a criticism of Buddhism is that carried too far, it could become a kind of a nihilism where you make no judgments at all, and right, there's evil as beautiful. And so I kind of have a super long footnote in the book about that where I say that, you know,

for practical purposes, that's just not a problem. I mean, almost nobody gets anywhere near the territory where that would be a serious question, and the people who do get so far beyond judgment that it becomes a serious question. I think it tends to be the case that they have so let go of their own selfish needs and the selfish nature of their judgments, that it's not like they're going to go do a bunch of evil stuff just because they no longer judge, you know, eventually judged

bad things as bad. So anyway, I think that's not a big problem. And I do think it's true that. I mean, if you take the extreme case, when I'm on a meditation retreat, you know, I have a daily meditation practice, which is helpful, But when I go to like a one week silent meditation retreat, you know, there's an intensified version of like what meditation can do for you.

In principle, it's an interesting way to find out, like what would it be like to be some monk who meditates for four hours a day or whatever every day. I mean, you actually meditate even more than that on a meditation retreat, and you certainly One of the first things I noticed is, Wow, everything is beautiful. I mean, it was like I recount in the book when I on my first retreat, I came across I was in the woods, and I came across a weed. It's called

a plantain weed. And when I had seen them in my yard, I thought they were horrific and tried to kill them. And I just realized, you know, it looked beautiful. And I realized there's no objective basis for saying this is ugly, and the other stuff is by it is beautiful. That is like a judgment that we have convinced ourselves of.

It's not like a god's eye view, you know. And as a practical matter, you don't want people to go so far that they see so much beauty in a mass murder or something that they don't punish them, obviously, but it can be liberating to see beauty in a lot of things where you hadn't seen beauty, and to see more intense beauty and things where you had seen beauty. Yeah. Yeah, that tells very nicely with that point, and you know, of course we need to be careful with taking that

to the extreme. But there's just something really I feel like, really profound about this point though, that when we pull back, you know, as we'll believe that when we pull back

all of our evolutionary heritage. I mean, in a lot of ways, this is very consistent with what you arguing in your book that underneath all that is actually fundamental goodness, that goodness is actually probably our default, and that it's all these you know, evolved judgments and biases and all the kind of the internal drama that we go through all as it kind of take us away from being able to fully see that. And you say that, and you know you talk about that a lot. Yeah, I

mean I would say I would qualify it. I would say, if by default state you mean the way the organisms were designed in quotes, of course, designed by natural selection. I mean I put it in quotes because natural selection is not a conscious process. But if by default you mean the way we were designed by natural selection to operate,

I wouldn't say the default state is good. What I would say is that through meditation, it is possible in a certain sense of financial selections, agenda and reach almost a deeper default state. I mean, you might, if you wanted to get metaphysical, you might say, well, maybe this is the default state of consciousness. You know, maybe through evolution consciousness I mean, presumably consciousness gets created by evolution, but maybe because of the rules of evolution, consciousness in

the course of getting created gets kind of warped. And maybe there's a version of it which you could think of as a default state, a very just calm, observant version of it that's not so attached to a self and the self you know, immediate agenda, a version of it that is much more benign. And when that, I mean, I don't want to sound too weirdly metaphysical here, okay, because I my consciousness isn't I mean, I'm, I'm it's

a whole other topic. But I do want to say I don't think our default state, as organisms created by natural selection, is to be always good by any means. But in fact, you know, I'm trying to point in the book to some kinds of pernicious natural warpings of our perception. But it is possible to move yourself to a deeper state through meditation that is less afflicted by those unfortunate distortions. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, And I would say, you know, you look at people

who are set to be enlightened. I mean, if there is such a thing as true full on Buddhist enlightenment and people argue about this, you know, they are in a whole different realm in this regard, and you would expect that it's an extremely benign form of consciousness. Yeah, I didn't mean default. I actually I would like to take that back. You know, our default state may just be kind of neutrality. I mean, we have all of these you know, if we talk let's talk about Robert

