The Dalai Lama has said that Buddhism and science are deeply compatible and has encouraged Western scholars to critically examine both the meditative practice and Buddhist ideas about the human mind. A number of scientists and philosophers have taken up this challenge. There have been brain scans of meditators and philosophical examinations of Buddhist doctrines. There have even been discussions of Darwin and the Buddha: Do early Buddhist descriptions of the mind, and of the human condition, make particular sense in light of evolutionary psychology? This course will examine how Buddhism is faring under this scrutiny. Are neuroscientists starting to understand how meditation “works”? Would such an understanding validate meditation—or might physical explanations of meditation undermine the spiritual significance attributed to it? And how are some of the basic Buddhist claims about the human mind holding up? We’ll pay special attention to some highly counterintuitive doctrines: that the self doesn’t exist, and that much of perceived reality is in some sense illusory. Do these claims, radical as they sound, make a certain kind of sense in light of modern psychology? And what are the implications of all this for how we should live our lives? Can meditation make us not just happier, but better people?
Not-Self as Interconnection
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En provenance du cours de Princeton University
Buddhism and Modern Psychology
2816 notes
À partir de la leçon
What is Enlightenment?
Rencontrer les enseignants
Robert WrightVisiting Lecturer
Religion Department and the Center for Human Values
Okay, well, this is the final lecture of the course
and I'm hoping that some of the threads that have been
running through the course are going to come together in a
satisfying way, because this is their last chance to do that.
now, at the beginning of the course I said that we
were going to look at what I call the naturalistic part of Buddhism.
We weren't going to talk about reincarnation, or deities.
We were going to talk about Buddhists ideas about the mind and about reality.
And we were going to try to assess some
of those ideas from a scientific point of view.
And I hope it's clear that we have done some of that.
So, for example this Buddhist emphasis on impermanence the idea that
kind of everything is impermanent, especially pleasure in that our failure
to reckon with that and see it clearly, causes suffering and,
and, and a certain kind of undercurrent of unsatisfactoriness in life.
And we saw that there's a pretty plausible account from evolutionary psychology.
Why pleasure might be designed, by natural selection, to be very impermanent,
fleeting to, to evaporate quickly, and why that by design might
leave us unsatisfied, and why our minds might be designed to
kind of not get the picture, to really not see that clearly.
We also looked at the, the not-self doctrine, the idea that
in some sense the self as we normally think of doesn't exist.
And we saw that indeed, modern psychology provides reason to doubt that at least
conscious kind of CEO in control self really ex, exists.
There, there's reason to wonder whether the self that we
kind of naturally think of existing does in fact exist.
And we also saw that a particular modern kind of
theory of the mind, the modular model of the mind actually helps explain
some of the texture of meditative experience and also suggests that certain
meditative experiences in particular those associated with kind of seeing not self.
May indeed be, kind of, an accurate view of the workings of a modular mind, okay?
So, in, in various way we've kind of given
some corroboration, some validation to the Buddhist view of things.
In this lecture, I want to consolidate that, and, and extend it.
And the way I'd like to frame what we're up to here is that I want to take
a question that's been kind of hovering over the
course and, and put it in particularly dramatic form.
I want to ask the question, is enlightenment really enlightenment?
Okay, so, I am referring of course to this, this idea
that at the culmination of the Buddhist path there is this, this
state, this experience, known as enlightenment even if it's rarely attained
and it involves a, a kind of perfectly clear vision of things.
And also nicely is accompanied by liberation from suffering.
So the question I want to ask is,
you know, does enlightenment really deserve its name?
Now, this may strike you as kind of a mute question.
You know a question that doesn't have a
lot of practical significance, because after all, how many
of us are realistically, you know, hoping to
attain actual enlightenment in the course of out lifetimes.
And it's true that I don't think a lot
of us probably will, and speaking for myself, certainly.
On the other hand you know, if you are seriously pursuing
the meditative path in a Buddhist context then in theory you
are trying to get closer at least to this thing out there known as enlightenment.
And if indeed this, this, this, this however
hard to attain thing known as enlightenment that it's
at, at the end of the path does bring kind of, utter clarity, does bring you know,
contact with profound truth, even ultimate truth then
it's reasonable to think that maybe the incremental steps
that we make along the way are at least
bringing us clearer vision and closer to the truth.
So there is that kind of significance.
That kind of practical significance to the question of kind of what
this enlightenment thing is and whether it really corresponds to deep truth.
Now, there are obviously some challenges in trying
to, to kind of get a grip on enlightenment.
