I once participated in a twenty-three-day wilderness program in
the mountains of Colorado. If the purpose of this course was to
expose students to dangerous lightning and half the world’s
mosquitoes, it was fulfilled on the first day. What was in essence a
forced march through hundreds of miles of backcountry culminated in a
ritual known as “the solo,” where we were finally permitted to
rest—alone, on the outskirts of a gorgeous alpine lake—for three
days of fasting and contemplation.
I had just turned sixteen, and this was my first taste of true
solitude since exiting my mother’s womb. It proved a sufficient
provocation. After a long nap and a glance at the icy waters of the
lake, the promising young man I imagined myself to be was quickly cut
down by loneliness and boredom. I filled the pages of my journal not
with the insights of a budding naturalist, philosopher, or mystic but
with a list of the foods on which I intended to gorge myself the
instant I returned to civilization. Judging from the state of my
consciousness at the time, millions of years of hominid evolution had
produced nothing more transcendent than a craving for a cheeseburger
and a chocolate milkshake.
I found the experience of sitting undisturbed for three days amid
pristine breezes and starlight, with nothing to do but contemplate
the mystery of my existence, to be a source of perfect misery—for
which I could see not so much as a glimmer of my own contribution. My
letters home, in their plaintiveness and self-pity, rivaled any
written at Shiloh or Gallipoli.
So I was more than a little surprised when several members of our
party, most of whom were a decade older than I, described their days
and nights of solitude in positive, even transformational terms. I
simply didn’t know what to make of their claims to happiness. How
could someone’s happiness
increase when all the material
sources of pleasure and distraction had been removed? At that age,
the nature of my own mind did not interest me—only my life did. And
I was utterly oblivious to how different life would be if the quality
of my mind were to change.
Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And
they are all we can offer others. This might not be obvious,
especially when there are aspects of your life that seem in need of
improvement—when your goals are unrealized, or you are struggling
to find a career, or you have relationships that need repairing. But
it’s the truth. Every experience you have ever had has been shaped
by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is
because of the minds involved. If you are perpetually angry,
depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it
won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life—
you won’t enjoy any of it.
Most of us could easily compile a list of goals we want to achieve
or personal problems that need to be solved. But what is the real
significance of every item on such a list? Everything we want to
accomplish—to paint the house, learn a new language, find a better
job—is something that promises that, if done, it would allow us to
finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. Generally speaking,
this is a false hope. I’m not denying the importance of achieving
one’s goals, maintaining one’s health, or keeping one’s
children clothed and fed—but most of us spend our time seeking
happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose
of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present:
We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied
now.
Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are
playing allows us to play it differently. How we pay attention to the
present moment largely determines the character of our experience
and, therefore, the quality of our lives. Mystics and contemplatives
have made this claim for ages—but a growing body of scientific
research now bears it out.
A few years after my first painful encounter with solitude, in the
winter of 1987, I took the drug
3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (MDMA), commonly known as
Ecstasy, and my sense of the human mind’s potential shifted
profoundly. Although MDMA would become ubiquitous at dance clubs and
“raves” in the 1990s, at that time I didn’t know anyone of my
generation who had tried it. One evening, a few months before my
twentieth birthday, a close friend and I decided to take the drug.
The setting of our experiment bore little resemblance to the
conditions of Dionysian abandon under which MDMA is now often
consumed. We were alone in a house, seated across from each other on
opposite ends of a couch, and engaged in quiet conversation as the
chemical worked its way into our heads. Unlike other drugs with which
we were by then familiar (marijuana and alcohol), MDMA produced no
feeling of distortion in our senses. Our minds seemed completely
clear.
In the midst of this ordinariness, however, I was suddenly struck
by the knowledge that I loved my friend. This shouldn’t have
surprised me—he was, after all, one of my best friends. However, at
that age I was not in the habit of dwelling on how much I loved the
men in my life. Now I could
feel that I loved him, and this
feeling had ethical implications that suddenly seemed as profound as
they now sound pedestrian on the page:
I wanted him to be happy.
That conviction came crashing down with such force that something
seemed to give way inside me. In fact, the insight appeared to
restructure my mind. My capacity for envy, for instance—the sense
of being diminished by the happiness or success of another
person—seemed like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished
without a trace. I could no more have felt envy at that moment than I
could have wanted to poke out my own eyes. What did I care if my
friend was better looking or a better athlete than I was? If I could
have bestowed those gifts on him, I would have.
Truly wanting
him to be happy made his happiness my own.
A certain euphoria was creeping into these reflections, perhaps,
but the general feeling remained one of absolute sobriety—and of
moral and emotional clarity unlike any I had ever known. It would not
be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life.
And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely
straightforward. I was simply talking to my friend—about what, I
don’t recall—and realized that I had ceased to be concerned about
myself. I was no longer anxious, self-critical, guarded by irony, in
competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and
future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that
separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through
another person’s eyes.
And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of
how good human life could be. I was feeling
boundless love for
one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a stranger
had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been
fully included in this love. Love was at bottom impersonal—and
deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a
transactional form of love—I love you
because…—now made
no sense at all.
The interesting thing about this final shift in perspective was
that it was not driven by any change in the way I felt. I was not
overwhelmed by a new feeling of love. The insight had more the
character of a geometric proof: It was as if, having glimpsed the
properties of one set of parallel lines, I suddenly understood what
must be common to them all.
The moment I could find a voice with which to speak, I discovered
that this epiphany about the universality of love could be readily
communicated. My friend got the point at once: All I had to do was
ask him how he would feel in the presence of a total stranger at that
moment, and the same door opened in his mind. It was simply obvious
that love, compassion, and joy in the joy of others extended without
limit. The experience was not of love growing but of its being no
longer obscured. Love was—as advertised by mystics and crackpots
through the ages—a state of being. How had we not seen this before?
And how could we overlook it ever again?
It would take me many years to put this experience into context.
Until that moment, I had viewed organized religion as merely a
monument to the ignorance and superstition of our ancestors. But I
now knew that Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, and the other saints and
sages of history had not all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or
frauds. I still considered the world’s religions to be mere
intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost,
but I now understood that important psychological truths could be
found in the rubble.
Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual
but not religious.” Although the claim seems to annoy believers and
atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a
perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important
truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious
doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is
more to understanding the human condition than science and secular
culture generally admit. One purpose of this book is to give both
these convictions intellectual and empirical support.
Before going any further, I should address the animosity that many
readers feel toward the term
spiritual. Whenever I use the
word, as in referring to meditation as a “spiritual practice,” I
hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I have
committed a grievous error.
The word
spirit comes from the
Latin
spiritus, which is a translation of the Greek
pneuma,
meaning “breath.” Around the thirteenth century, the term became
entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings,
ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well: We speak of
the
spirit of a thing as its most essential principle or of
certain volatile substances and liquors as
spirits.
Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things “spiritual”
to be contaminated by medieval superstition.
I do not share their semantic concerns.
[1]
Yes, to walk the aisles of any “spiritual” bookstore is to
confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard, but
there is no other term—apart from the even more problematic
mystical or the more restrictive
contemplative—with
which to discuss the efforts people make, through meditation,
psychedelics, or other means, to fully bring their minds into the
present or to induce nonordinary states of consciousness. And no
other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives.
Throughout this book, I discuss certain classically spiritual
phenomena, concepts, and practices in the context of our modern
understanding of the human mind—and I cannot do this while
restricting myself to the terminology of ordinary experience. So I
will use
spiritual, mystical, contemplative, and
transcendent
without further apology. However, I will be precise in describing the
experiences and methods that merit these terms.
For many years, I have been a vocal critic of religion, and I
won’t ride the same hobbyhorse here. I hope that I have been
sufficiently energetic on this front that even my most skeptical
readers will trust that my bullshit detector remains well calibrated
as we advance over this new terrain. Perhaps the following assurance
can suffice for the moment: Nothing in this book needs to be accepted
on faith. Although my focus is on human subjectivity—I am, after
all, talking about the nature of experience itself—all my
assertions can be tested in the laboratory of your own life. In fact,
my goal is to encourage you to do just that.
Authors who attempt to build a bridge between science and
spirituality tend to make one of two mistakes: Scientists generally
start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience, assuming
that it must be a grandiose way of describing ordinary states of
mind— parental love, artistic inspiration, awe at the beauty of the
night sky. In this vein, one finds Einstein’s amazement at the
intelligibility of Nature’s laws described as though it were a kind
of mystical insight.
New Age thinkers usually enter the ditch on the other side of the
road: They idealize altered states of consciousness and draw specious
connections between subjective experience and the spookier theories
at the frontiers of physics. Here we are told that the Buddha and
other contemplatives anticipated modern cosmology or quantum
mechanics and that by transcending the sense of self, a person can
realize his identity with the One Mind that gave birth to the cosmos.
In the end, we are left to choose between pseudo-spirituality and
pseudo-science.
Few scientists and philosophers have developed strong skills of
introspection—in fact, most doubt that such abilities even exist.
Conversely, many of the greatest contemplatives know nothing about
science. But there is a connection between scientific fact and
spiritual wisdom, and it is more direct than most people suppose.
Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about
the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well-established
truths about the human mind: Our conventional sense of self is an
illusion; positive emotions, such as compassion and patience, are
teachable skills; and the way we think directly influences our
experience of the world.
There is now a large literature on the psychological benefits of
meditation. Different techniques produce long-lasting changes in
attention, emotion, cognition, and pain perception, and these
correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain.
This field of research is quickly growing, as is our understanding of
self-awareness and related mental phenomena. Given recent advances in
neuroimaging technology, we no longer face a practical impediment to
investigating spiritual insights in the context of science.
Spirituality
must be distinguished from religion—because
people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of
spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually
interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we
know that this is a mistake. Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and
a Hindu can experience—self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss,
inner light—constitutes evidence in support of their traditional
beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one
another. A deeper principle must be at work.
That principle is the subject of this book: The feeling that we
call “I” is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living
like a Minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that
there is—the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes,
looking out at a world that is separate from yourself—can be
altered or entirely extinguished. Although such experiences of
“self-transcendence” are generally thought about in religious
terms, there is nothing, in principle, irrational about them. From
both a scientific and a philosophical point of view, they represent a
clearer understanding of the way things are. Deepening that
understanding, and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the
self, is what is meant by “spirituality” in the context of this
book.
Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and
happiness are available. The landscape of human experience includes
deeply transformative insights about the nature of one’s own
consciousness, and yet it is obvious that these psychological states
must be understood in the context of neuroscience, psychology, and
related fields.
I am often asked what will replace organized religion. The answer,
I believe, is nothing and everything. Nothing need replace its
ludicrous and divisive doctrines—such as the idea that Jesus will
return to earth and hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire, or that
death in defense of Islam is the highest good. These are terrifying
and debasing fictions. But what about love, compassion, moral
goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that
religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we
must talk about the full range of human experience in a way that is
as free of dogma as the best science already is.
This book is by turns a seeker’s memoir, an introduction to
the brain, a manual of contemplative instruction, and a philosophical
unraveling of what most people consider to be the center of their
inner lives: the feeling of self we call “I.” I have not set out
to describe all the traditional approaches to spirituality and to
weigh their strengths and weaknesses. Rather, my goal is to pluck the
diamond from the dunghill of esoteric religion. There is a diamond
there, and I have devoted a fair amount of my life to contemplating
it, but getting it in hand requires that we remain true to the
deepest principles of scientific skepticism and make no obeisance to
tradition. Where I do discuss specific teachings, such as those of
Buddhism or Advaita Vedanta, it isn’t my purpose to provide
anything like a comprehensive account. Readers who are loyal to any
one spiritual tradition or who specialize in the academic study of
religion, may view my approach as the quintessence of arrogance. I
consider it, rather, a symptom of impatience. There is barely time
enough in a book—or in a life—to get to the point. Just as a
modern treatise on weaponry would omit the casting of spells and
would very likely ignore the slingshot and the boomerang, I will
focus on what I consider the most promising lines of spiritual
inquiry.