Cursbin's model of the mind for a second. We have all these modules, these different selves, and some of them evolved to have different goals than other goals others of the self. So we actually have within all of us multiple personality disorder right in a way, because we have these competing drives and motives within us. And it seems like meditation is a good way of helping us become more harmonious and unified in that sense of self. Even

though there isn't a single sense of self. But I would kind of make the argument that your book is not just validating the Cursbin model, it's actually going beyond it. And I think this is what I've wanted to talk to you about for a while. In a lot of ways, I think your book could have been told why evolutionary psychology is not complete, and that could have been an interesting framing of the book, an additional framing of it. It does suggest there is a perceiving self that is

not the simply the sum of the parts. In a way, it's not simply like we are more than our evolutionary We can be more than our evolutionary drives. We can have goals that I think truly transcend our biological imperatives. And I think your book actually makes that argument convincingly, even though that wasn't the stated argument of your book. Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean that part of my point in the book is that Buddhist meditation, mindfulness meditation

in particular, is a means of transcending biological heritage. It is. Now that doesn't mean, you know, as you know, I'm a big believer in evolutionary psychology as a model for understanding human behavior. But this is a dis a plan of in some sense transcendence. I mean that word can mean a lot of things, but I certainly mean that

you can define natural selections agenda in a certain sense. Yeah, you cannot behave as selfishly as natural selection might quote want you to, and that involves liberating yourself to at least some extent from the kind of emotional levers that natural selection uses to steer people towards serving its agenda.

There are all kinds of feelings, ranging from lust to rage too much subtler feelings that you know are with us, I think because in the past they help you know, people get changed in the next generation their legacies of natural selection, and the process of liberating yourself from natural selections agenda involves liberating yourself from the control of these feelings. Those are the levers that get you to serve natural

selections agenda. That doesn't mean you've become a person without feelings, but the idea in Mindful's meditation is that you at least give more aware of feelings, take kind of a critical look at them, and decide at least whether there are certain feelings you just shouldn't buy into totally and shouldn't be governed by Yeah. I keep thinking of Keith

Stanovich's book the title The Robots Rebellion. You know, in a lot of ways, mindfulness allows us to be more aware of how much we're being controlled by forces that are deep within us, and we can in a sense, rebel against them. Yeah, you've just brought feelings and illusions. I would love to talk a little about something you talk about the book about You say, sometimes feelings are illusions. Now, how do we know when our feeling is an illusion

to when it's not? Well, it's hard. I think evolutionary psychology helps us think about it. So you take something like fear or anxiety, and when you're in a fearful state, like say you're taking a hike, you know that the area is rattlesnake rattlesnake infested. You know, anything you hear down by your feet, you're going to think, for a moment, oh, maybe that's a snake. You might even look down if it's a lizard, you'll actually see the lizard as a

snake for a second. Literally think you see a snake. Now it's plausible, but that kind of error of perception is an adaptation, that's a designed in feature of natural selection, because you know, better safe than sorry. So false positives in life threatening situations are better than a lot of false negatives where you fail to get out of the way of something that is, in fact a snake. Is

better to err on the side of caution. So that's a case where you might say natural selection designed a certain kind of delusion into us because it was pragmatically valuable. It helped get jeenes, it helped organisms and get genes into the next generation. Now it may further be that in a natural environment the problem gets exacerbated, And of course you might say, well, that's that's not a problem false positives, because in fact it did keep people safe.