For starters, figuring out exactly what it is,
what would the experience of enlightenment be like.
Because after all as we've seen, one of the characteristics of mystical
forms of enlightenment, is that they are very hard to articulate, as a rule.
People have the sense that they have perceived the truth
but, but it's not so easy to describe that truth.
So once we find these people who have had the experience
of enlightenment, they may not be able to communicate clearly to us.
The other problem is finding these people
who have had the experience of enlightenment.
Because after all it's not like there's some, you know, Buddhist
agency that issues certificates to people have, who have attained enlightenment.
So these people can just flash their credentials and
we'll say, oh, you're enlightened, can you talk about it?
You know, who's to say?
Who's, who's enlightened, you know?
But I do think, we can at least start to flesh out the
experience of enlightenment by talking to people
who are clearly very serious meditators, who've
done a whole lot of it, seemed to have some deep experiences, and in particular
experiences that do correspond to kind of Buddhist core ideas and concepts, okay?
We've, we've obviously done some of that but we're going to do a little more
of it today during the, the, the, kind of the first half of the lecture.
And we're going to focus in particular on two
things that we haven't really looked at yet.
First, we're going to look at an aspect of, of the idea of not
self and the meditative experience of not self that we actually haven't covered yet.
Then we're going to look at a concept
known as emptiness that we also haven't looked at.
And you know, then I think we'd be prepared
to address some questions that, that I raised at the
beginning of the, the course even beyond the question of
whether Buddhism presents kind of, a clear picture of reality.
I also raised two other questions.
I asked does the Buddhist path get people closer,
not just to a clear view of, of, of
things, of their mind, of the world out there,
but does it bring them closer to moral truth?
And I also asked, does this,this thing I'm calling naturalistic Buddhism,
does it maybe qualify as a kind of spiritual, or even religious worldview?
I want to get back to these questions and I think it'll help, help to set the stage
for that assessment by, by, by fleshing out
this, this idea of enlightenment in this particular way.
So in this segment of this lecture, we're going to talk about
this other side of not self that we haven't talked about.
And then next segment, we're going to talk about the idea of emptiness,
and then we're going to try to, try to bring it all together.
So, so far, the aspect of kind of, the not self idea
and experience we've talked about, is what you might call the interior version.
Okay, in other words, we've talked about
kind of, looking inside your mind viewing ideas
and feelings more objectively maybe than people normally
do, and kind of, not identifying with him.
You know, we've seen, that's part of the not self experience.
It's saying that you don't have to own all of these things.
You don't have to, to see them as part of you.
But there's another kind of, half of the not self experience.
That I would call the exterior part of the experience.
And that involves kind of, getting the sense that the bounds of
your body are more kind of permeable, and porous than you might have thought.
They're not so, the boundaries are not so solid.
And there's more kind of, interaction with the world out there in a, in a sense.
More fluid interaction than you might have appreciated.
And before we talk about the actual experience of
that exterior version of not self I want to set
the stage, by shedding a little light on, kind
of the logic behind the experience of not self.
And I want to do that by hearing just a little bit of
a conversation I had Sharon Salzberg, who's a very well known meditation
teacher and author, and she co-founded along with Joseph Goldstein, whom we've
already met, the Insight Meditation Society,
and also along with Jack Kornfield.
And here's something that Sharon said to me
in the course of a conversation about this.
>> You know, all those times, many, many times, sometimes
many times a day, we think, I should be able to
control this you know, because there's, there's a sense of control
that, that we think we're entitled to as a separate self.
And so it's more an understanding I
think that we live in an interconnected universe.
That of course I'm distinct from you and it's
not that we kind of morph together in some
soup, you know but that the truth all along
has been that we live in an interconnected universe.
Like sometimes in sitting in a room with people, we could do it now in some way, I
ask people to reflect, who all has had some
affect on a fact that you're sitting here right now?
Somebody gave you a book.
Somebody read you a poem, >> Mm-hm.
>> Somebody told you about this experience.
You know, and people just bring to mind this, it's really like
this moment of, this confluence of
connections and relationships and interactions and-.
>> Okay, so that helps set the intellectual context of this experience.
Of the exterior side of, not self and it points to a part
of the Buddhist argument for not self that we haven't really, talked about.
And that has to do with what you might call
kind of the pervasiveness of causal influences on our behavior.
We normally think, of ourselves, as kind of acting on the world.
But, the, the point here, the point that Sharon's making,
is that actually the world acts on us a whole lot.