My hope is that my personal experience will help readers to see
the nature of their own minds in a new light. A rational approach to
spirituality seems to be what is missing from secularism and from the
lives of most of the people I meet. The purpose of this book is to
offer readers a clear view of the problem, along with some tools to
help them solve it for themselves.
THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS
One day, you will find yourself outside this world which is
like a mother’s womb. You will leave this earth to enter, while you
are yet in the body, a vast expanse, and know that the words, “God’s
earth is vast,” name this region from which the saints have come.
Jalal-ud-Din Rumi
I share the concern, expressed by many atheists, that the terms
spiritual and
mystical are often used to make claims
not merely about the quality of certain experiences but about reality
at large. Far too often, these words are invoked in support of
religious beliefs that are morally and intellectually grotesque.
Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of
spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or
self-deception. This is a problem, because millions of people have
had experiences for which
spiritual and
mystical seem
the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the
basis of these experiences are false. But the fact that most atheists
will view a statement like Rumi’s above as a symptom of the man’s
derangement grants a kernel of truth to the rantings of even our
least rational opponents. The human mind does, in fact, contain vast
expanses that few of us ever discover.
And there is something degraded and degrading about many of our
habits of attention as we shop, gossip, argue, and ruminate our way
to the grave. Perhaps I should speak only for myself here: It seems
to me that I spend much of my waking life in a neurotic trance. My
experiences in meditation suggest, however, that an alternative
exists. It is possible to stand free of the juggernaut of self, if
only for moments at a time.
Most cultures have produced men and women who have found that
certain deliberate uses of attention—meditation, yoga, prayer—can
transform their perception of the world. Their efforts generally
begin with the realization that even in the best of circumstances,
happiness is elusive. We seek pleasant sights, sounds, tastes,
sensations, and moods. We satisfy our intellectual curiosity. We
surround ourselves with friends and loved ones. We become
connoisseurs of art, music, or food. But our pleasures are, by their
very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some great professional success,
our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an
hour, or perhaps a day, but then they subside. And the search goes
on. The effort required to keep boredom and other unpleasantness at
bay must continue, moment to moment.
Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment.
Realizing this, many people begin to wonder whether a deeper source
of well-being exists. Is there a form of happiness beyond the mere
repetition of pleasure and avoidance of pain? Is there a happiness
that does not depend upon having one’s favorite foods available, or
friends and loved ones within arm’s reach, or good books to read,
or something to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be
happy
before anything happens, before one’s desires are
gratified, in spite of life’s difficulties, in the very midst of
physical pain, old age, disease, and death?
We are all, in some sense, living our answer to this question—
and most of us are living as though the answer were “no.” No,
nothing is more profound than repeating one’s pleasures and
avoiding one’s pains; nothing is more profound than seeking
satisfaction—sensory, emotional, and intellectual—moment after
moment. Just keep your foot on the gas until you run out of road.
Certain people, however, come to suspect that human existence
might encompass more than this. Many of them are led to suspect this
by
religion—by the claims of the Buddha or Jesus or some
other celebrated figure. And such people often begin to practice
various disciplines of attention as a means of examining their
experience closely enough to see whether a deeper source of
well-being exists. They may even sequester themselves in caves or
monasteries for months or years at a time to facilitate this process.
Why would a person do this? No doubt there are many motives for
retreating from the world, and some of them are psychologically
unhealthy. In its wisest form, however, the exercise amounts to a
very simple experiment. Here is its logic: If there exists a source
of psychological well-being that does not depend upon merely
gratifying one’s desires, then it should be present even when all
the usual sources of pleasure have been removed. Such happiness
should be available to a person who has declined to marry her high
school sweetheart, renounced her career and material possessions, and
gone off to a cave or some other spot that is inhospitable to
ordinary aspirations.
One clue to how daunting most people would find such a project is
the fact that solitary confinement—which is essentially what we are
talking about—is considered a punishment
inside a
maximum-security prison. Even when forced to live among murderers and
rapists, most people still prefer the company of others to spending
any significant amount of time alone in a room. And yet
contemplatives in many traditions claim to experience extraordinary
depths of psychological well-being while living in isolation for vast
stretches of time. How should we interpret this? Either the
contemplative literature is a catalogue of religious delusion,
psychopathology, and deliberate fraud, or people have been having
liberating insights under the name of “spirituality” and
“mysticism” for millennia.
Unlike many atheists, I have spent much of my life seeking
experiences of the kind that gave rise to the world’s religions.
Despite the painful results of my first few days alone in the
mountains of Colorado, I later studied with a wide range of monks,
lamas, yogis, and other contemplatives, some of whom had lived for
decades in seclusion doing nothing but meditating. In the process, I
spent two years on silent retreat myself (in increments of one week
to three months), practicing various techniques of meditation for
twelve to eighteen hours a day.
I can attest that when one goes into silence and meditates for
weeks or months at a time, doing nothing else—not speaking,
reading, or writing, just making a moment-to-moment effort to observe
the contents of consciousness—one has experiences that are
generally unavailable to people who have not undertaken a similar
practice. I believe that such states of mind have a lot to say about
the nature of consciousness and the possibilities of human
well-being. Leaving aside the metaphysics, mythology, and sectarian
dogma, what contemplatives throughout history have discovered is that
there is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the
conversation we are having with ourselves; there is an alternative to
simply identifying with the next thought that pops into
consciousness. And glimpsing this alternative dispels the
conventional illusion of the self.
Most traditions of spirituality also suggest a connection between
self-transcendence and living ethically. Not all good feelings have
an ethical valence, and pathological forms of ecstasy surely exist. I
have no doubt, for instance, that many suicide bombers feel
extraordinarily good just before they detonate themselves in a crowd.
But there are also forms of mental pleasure that are intrinsically
ethical. As I indicated earlier, for some states of consciousness, a
phrase like “boundless love” does not seem overblown. It is
decidedly inconvenient for the forces of reason and secularism that
if someone wakes up tomorrow feeling boundless love for all sentient
beings, the only people likely to acknowledge the legitimacy of his
experience will be representatives of one or another Iron Age
religion or New Age cult.