I mean, if you were decided, you know you yourself would rather err on the side of caution. Unfortunately, it means a lot of unpleasant fear, but that just seems to be the way we're built. So given the fact that caution is associated with fear, you know you would choose to live with the excessive fear rather than risk being killed by a snake. But then you move to the modern environment, you take a feeling like anxiety, which

according to evolutionary psychologists is natural in itself. You know, were worrying that maybe your child who's wandered off may get you know, killed, or something leads you to go look, find the child and secure them. That part's natural. But then in a modern environment, various social anxieties get exacerbated and become less productive. Right, So, like, yes, it's natural to care what people think of us and to be anxious about it because what people thought of us was

correlated with genetic proliferation. But what wasn't natural in the environment that we were designed for by natural selection is this suddenly find yourself giving it speaking to like one hundred people you've never met, and you know that just doesn't happen in a hundred gathered village. So that's a case where social anxiety, that is that it's core natural, gets exacerbated and becomes unproductive. I mean again, to certain points productive you should be worried enough about your talk

that you get to talk done. But then once you're ready and you're having trouble sleeping the night before and you're you know, in some cases, you know, people have illusions of visions of themselves projectile, vomiting something they've never done while speaking, you know, people at phobia isn't that's completely unproductive, And so I think that's a case where the feeling, you know, it's just the Darwegian paradigm is useful in distinguishing between these feelings that are in some

sense natural, arguably useful, and the cases in which the feelings are you know, in a sense turns of misbehaving by virtue of the fact that we live in a new kind of environment and are not productive in any sense of the word so interesting. You know, look, I think there's a really important distinction here to be made between and I try to make a distinction in my own writings between evolutionary adaptive and personally constructive. They can

be two different things. A lot of evolution psychologists talk about adaptiveness in the sense of what was adaptive amongst our ancestors. But you know, I'll give you one domain which evolution psychologist talk about, so and them. You know, evolution psychologists love talking about meeting. They love meeting, and they're the only one I think. I think they talk about it a little too much. Frankly, Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I agree. Yeah, And this is someone who

wrote a book called Meeting Intelligence Unleashed. But we're just going to ignore that that book, that book for a second. So evolu psychologists just well meaning a lot they talk about how it's a good thing having a bias that your made value is higher than your actual meat value is.

So there's a whole literature in evolutionology on why it's adaptive and I'm putting adaptive there on quotes to have to not see reality clearly if you're a schlub, you know whatever that you know, a schlub means you know what I mean by shlub, and you think you're an Adonis, there's actually that confidence will give you a little bit of an upper edge then, you know, if you really

saw you who you are for what it's worth. Now, that's not the same thing as over in the long run constructive, right, because ultimately that's going to eventually catch up with you, right Like eventually, you know, like it'll be better in the long run to actually genuinely become maybe not an Adonis, but to genuinely become a better

person than you currently are in the long run. But you know, you do see in the literature a lot that they use the word adoptive in a lot of these senses that they even show correlations between I published this main intelligent scale showing that kind of over confidence is correlated with meeting outcomes. Yeah, well I remember. It

kind of reminds me. I remember somebody once in the early days of evolutionary psychology arguing that premature ejaculation is not a problem because as long, you know, as long as you've gotten into the you know, initiated the process, insemination will happen, right, even if the woman's not gratified. But wait a second, I mean, you know, you're building a relationship. There's reason to care whether the woman is gratified, right, I mean, you know, it's just not enough to say

I agree. You know, the job has been done, that we got our genes in there, and now we're hoping for the best. You know. It's like that is a conflation between adaptive and personally useful, and the two do get conflated sometimes, you know, not by everyone, but yeah, it's a distinction. I mean, am I if anything, if I air irobably air in the opposite direction. I mean, I'm out to define nancial selections agenda, you know, because yeah, yeah,

and that's the spirit of the book, not unequivocally. I mean again, you know, love of offspring and so on. You know, when kept in perspective, is just a wonderful thing. But that said, I think we should be a little skeptical about the agenda of our designer, because so often it executes its agenda in subtle ways. I mean, it doesn't by subtly warping perception. In ways it can be very consequential and can start wars and huge feuds with

friends and so on that are unnecessary. And I do think mindfulness meditation, I mean, I think the stereotype of meditation is in some ways misleading. People think, oh, you think meditation can save the world, It'll suffuse us with love and so on. Is that that so much? There are kinds of meditation devoted to that, actually, but mindfulness