And that helps explain a lot of what we do.
A lot of our behavior and our, and our thoughts
are the consequence of things that have impinged on us, right?
And when you think about it that way if you think about our
behavior as kind of output, in response to all these input, then it's
kind of, there's kind of less room for a kind of autonomous self
that's actually generating and initiating a lot of behavior and, and thought, okay?
And this is a sense in which Buddhism is, is very modern.
In, in, in having the same emphasis on kind
of causal influences that modern behavioral science has, okay?
Now, what is the experience of this like in meditation?
Well, I've actually had a little glimmer of it a couple of
times while on medication retreats, and I remember the first time this happened.
I, it was days into the retreat, and I was sitting
there, and I felt, you know, like a tingling in my foot.
And I heard a bird singing, and suddenly, it just wasn't
so clear to me what the difference between those two was.
I don't mean I couldn't distinguish between them.
You know, one was a tingling in my foot, one was a bird.
But, what I mean is, it just seemed to me that the tingling
in my foot was no more a part of myself than the bird that was singing.
I mean, after all there was both of them were kind of sending signals
up to here and that was influencing the way I thought and I felt.
It might be a good feeling, might be a bad feeling.
But in both cases I'm like getting, getting a signal
from somewhere, and at that moment I mean obviously one of
the signals is originating from inside my body, but at
that moment that seemed like kind of an, an arbitrary separation.
It didn't seem like there was really a fundamental difference.
Kind of, structurally between what the two things were doing with my mind.
And that's kind of, about as far as I've gotten.
I haven't had this kind of full on experience of what
I'd call a exterior, the exterior part of not so, but when
I have shared this experience with kind of more serious mediators
who have had more profound experiences, I have found that this does resonate.
They do recognize this as kind of a milestone
on the path to the kind of experience they've had.
And one example is, is Joseph Goldstein whom we've already heard
from and this came up in a conversation I had with him.
>> You know, so the boundaries can really dissolve the experience.
At those times, the boundaries are very dissolved.
But, it's not in a it can be in a very peaceful way.
>> And, and can that entail, like say hearing a, a, you
know, this, a bird song or something and thinking well, that's
no less a part of me than, than the signals I'm
getting from, from what is within, what is normally called my body.
>> Yeah, that's exactly right.
I mean that is in that quality of openness,
and the sound arises, so the bird for example,
there are times in meditation where we don't know,
we don't make the distinction of inside and outside.
Its just the sound being none.
Yeah and so that boundary, very much can dissolve at times.
But also people don't need to be afraid that, somehow they're not going to be able
to navigate in the world because, as soon as we get up from the sitting we
come back to kind of our ordinary perception and-.
>> Right.
>> So there's no pro, there's no problem in this and it's actually quite freeing.
>> Now Joseph's right.
You can certainly you know, get up I'm sure from the cushion
after one of these experiences and have no trouble dealing with the world.
On the other hand I do think there's some people who carry more of
the experience with them after they get up from the medication cushion than others.
And a good example of that is somebody named
Gary Webber, he has a very kind of interesting story.
You may remember the study we talked about that showed that the default mode network
gets quite when very adept mediators meditate.
When Gary participated in that study, he was recruited to
participate because he has done a whole lot of meditating.
But when he kind of went in for the
brain scan and they said, okay meditate the default
mode network seemed not as quiet as you
might expect for somebody that's serious of a meditator.
And finally he said well, let me just try it without meditating.
And then they found that his mind seemed very, very quiet.
Okay?
And this is consistent with his own account of his meditative history.
What he says is for decades, he meditated, he did contemplative
practice of various kinds for hours a day, and then finally
passed through a kind of threshold after which he doesn't have
many of the kind of self-referential thoughts that most of us have.
Exactly the kind of thoughts that, for example would
show up via the default mode on network, you know?
What am I going to do today?
What is that person think of me?
Just a whole category,major category of thoughts
that he doesn't by in large experience.
And he, he chronicled this in a book called, Happiness Beyond Thought.
And I want to to, to share with you just a little bit of the conversation I had with
him that relates to this kind of exterior version of the not-self experience.
There's a, there's a line in the introduction to
your book related to this, it says basically something like
the bad news is that you don't exist, the good
news is that you're everything, what does that part mean?
>> Well it's kind of a logical consequence, you're
nothing, which would disappear you can then be everything.
But you can't be everything unless you are one.
Which logically follows, that's the case.
In everything case, it's obvious, but, but if you
are nothing, instead of just disappearing and becoming a void.