Most of us are far wiser than we may appear to be. We know how
to keep our relationships in order, to use our time well, to improve
our health, to lose weight, to learn valuable skills, and to solve
many other riddles of existence. But following even the straight and
open path to happiness is hard. If your best friend were to ask how
she could live a better life, you would probably find many useful
things to say, and yet you might not live that way yourself. On one
level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow
one’s own advice. However, there are deeper insights to be had
about the nature of our minds. Unfortunately, they have been
discussed entirely in the context of religion and, therefore, have
been shrouded in fallacy and superstition for all of human history.
The problem of finding happiness in this world arrives with our
first breath—and our needs and desires seem to multiply by the
hour. To spend any time in the presence of a young child is to
witness a mind ceaselessly buffeted by joy and sorrow. As we grow
older, our laughter and tears become less gratuitous, perhaps, but
the same process of change continues: One roiling complex of thought
and emotion is followed by the next, like waves in the ocean.
Seeking, finding, maintaining, and safeguarding our well-being is
the great project to which we all are devoted, whether or not we
choose to think in these terms. This is not to say that we want mere
pleasure or the easiest possible life. Many things require
extraordinary effort to accomplish, and some of us learn to enjoy the
struggle. Any athlete knows that certain kinds of pain can be
exquisitely pleasurable. The burn of lifting weights, for instance,
would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But
because it is associated with health and fitness, most people find it
enjoyable. Here we see that cognition and emotion are not separate.
The way we think about experience can completely determine how we
feel about it.
And we always face tensions and trade-offs. In some moments we
crave excitement and in others rest. We might love the taste of wine
and chocolate, but rarely for breakfast. Whatever the context, our
minds are perpetually moving—generally toward pleasure (or its
imagined source) and away from pain. I am not the first person to
have noticed this.
Our struggle to navigate the space of possible pains and pleasures
produces most of human culture. Medical science attempts to prolong
our health and to reduce the suffering associated with illness,
aging, and death. All forms of media cater to our thirst for
information and entertainment. Political and economic institutions
seek to ensure our peaceful collaboration with one another—and the
police or the military is summoned when they fail. Beyond ensuring
our survival, civilization is a vast machine invented by the human
mind to regulate its states. We are ever in the process of creating
and repairing a world that our minds want to be in. And wherever we
look, we see the evidence of our successes and our failures.
Unfortunately, failure enjoys a natural advantage. Wrong answers to
any problem outnumber right ones by a wide margin, and it seems that
it will always be easier to break things than to fix them.
Despite the beauty of our world and the scope of human
accomplishment, it is hard not to worry that the forces of chaos will
triumph—not merely in the end but in every moment. Our pleasures,
however refined or easily acquired, are by their very nature
fleeting. They begin to subside the instant they arise, only to be
replaced by fresh desires or feelings of discomfort. You can’t get
enough of your favorite meal until, in the next moment, you find you
are so stuffed as to nearly require the attention of a surgeon—and
yet, by some quirk of physics, you still have room for dessert. The
pleasure of dessert lasts a few seconds, and then the lingering taste
in your mouth must be banished by a drink of water. The warmth of the
sun feels wonderful on your skin, but soon it becomes too much of a
good thing. A move to the shade brings immediate relief, but after a
minute or two, the breeze is just a little too cold. Do you have a
sweater in the car? Let’s take a look. Yes, there it is. You’re
warm now, but you notice that your sweater has seen better days. Does
it make you look carefree or disheveled? Perhaps it is time to go
shopping for something new. And so it goes.
We seem to do little more than lurch between wanting and not
wanting. Thus, the question naturally arises: Is there more to life
than this? Might it be possible to feel much better (in every sense
of
better) than one tends to feel? Is it possible to find
lasting fulfillment despite the inevitability of change?
Spiritual life begins with a suspicion that the answer to such
questions could well be “yes.” And a true spiritual practitioner
is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in
the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and
that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent
boundaries of the self. Those who have never tasted such peace of
mind might view these assertions as highly suspect. Nevertheless, it
is a fact that a condition of selfless well-being is there to be
glimpsed in each moment. Of course, I’m not claiming to have
experienced all such states, but I meet many people who appear to
have experienced none of them—and these people often profess to
have no interest in spiritual life.
This is not surprising. The phenomenon of self-transcendence is
generally sought and interpreted in a religious context, and it is
precisely the sort of experience that tends to increase a person’s
faith. How many Christians, having once felt their hearts grow as
wide as the world, will decide to ditch Christianity and proclaim
their atheism? Not many, I suspect. How many people who have never
felt anything of the kind become atheists? I don’t know, but there
is little doubt that these mental states act as a kind of filter: The
faithful count them in support of ancient dogma, and their absence
gives nonbelievers further reason to reject religion.
This is a difficult problem for me to address in the context of a
book, because many readers will have no idea what I’m talking about
when I describe certain spiritual experiences and might assume that
the assertions I’m making must be accepted on faith. Religious
readers present a different challenge: They may think they know
exactly what I’m describing, but only insofar as it aligns with one
or another religious doctrine. It seems to me that both these
attitudes present impressive obstacles to understanding spirituality
in the way that I intend. I can only hope that, whatever your
background, you will approach the exercises presented in this book
with an open mind.
RELIGION, EAST AND WEST
We are often encouraged to believe that all religions are the
same: All teach the same ethical principles; all urge their followers
to contemplate the same divine reality; all are equally wise,
compassionate, and true within their sphere—or equally divisive and
false, depending on one’s view.
No serious adherents of any faith can believe these things,
because most religions make claims about reality that are mutually
incompatible. Exceptions to this rule exist, but they provide little
relief from what is essentially a zero-sum contest of all against
all. The polytheism of Hinduism allows it to digest parts of many
other faiths: If Christians insist that Jesus Christ is the son of
God, for instance, Hindus can make him yet another avatar of Vishnu
without losing any sleep. But this spirit of inclusiveness points in
one direction only, and even it has its limits. Hindus are committed
to specific metaphysical ideas—the law of karma and rebirth, a
multiplicity of gods—that almost every other major religion
decries. It is impossible for any faith, no matter how elastic, to
fully honor the truth claims of another.