meditation isn't one of them. It's just more that you become more aware of how your feelings are pushing and pulling you, and when you decide that a feeling is not constructive, you can get a little distance from it and be less obedient to it. I really like that. I really like that. I want to return this thing, said you said to you you kind of want to defy evolution? Are you equal opportunity with that? Though, because, like you know, we have there are so many positive

aspects of humanity that also are evolved. I think evolution psychologists focus too much on the muck. But there are positive psychologists like doctor Keltner who have put an evolutionary framework things like all things like love, things like you know, there are so many positive aspects that also there's still technically evolution's agenda. So do you only want to rebel against evolution's agenda when it's the muck or do you want to full stop rebel against every No, I only

want to rebel when it's the mock. Okay, Now I may focus on the muck, because that's the part that needs focus, right. I do think meditation can actually accentuate positive feelings like the apprehension of beauty and compassion, even when you're not like doing one like meta like loving kindness meditation. I just think garden variety of mindfulness meditation can make you more compassionate toward people. And I'm all

for that. I'm for I guess I would say I'm for not just yes, accepting the positive legacies that natural selections left us with, and there are many. I'm for accentuating them if you can. And you know, I know Dhaker, I think himself is a meditator. I know he's very you know, plugged into the meditation community there in northern California. He's at Berkeley, but I'm a big fan of his work. I actually heard him on the radio last night, as it Happens, Yeah, oh cool. What was that? We'll put

a link on the podcast for that. Do you know what station? I think it was actually a local Philadelphian PR show. He was called Radio Time's Cool with Marty. I think he was on that and they were rebroadcasting at night. It was about political stuff and his book on I think it's called The Power Paradox, but it's about how having power changes people, sometimes not for the better, yeah, you know, and how most people who get changed by

power were necessarily power hungry before. You know how it's kind of part of human nature to kind of change us. Somebody hands it to you, you you take it, Yeah, yeah, exactly. It hasn't happened to me yet, but if they do, you know, I'm available. If somebody must say hand me, I love your sense of hearer, I love it. So there's a very profound point in your book about how the more that we strengthen, the more that we engage or in a sense don't rebel against the module, the

stronger it's power becomes. Like in terms of self help development, like it is a more powerful concept as far as I'm concerned as reading. I'm not going to call out anyone, but it's a very important way. And to me, it love tails with the expression, you know, feeding the wolf, Right, the more we feed the wolf, the stronger the wolf becomes.

So it seems like, and I will say, as someone who's trying to practice meditation myself, the best description I can give of how I feel when I've consistently meditated is I feel like I'm not possessed anymore by anything, Like nothing is possessing me. Right, I think that's the best way I can describe it. I don't know if that dovetails with your experiences at all, but it feels good because I feel greater freedom to I don't know, to,

just I guess, choose whatever I want to do. So is it that meditation linking that to this idea of the wolf is it because what I'm doing is and I'm meditating on some of these modules that I don't want to indulge in, but I'm not inhibiting it. I'm actually facing it head on in a way, right, and then therefore by facing it head on, it's quieting. Is that? What is it? Is that what's going on? I think basically yes. So I think, first of all, what you

said is true. That you know, if you think of the mind as having these little specialized modules, like one of them wants you to eat and if you see junk food, it you know, gets you all excited, and another one I want you to impress someone, or another one wants you to do something else. And there's these specialized functions and some of them are yeah, can get out of control light hunger. First of all, it's true. It's a it's a pretty conventionally observed fact that appetites

that are indulged grow stronger. That's what addiction is. I mean, if you're addicted to a chemical that of course is not something natural selection anticipated, but it's a feature of the modern environment that short circuits the reward system. You know, a gratifying chemical like nicotine or something it's well known that if you feed the appetite, the appetite gets stronger.