You find out that in some strange way you can
actually, you actually see this, you perceive it this way.
That, that everything is all one thing, this is a cliche, mystical statement.
But it really is perceptible when you can
deeply sense that everything is all one thing.
>> Mm-hm.
>> And it's somehow, strangely it's inside of you.
>> Yeah.
I mean, I would say I have, I have had a meditative experience where the
bounds of my self in a certain sense suddenly seemed a lot more permeable.
>> Absolutely.
>> That, that is like the place where the birds' song enters my body, my, my sensory
apparatus no longer seemed like such a, a fine
dividing point, you know, and things like, like that.
>> Exactly.
>> But that's very di, but I don't, you know, that was
like a one-time brief experience, not sure what to make of it.
You're saying that as you walk around every day, or are you saying that you,
you, in a way, identify with everyone else as much as you identify with yourself?
>> Yeah, that's how I would say.
But it's a little, a little a little different from that.
But that's not far, far different.
I, I don't identify with anything.
I mean there's just nobody here to identify with either me,-
>> Mm-hm.
>> Or with anybody else.
There's just, it's just an empty still presence here which is there.
>> So the problem with saying you identify with
everyone is the very beginning of the sentence, you.
[LAUGH] >> Exactly.
There, there's nobody, there's no you there to do to identify.
>> Now, when, when Gary says if you're,
if you're nothing then you're everything basically, that
may sound kind of cryptic, but I think I, I have an inkling of what he means.
Because in that experience that I had, that I just recounted
for you I remember that, you know, one reason it was,
kind of, easier to think of the bird song as, as
much a part of me, as the tingling in my foot.
Is that I wasn't thinking of the tingling in my foot
as very much a part of me to begin with, right?
Becasue I was, I'd been meditating a lot.
And, and I had this kind of, more objective view of, of my, my feelings.
And I was identifying with them less.
So tingling in my foot, bird song, they all seemed
like, well not, not all that much a part of me.
So, in other words, it was through kind of disaggregating that the self internally
that it became easier to kind of see things outside the body as, as,
as much a part of you as, as the things that were now disaggregated.
Now, one interesting thing, really important thing, about this
exterior version of the not-self experience is that it
has moral implications, and here I want you to
listen to what, what Gary Webber has to say.
>> If everything is one thing, and we're all in this
together, not all of us that's everything is one thing, then
why should I do something if I wasn't hired to do
it, to [UNKNOWN] this why would I do something bad to you?
>> Okay now I want to emphasize that, that
what Gary's talking about is not feeling waves
of empathy for his fellow human beings in
fact I wouldn't call Gary especially warm and fuzzy.
As a person now there is, there is that
part of Buddhism that,that specifically cultivates empathy and commpassion.
There is, there is something called loving kindness meditation.
In fact, Sharon Salzberg is, is, is kind of a leading promulgator of that.
But what Gary's talking about is different.
It's just the perception that since there is no
separation between you and the world out there, there's just
a feeling that any logic there might have been to
harming anything in the world out there no longer applies.
And I got very much the same sense from talking to Judson Brewer.
As you may recall, he's the one
that conducted the default mode network experiment, and
what I may not have told you is that he is himself a very serious meditator.
And he's had I think some pretty deep experiences.
And here's an exchange I had with him.
If everyone, if everyone meditated, meditated
intensively would there be any wars?
>> I guess that I would ask that as a question.
You know, why would, why would someone want to harm themself?
>> Mm-hm.
>> So, in that sense, it doesn't, I don't think that there would be, because
it's kind of like, well, you know, why would you cut off your right hand?
It's kind of useful.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So, I think if people really saw the non separation
how could they?
>> Okay, so that's what I would call the exterior part of the not self experience,
it is a kind of a, a logical extension in a way, of the interior part.
But it does really accentuate an
important moral implication of the not-self experience.
It might not be so clear otherwise.
And that is just that.
it, it gives people the feeling that not harming things.
At least it can give people this feeling.
I can't vouch for everybody.
Can give people the feeling that, that not
harming things is just the logical thing to do.
So this is, you know, you might almost say that it's
an example of, you know, selflessness in a kind of literal sense
of not, not self, just not feeling the self, not experiencing the
self, leads to a kind of selflessness in a more moral sense.
Okay?
now, in the next segment, I'm going to talk
about this experience that, that is known as emptiness.
And then, for the rest of the lecture, I'm going to try to tie these,
these two things together with some, some other things and see where we wind up.
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