Devout Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe that theirs is the
one true and complete revelation—because that is what their holy
books say of themselves. Only secularists and New Age dabblers can
mistake the modern tactic of “interfaith dialogue” for an
underlying unity of all religions.
I have long argued that confusion about the unity of religions is
an artifact of language.
Religion is a term like
sports:
Some sports are peaceful but spectacularly dangerous (“free solo”
rock climbing); some are safer but synonymous with violence (mixed
martial arts); and some entail little more risk of injury than
standing in the shower (bowling). To speak of sports as a generic
activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or
the physical attributes required to do it. What do all sports have in
common apart from breathing? Not much. The term
religion is
hardly more useful.
The same could be said of
spirituality. The esoteric
doctrines found within every religious tradition are not all derived
from the same insights. Nor are they equally empirical, logical,
parsimonious, or wise. They don’t always point to the same
underlying reality—and when they do, they don’t do it equally
well. Nor are all these teachings equally suited for export beyond
the cultures that first conceived them.
Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable
in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear
that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn’t, or that
Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated, empirical approach to
understanding the human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost
perfect impediment to such understanding. In many circles, to make
invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry.
In one sense, all religions and spiritual practices must address
the same reality—because people of all faiths have glimpsed many of
the same truths. Any view of consciousness and the cosmos that is
available to the human mind can, in principle, be appreciated by
anyone. It is not surprising, therefore, that individual Jews,
Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists have given voice to some of the
same insights and intuitions. This merely indicates that human
cognition and emotion run deeper than religion. (But we knew that,
didn’t we?) It does not suggest that all religions understand our
spiritual possibilities equally well.
One way of missing this point is to declare that all spiritual
teachings are inflections of the same “Perennial Philosophy.” The
writer Aldous Huxley brought this idea into prominence by publishing
an anthology by that title. Here is how he justified the idea:
Philosophia perennis—the phrase was coined by
Leibniz; but the thing—the metaphysic that recognizes a divine
Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the
psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even
identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final
end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all
being—the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the
Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of
primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully
developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions.
A version of this Highest Common Factor in all preceding and
subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than
twenty-five centuries ago, and since that time the inexhaustible
theme has been treated again and again, from the standpoint of every
religious tradition and in all the principal languages of Asia and
Europe.[2]
Although Huxley was being reasonably cautious in his wording, this
notion of a “highest common factor” uniting all religions begins
to break apart the moment one presses for details. For instance, the
Abrahamic religions are incorrigibly dualistic and faith-based: In
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the human soul is conceived as
genuinely separate from the divine reality of God. The appropriate
attitude for a creature that finds itself in this circumstance is
some combination of terror, shame, and awe. In the best case, notions
of God’s love and grace provide some relief—but the central
message of these faiths is that each of us is separate from, and in
relationship to, a divine authority who will punish anyone who
harbors the slightest doubt about His supremacy.
The Eastern tradition presents a very different picture of
reality. And its highest teachings—found within the various schools
of Buddhism and the nominally Hindu tradition of Advaita
Vedanta—explicitly transcend dualism. By their lights,
consciousness itself is identical to the very reality that one might
otherwise mistake for God. While these teachings make metaphysical
claims that any serious student of science should find incredible,
they center on a range of experiences that the doctrines of Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam rule out-of-bounds.
Of course, it is true that specific Jewish, Christian, and Muslim
mystics have had experiences similar to those that motivate Buddhism
and Advaita, but these contemplative insights are not exemplary of
their faith. Rather, they are anomalies that Western mystics have
always struggled to understand and to honor, often at considerable
personal risk. Given their proper weight, these experiences produce
heterodoxies for which Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been
regularly exiled or killed.
Like Huxley, anyone determined to find a happy synthesis among
spiritual traditions will notice that the Christian mystic Meister
Eckhart (ca. 1260–ca. 1327) often sounded very much like a
Buddhist: “The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine
that they should see God, as if He stood there and they here. This is
not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.” But he also sounded
like a man bound to be excommunicated by his church—as he was. Had
Eckhart lived a little longer, it seems certain that he would have
been dragged into the street and burned alive for these expansive
ideas. That is a telling difference between Christianity and
Buddhism.
In the same vein, it is misleading to hold up the Sufi mystic
Al-Hallaj (858–922) as a representative of Islam. He was a Muslim,
yes, but he suffered the most grisly death imaginable at the hands of
his coreligionists for presuming to be one with God. Both Eckhart and
Al-Hallaj gave voice to an experience of self-transcendence that any
human being can, in principle, enjoy. However, their views were not
consistent with the central teachings of their faiths.
The Indian tradition is comparatively free of problems of this
kind. Although the teachings of Buddhism and Advaita are embedded in
more or less conventional religions, they contain empirical insights
about the nature of consciousness that do not depend upon faith. One
can practice most techniques of Buddhist meditation or the method of
self-inquiry of Advaita and experience the advertised changes in
one’s consciousness without ever believing in the law of karma or
in the miracles attributed to Indian mystics. To get started as a
Christian, however, one must first accept a dozen implausible things
about the life of Jesus and the origins of the Bible—and the same
can be said, minus a few unimportant details, about Judaism and
Islam. If one should happen to discover that the sense of being an
individual soul is an illusion, one will be guilty of blasphemy
everywhere west of the Indus.
There is no question that many religious disciplines can produce
interesting experiences in suitable minds. It should be clear,
however, that engaging a faith-based (and probably delusional)
practice, whatever its effects, isn’t the same as investigating the
nature of one’s mind absent any doctrinal assumptions. Statements
of this kind may seem starkly antagonistic toward Abrahamic
religions, but they are nonetheless true: One can speak about
Buddhism shorn of its miracles and irrational assumptions. The same
cannot be said of Christianity or Islam.