I think i'd say two things. One, you're right that in the book I kind of explain why I think natural selection would have designed things that that way, such that modules that win in the competition to dominate your consciousness over other modules get more power. But the other thing I'd say is so yes, in a sense, defying them makes them less strong. But as you did suggest there towards the end, defying can be a slightly misleading.

You're not really worrying it because you're not pushing them away. And in fact, to look at this mindfulness therapy that has been effective with nicotine addiction, it's not that they ask you to push the urge to have a cigarette out of your mind. On the contrary, they say, imagine having a cigarette. Think about that, close your eyes, examine the feeling. Don't try to get rid of the urge.

Look at the urge. Feel the urge, and the fact that you entertain the urge so long without the urge succeeding and getting you to actually a cigarette slowly gives you some distance from it, and it doesn't give the module the positive reinforcement. Right, So the module is like, didn't win that time, and that seems to kind of disempower the module. So it isn't defiance in a sense of pushing away. Yes, it is ultimately defiance, but it

is a subtle kind of thwarting. Yeah. So you just reminded me of a beautiful passage in one of Overall a Maze books. You're familiar with the humanistic psychologist's role, may I'm familiar with the name, but that's about it. He has this fignette. He talks about a clinical patient who just had this fear, a rational fear there every time he's near a window that he's just gonna just compulsively jump out of it and kill himself. And it really has taken over his life and it has really

possessed him. And the psychotherapist one day, you know, they're walking past a window and he's panicking and the psychotherapist opens the window and says, go just jump. When the guy says, in that moment, he was cured. Huh, he no longer had that fear. Ever, again, that's funny because it had the opportunity to get what it wanted it and he really he realized you know what, I actually don't want to. Yeah. Yeah, dangerous thing to do that for a psychotherapist. But I know right now you can

imagine a lawsuit from the family. But I'm glad things worked out. Yeah, I'm really glad things worked out to And I'm also going to link it to something Carl Rogers says most of his patients have a fear of unleashing the beast within. There's this kind of this fear with a lot of these patients that they'll that somehow, if they are their real selves, it'll be out of

control and they'll do horrible, horrible things. But he writes about in his books that, like, you know, the reality of the matter is that whenever any of his patients do the most horrible thing they think they would do, or they get that opportunity or whatever, that actually they're not really a beast. Their nature is not really what they most fear. I'm leaking all these things together on the spot in improvisational format, but yeah, I mean, I'm

thinking a couple of things. One is that the modern environment makes it easy to be a beast. I mean in the sense of indulging your appetite. So there's like pornography online. There are drugs that will gratify your reward system without you, like doing any work. I mean, we were designed to have to work, you know, to get like a boost and self esteem. We were designed to have to impress people, you know, by that was the idea behind the way natural selection created the brain. So,

I mean, I don't know what I'm thinking exactly. I guess my view of human nature is that people can behave like beasts. I guess I'm a little less sunny than Carl Rogers. A lot of people were that criticize that's one of the Chris says the Carl Rogers he was too optimistic about human nature. Yeah, I'm probably in that camp. But I think, what when I use the word beasts, I don't you know something truly truly horrible, like you're gonna kill lots, you know, like you're gonna

lose your mind and go insane. I'm saying, like our greatest deepest fears is what I'm saying. Yeah, I think, you know, just decency and friendliness and generosity are very deeply embedded things, and they manifest themselves in all kinds of situations. And there is nothing that gives me more pleasure than giving directions to somebody who asked for directions. And that's an interesting and I think there are a lot of people like that, and that's an interesting thing

because there's no payoff for you. Now, if you ask, well, why would natural selection design us to do something there's no payoff for? Well, maybe because you know, in the environment of revolution, there are basically no such thing as strangers. So you know, it's like, you help people and it may well come back to benefit you that they will help you later, who knows, But it doesn't matter, you know, for practical purposes. There's a very robust positive side of