[3]
Western engagement with Eastern spirituality dates back at
least as far as Alexander’s campaign in India, where the young
conqueror and his pet philosophers encountered naked ascetics whom
they called “gymnosophists.” It is often said that the thinking
of these yogis greatly influenced the philosopher Pyrrho, the father
of Greek skepticism. This seems a credible claim, because Pyrrho’s
teachings had much in common with Buddhism. But his contemplative
insights and methods never became part of any system of thought in
the West.
Serious study of Eastern thought by outsiders did not begin until
the late eighteenth century. The first translation of a Sanskrit text
into a Western language appears to have been Sir Charles Wilkins’s
rendering of the
Bhagavad Gita, a cornerstone text of
Hinduism, in 1785. The Buddhist canon would not attract the attention
of Western scholars for another hundred years.
[4]
The conversation between East and West started in earnest, albeit
inauspiciously, with the birth of the Theosophical Society, that
golem of spiritual hunger and self-deception brought into this world
almost single-handedly by the incomparable Madame Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky in 1875. Everything about Blavatsky seemed to defy earthly
logic: She was an enormously fat woman who was said to have wandered
alone and undetected for seven years in the mountains of Tibet. She
was also thought to have survived shipwrecks, gunshot wounds, and
sword fights. Even less persuasively, she claimed to be in psychic
contact with members of the “Great White Brotherhood” of ascended
masters—a collection of immortals responsible for the evolution and
maintenance of the entire cosmos. Their leader hailed from the planet
Venus but lived in the mythical kingdom of Shambhala, which Blavatsky
placed somewhere in the vicinity of the Gobi Desert. With the
suspiciously bureaucratic name “the Lord of the World,” he
supervised the work of other adepts, including the Buddha, Maitreya,
Maha Chohan, and one Koot Hoomi, who appears to have had nothing
better to do on behalf of the cosmos than to impart its secrets to
Blavatsky.
[5]
It is always surprising when a person attracts legions of
followers and builds a large organization on their largesse while
peddling penny-arcade mythology of this kind. But perhaps this was
less remarkable in a time when even the best-educated people were
still struggling to come to terms with electricity, evolution, and
the existence of other planets. We can easily forget how suddenly the
world had shrunk and the cosmos expanded as the nineteenth century
came to a close. The geographical barriers between distant cultures
had been stripped away by trade and conquest (one could now order a
gin and tonic almost everywhere on earth), and yet the reality of
unseen forces and alien worlds was a daily focus of the most careful
scientific research. Inevitably, cross-cultural and scientific
discoveries were mingled in the popular imagination with religious
dogma and traditional occultism. In fact, this had been happening at
the highest level of human thought for more than a century: It is
always instructive to recall that the father of modern physics, Isaac
Newton, squandered a considerable portion of his genius on the study
of theology, biblical prophecy, and alchemy.
The inability to distinguish the strange but true from the merely
strange was common enough in Blavatsky’s time—as it is in our
own. Blavatsky’s contemporary Joseph Smith, a libidinous con man
and crackpot, was able to found a new religion on the claim that he
had unearthed the final revelations of God in the hallowed precincts
of Manchester, New York, written in “reformed Egyptian” on golden
plates. He decoded this text with the aid of magical “seer stones,”
which, whether by magic or not, allowed Smith to produce an English
version of God’s Word that was an embarrassing pastiche of
plagiarisms from the Bible and silly lies about Jesus’s life in
America. And yet the resulting edifice of nonsense and taboo survives
to this day.
A more modern cult, Scientology, leverages human credulity to an
even greater degree: Adherents believe that human beings are
possessed by the souls of extraterrestrials who were condemned to
planet Earth 75 million years ago by the galactic overlord Xenu. How
was their exile accomplished? The old-fashioned way: These aliens
were shuttled by the billions to our humble planet aboard a
spacecraft that resembled a DC-8. They were then imprisoned in a
volcano and blasted to bits with hydrogen bombs. Their souls
survived, however, and disentangling them from our own can be the
work of a lifetime. It is also expensive.
[6]
Despite the imponderables in her philosophy, Blavatsky was among
the first people to announce in Western circles that there was such a
thing as the “wisdom of the East.” This wisdom began to trickle
westward once Swami Vivekananda introduced the teachings of Vedanta
at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Again,
Buddhism lagged behind: A few Western monks living on the island of
Sri Lanka were beginning to translate the Pali Canon, which remains
the most authoritative record of the teachings of the historical
Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama. However, the practice of Buddhist
meditation wouldn’t actually be taught in the West for another half
century.
It is easy enough to find fault with romantic ideas about
Eastern wisdom, and a tradition of such criticism sprang up almost
the instant the first Western seeker sat cross-legged and attempted
to meditate. In the late 1950s, the author and journalist Arthur
Koestler traveled to India and Japan in search of wisdom and
summarized his pilgrimage thus: “I started my journey in sackcloth
and ashes, and came back rather proud of being a European.”
[7]
In
The Lotus and the Robot, Koestler gives some of his
reasons for being less than awed by his journey to the East.
Consider, for example, the ancient discipline of hatha yoga. While
now generally viewed as a system of physical exercises designed to
increase a person’s strength and flexibility, in its traditional
context hatha yoga is part of a larger effort to manipulate “subtle”
features of the body unknown to anatomists. No doubt much of this
subtlety corresponds to experiences that yogis actually have—but
many of the beliefs formed on the basis of these experiences are
patently absurd, and certain of the associated practices are both
silly and injurious.
Koestler reports that the aspiring yogi is traditionally
encouraged to lengthen his tongue—even going so far as to cut the
frenulum (the membrane that anchors the tongue to the floor of the
mouth) and stretch the soft palate. What is the purpose of these
modifications? They enable our hero to insert his tongue into his
nasopharynx, thereby blocking the flow of air through the nostrils.
His anatomy thus improved, a yogi can then imbibe subtle liquors
believed to emanate directly from his brain. These substances—
imagined, by recourse to further subtleties, to be connected to the
retention of semen—are said to confer not only spiritual wisdom but
immortality. This technique of drinking mucus is known as
khechari
mudra, and it is thought to be one of the crowning achievements
of yoga.