human nature for us to build on. And if I focus in the book on distortions of perception and their attendant moral concept quins, it's just because I do want to build on the positive stuff we have to build on and avoid the most calamitous outcomes you can imagine for the species. Wow, you sound like a positive psychologist. Well, you know, I'm I'm a fan of a lot of the work in positive psychology, as you know. Yeah, no, of course, so I know I want to be mindful

of your time. I have just a couple more questions. I really interest I'm really really fascinated with this notion of non self and what the Buddha really meant. Do you have the section like hearsay? Tell me what your interpretation is, and can you link that to this idea of specialness because I've been thinking a lot lately about like you still have an identity? Like identity seems to be such a strong part of self. Are you saying we should get rid of an identity entirely? So? Can

you kind of tie all that together in a way? Okay, Well, first of all, I ask for what the Buddha meant by not self. I think the answers we don't know. You know, you didn't write anything down. Nothing was written down for quite a while. I think Buddhist thought probably developed for some time before much was written down, so there was a lot of oral transmission. I will say, if you look at you know, there is this famous

Buddhist doctrine this self doesn't exist. Well, what does that mean? Well, if you look at the Buddha's earliest what is said to be the Buddhist's earliest discourse on the not self, it's not clear, oddly that he's actually denying the existence of his of the self. I mean, that's a pretty plausible reading, but there are people who point out I

never quite says that. What he does do is he goes through the various parts of like the mind and the elements of human experience, you know, Buddhist psychology kind of divides human experience into five categories, like, you know, perceptions, feelings, so called mental formations, consciousness, the physical being. And he goes through them all and says, does it make sense to call this self? Like he says, you know, isn't it the case that your feelings you don't really control them,

and they can cause you affliction? Right, they can be unpleasant and you don't control them, So is that something we should call the self? And the monks who were listening say, no, you're right, we shouldn't. And he goes through the whole gamut of every element of human experience and argues that you know, you're not controlling them, they don't various reasons not to consider themselves. You could read

it as just therapeutic advice. In other words, if you can't control these things and they're causing you suffering, disown them. And interestingly, mindfulness meditation helps you do that. So, like you look at anxiety or something some feeling that's giving you trouble, you get a little distance from it. It actually loosens its script on you. It's less a part of yourself, and so you could just view that discourse

on the not self as pragmatic therapeutic device. Now, most interpreters don't think that it's no, it's the assertion that it's a metaphysical doctrine. The self, whatever he meant by that, does not exist. That's a majority of you, and I think it's certainly the case that as Buddhist doctrine developed, that became a Buddhist doctrine. There's no doubt about that.

It became a Buddhist doctrine fairly early on. At the same time, one reason I wanted to spend some time looking at that discourse in my book is I want to emphasize that people look leave aside whether you think the self exists. I mean, there certainly are lots of reasons for modern psychology to think we over state the extent to which there is some kind of solid, powerful, CEO type self in our conscious mind. Yeah, that's true, But you can also just think of it as like

a meditative guidance. Like parts of your experience that are giving you trouble, you don't have to think of them as pardon yourself. Those are the beginning steps on the path of mindfulness meditation. Now if they do lead you all the way, if you become a super committed meditator and say, well, I have had the fall on not self experience, as some meditators do, and that can be a profound experience. I haven't had the full on version of it, but in retreats, I've gotten a little taste

of elements of it. You might say that's all fine, But even if you don't go that far, I think the not self doctrine can be useful just in reframing. You know, the relationship you can choose to have with problematic feelings. I like that, But what about the relationship you have to your identity. I mean, one of the scariest things that dementia patients report is that their sense of identity is evaporating. I mean, it's a scary thing for them, and I'm not convinced that we all strive

for that level of complete non attachment. We want to feel like we exist in this world as well. Yeah, I mean, I will say, you know, I've talked to some people who are very adept meditators, and I talk about them in the book, and they seem to me like they can make plausible claims of having realized not self, of having experientially apprehended and even in an going away, and also to have the experience of so called emptiness, which isn't actually what it sounds like. Well, emptiness actually