I’m more than happy to score a point for Koestler here. Needless
to say, no defense of such practices will be found in this book.
Criticism of Eastern wisdom can seem especially pertinent when
coming from Easterners themselves. There is indeed something
preposterous about well-educated Westerners racing East in search of
spiritual enlightenment while Easterners make the opposite pilgrimage
seeking education and economic opportunities. I have a friend whose
own adventures may have marked a high point in this global comedy. He
made his first trip to India immediately after graduating from
college, having already acquired several yogic affectations: He had
the requisite beads and long hair, but he was also in the habit of
writing the name of the Hindu god Ram in Devanagari script over and
over in a journal. On the flight to the motherland, he had the good
fortune to be seated next to an Indian businessman. This weary
traveler thought he had witnessed every species of human folly—until
he caught sight of my friend’s scribbling. The spectacle of a
Western-born Stanford graduate, of working age, holding degrees in
both economics and history, devoting himself to the graphomaniacal
worship of an imaginary deity in a language he could neither read nor
understand was more than this man could abide in a confined space at
30,000 feet. After a testy exchange, the two travelers could only
stare at each other in mutual incomprehension and pity—and they had
ten hours yet to fly. There really are two sides to such a
conversation, but I concede that only one of them can be made to look
ridiculous.
We can also grant that Eastern wisdom has not produced societies
or political institutions that are any better than their Western
counterparts; in fact, one could argue that India has survived as the
world’s largest democracy only because of institutions that were
built under British rule. Nor has the East led the world in
scientific discovery. Nevertheless, there is something to the notion
of uniquely Eastern wisdom, and most of it has been concentrated in
or derived from the tradition of Buddhism.
Buddhism has been of special interest to Western scientists
for reasons already hinted at. It isn’t primarily a faith-based
religion, and its central teachings are entirely empirical. Despite
the superstitions that many Buddhists cherish, the doctrine has a
practical and logical core that does not require any unwarranted
assumptions. Many Westerners have recognized this and have been
relieved to find a spiritual alternative to faith-based worship. It
is no accident that most of the scientific research now done on
meditation focuses primarily on Buddhist techniques.
Another reason for Buddhism’s prominence among scientists has
been the intellectual engagement of one of its most visible
representatives: Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama. Of course,
the Dalai Lama is not without his critics. My late friend Christopher
Hitchens meted out justice to “his holiness” on several
occasions. He also castigated Western students of Buddhism for the
“widely and lazily held belief that ‘Oriental’ religion is
different from other faiths: less dogmatic, more contemplative, more
. . . Transcendental,” and for the “blissful, thoughtless
exceptionalism” with which Buddhism is regarded by many.
[8]
Hitch did have a point. In his capacity as the head of one of the
four branches of Tibetan Buddhism and as the former leader of the
Tibetan government in exile, the Dalai Lama has made some
questionable claims and formed some embarrassing alliances. Although
his engagement with science is far-reaching and surely sincere, the
man is not above consulting an astrologer or “oracle” when making
important decisions. I will have something to say in this book about
many of the things that might have justified Hitch’s opprobrium,
but the general thrust of his commentary here was all wrong. Several
Eastern traditions are exceptionally empirical and exceptionally
wise, and therefore merit the exceptionalism claimed by their
adherents.
Buddhism in particular possesses a literature on the nature of the
mind that has no peer in Western religion or Western science. Some of
these teachings are cluttered with metaphysical assumptions that
should provoke our doubts, but many aren’t. And when engaged as a
set of hypotheses by which to investigate the mind and deepen one’s
ethical life, Buddhism can be an entirely rational enterprise.
Unlike the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the
teachings of Buddhism are not considered by their adherents to be the
product of infallible revelation. They are, rather, empirical
instructions: If you do X, you will experience Y. Although many
Buddhists have a superstitious and cultic attachment to the
historical Buddha, the teachings of Buddhism present him as an
ordinary human being who succeeded in understanding the nature of his
own mind.
Buddha means “awakened one”—and Siddhartha
Gautama was merely a man who woke up from the dream of being a
separate self. Compare this with the Christian view of Jesus, who is
imagined to be the son of the creator of the universe. This is a very
different proposition, and it renders Christianity, no matter how
fully divested of metaphysical baggage, all but irrelevant to a
scientific discussion about the human condition.
The teachings of Buddhism, and of Eastern spirituality generally,
focus on the primacy of the mind. There are dangers in this way of
viewing the world, to be sure. Focusing on training the mind to the
exclusion of all else can lead to political quietism and hive-like
conformity. The fact that your mind is all you have and that it is
possible to be at peace even in difficult circumstances can become an
argument for ignoring obvious societal problems. But it is not a
compelling one. The world is in desperate need of improvement—in
global terms, freedom and prosperity remain the exception—and yet
this doesn’t mean we need to be miserable while we work for the
common good.
In fact, the teachings of Buddhism emphasize a connection between
ethical and spiritual life. Making progress in one domain lays a
foundation for progress in the other. One can, for instance, spend
long periods of time in contemplative solitude for the purpose of
becoming a better person in the world—having better relationships,
being more honest and compassionate and, therefore, more helpful to
one’s fellow human beings. Being wisely selfish and being selfless
can amount to very much the same thing. There are centuries of
anecdotal testimony on this point—and, as we will see, the
scientific study of the mind has begun to bear it out. There is now
little question that how one uses one’s attention, moment to
moment, largely determines what kind of person one becomes. Our
minds—and lives—are largely shaped by how we use them.
Although the experience of self-transcendence is, in principle,
available to everyone, this possibility is only weakly attested to in
the religious and philosophical literature of the West. Only
Buddhists and students of Advaita Vedanta (which appears to have been
heavily influenced by Buddhism) have been absolutely clear in
asserting that spiritual life consists in overcoming the illusion of
the self by paying close attention to our experience in the present
moment.