refers largely to how you perceive the world. It means not attributing essence to the things you see, not having the feeling of essence, essence of tree, essence of like bad person, essence of weed, essence of flower so much you know, it's and by the way people have that perception. The reason emptiness is a mis leading term is they're like, it's all beautiful, you know. They're not like, oh, it's all hollow and meaningless. They're all, oh, it's luminous. It

exudes this positive energy. These people who have that feeling. Anyway, if they also report having the not self experience, the people I've talked to, they are not freaked out. These are happy camp and you know they have trouble articulating to me exactly what it's like. But you know, there are some unifying themes in the things that they say. I'm convinced that there are these thresholds that meditation can move you beyond that are extremely interesting and they well

move you closer to the truth. Yes, that's my sense, and may well liberate you in a really thorough going way from the kinds of kind of perceptual constraints and motivational constraints and interpretive constraints that natural selection has led the mind to kind of realize under normal conditions. I think that's a good point, and this is what I think.

I think that it may seem incredibly paradoxical, but at the end of the day, the more that we reach that state that the Buddhists are talking about, the stronger our self becomes actually not the weaker, so actually the stronger our unity and sense of self, because all these other things that are possessing us and pulling us are not really you know, there are things that are that

have biological imperatives. But the more that we can kind of get rid of I think we actually end up with the strongest sense of self well, and the more sense of continuity there is between yourself and the world out there, including other people. Unity, yes, integration. And I've had on retreat, I've had the experience of like whoa like you know, five days into retreat, I feel a tingling in my foot. I hear bird singing. It seems like the bird is no less a part of me.

The song is emanating from a place, it's no less a part of me than the tingling of the foot. In the book, I kind of defend, I kind of say, you know, there's a perspective from which you could make the case and argue that our very tightly bounded self is naturally that's the conception of self. Natural selection would impart, of course, because it's the container of our genes, so naturally you want natural selection would build us to think that, yeah,

the confines of our body are very special. Everything outside of it is much less important because that's how you get genes into the next generation is by thinking that way. But that doesn't mean that that's like the metaphysical truth, and in fact, it's kind of hard to defend it

is the moral truth. So you know, I think some of these deep apprehensions that I've had fleeting glimpses of that other meditator's experience on a more ongoing basis, maybe closer to moral truth and even in some sense to metaphysical truth. Although I want to be careful with that word, because I don't mean it in a super new aging way. I just mean it in the philosophical I think there's reason to take these claims seriously, and I agree with you that it certainly leads to a more productive well,

a more productive in the grand scheme of things self. Right. Yes, it's just so interesting. You know, you kind of once you really practice this and you really get closer and close in the state, you find that truth, beauty, and goodness seem to be more integrated within the person and

more available to the person. Yeah, that's really interesting, and I think, I mean, remember, the Buddhist claim is seeing things more clearly leads to more happiness and leads you closer to moral truth as well lead you to be a better person. I think on top of that, I

think that is largely the case. But I think on top of that, in my experience, the apprehension of beauty deepens as you go down the meditative path, especially if you're like on retreat and you're really getting in the zone, and I think it's something to be grateful for it.

I mean, there are a lot of unfortunate things about the human condition, but if the universe, the nature of reality is such that pursuing truth also leads you toward moral truth, happiness, and a deep appreciation of beauty, well, you know things could be worse than that, right, I mean, there's a certain efficiency to the pursuit. It's nice, It's very nice. I'd like to end on that point because I think that'd be enough motivation for people to get

their butt on the cushion. Yeah, yeah, quick fooling around. You're busy. Well, all the best to you in your new book. Thank you so much for chatting with me today. Well, thank you, Scott. It's been a great conversation. I really appreciate the trouble you've taken to understand the argument I'm making. Absolutely, I think it's a really worthy argument. Thank you so much for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as

thought provoking as I did. It's something you heard today stimulated you in some way. I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com.