[9]
As I wrote in my first book,
The End of Faith, the
disparity between Eastern and Western spirituality resembles that
found between Eastern and Western medicine—with the arrow of
embarrassment pointing in the opposite direction. Humanity did not
understand the biology of cancer, develop antibiotics and vaccines,
or sequence the human genome under an Eastern sun. Consequently, real
medicine is almost entirely a product of Western science. Insofar as
specific techniques of Eastern medicine actually work, they must
conform, whether by design or by happenstance, to the principles of
biology as we have come to know them in the West. This is not to say
that Western medicine is complete. In a few decades, many of our
current practices will seem barbaric. One need only ponder the list
of side effects that accompany most medications to appreciate that
these are terribly blunt instruments. Nevertheless, most of our
knowledge about the human body—and about the physical universe
generally—emerged in the West. The rest is instinct, folklore,
bewilderment, and untimely death.
An honest comparison of spiritual traditions, Eastern and Western,
proves equally invidious. As manuals for contemplative understanding,
the Bible and the Koran are worse than useless. Whatever wisdom can
be found in their pages is never best found there, and it is
subverted, time and again, by ancient savagery and superstition.
Again, one must deploy the necessary caveats: I am not saying that
most Buddhists or Hindus have been sophisticated contemplatives.
Their traditions have spawned many of the same pathologies we see
elsewhere among the faithful: dogmatism, anti-intellectualism,
tribalism, otherworldliness. However, the empirical difference
between the central teachings of Buddhism and Advaita and those of
Western monotheism is difficult to overstate. One can traverse the
Eastern paths simply by becoming interested in the nature of one’s
own mind—especially in the immediate causes of psychological
suffering—and by paying closer attention to one’s experience in
every present moment. There is, in truth, nothing one need believe.
The teachings of Buddhism and Advaita are best viewed as lab manuals
and explorers’ logs detailing the results of empirical research on
the nature of human consciousness.
Nearly every geographical or linguistic barrier to the free
exchange of ideas has now fallen away. It seems to me, therefore,
that educated people no longer have a right to any form of spiritual
provincialism. The truths of Eastern spirituality are now no more
Eastern than the truths of Western science are Western. We are merely
talking about human consciousness and its possible states. My purpose
in writing this book is to encourage you to investigate certain
contemplative insights for yourself, without accepting the
metaphysical ideas that they inspired in ignorant and isolated
peoples of the past.
A final word of caution: Nothing I say here is intended as a
denial of the fact that psychological well-being requires a healthy
“sense of self”—with all the capacities that this vague phrase
implies. Children need to become autonomous, confident, and
self-aware in order to form healthy relationships. And they must
acquire a host of other cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal
skills in the process of becoming sane and productive adults. Which
is to say that there is a time and a place for everything—unless,
of course, there isn’t. No doubt there are psychological
conditions, such as schizophrenia, for which practices of the sort I
recommend in this book might be inappropriate. Some people find the
experience of an extended, silent retreat psychologically
destabilizing.
[10]
Again, an analogy to physical training seems apropos: Not everyone
is suited to running a six-minute mile or bench-pressing his own body
weight. But many quite ordinary people are capable of these feats,
and there are better and worse ways to accomplish them. What is more,
the same principles of fitness generally apply even to people whose
abilities are limited by illness or injury.
So I want to make it clear that the instructions in this book are
intended for readers who are adults (more or less) and free from any
psychological or medical conditions that could be exacerbated by
meditation or other techniques of sustained introspection. If paying
attention to your breath, to bodily sensations, to the flow of
thoughts, or to the nature of consciousness itself seems likely to
cause you clinically significant anguish, please check with a
psychologist or a psychiatrist before engaging in the practices I
describe.
MINDFULNESS
It is always now. This might sound trite, but it is the
truth. It’s not quite true as a matter of neurology, because our
minds are built upon layers of inputs whose timing we know must be
different.
[11]
But it is true as a matter of
conscious experience. The
reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see,
is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to
understand if you want to be happy in this world.
But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth—
overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we
succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to
become
happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears,
grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain—and thinking,
interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running.
As a consequence, we spend our lives being far less content than we
might otherwise be. We often fail to appreciate what we have until we
have lost it. We crave experiences, objects, relationships, only to
grow bored with them. And yet the craving persists. I speak from
experience, of course.
As a remedy for this predicament, many spiritual teachings ask us
to entertain unfounded ideas about the nature of reality—or at the
very least to develop a fondness for the iconography and rituals of
one or another religion. But not all paths traverse the same rough
ground. There are methods of meditation that do not require any
artifice or unwarranted assumptions at all.
For beginners, I usually recommend a technique called
vipassana
(Pali for “insight”), which comes from the oldest tradition of
Buddhism, the Theravada. One of the advantages of
vipassana is
that it can be taught in an entirely secular way. Experts in this
practice generally acquire their training in a Buddhist context, and
most retreat centers in the United States and Europe teach its
associated Buddhist philosophy. Nevertheless, this method of
introspection can be brought into any secular or scientific context
without embarrassment. (The same cannot be said for the practice of
chanting to Lord Krishna while banging a drum.) That is why
vipassana
is now being widely studied and adopted by psychologists and
neuroscientists.
The quality of mind cultivated in
vipassana is almost
always referred to as “mindfulness,” and the literature on its
psychological benefits is now substantial. There is nothing spooky
about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and
undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether
pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been
shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive
function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions
of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation,
and self-awareness.
[12]
We will look more closely at the neurophysiology of mindfulness in a
later chapter.
Mindfulness is a translation of the Pali word
sati.
The term has several meanings in the Buddhist literature, but for our
purposes the most important is “clear awareness.” The practice
was first described in the
Satipatthana Sutta,[13]
which is part of the Pali Canon. Like many Buddhist texts, the
Satipatthana Sutta is highly repetitive and, for anything but
an avid student of Buddhism, exceptionally boring to read. However,
when one compares texts of this kind with the Bible or the Koran, the
difference is unmistakable: The
Satipatthana Sutta is not a
collection of ancient myths, superstitions, and taboos; it is a
rigorously empirical guide to freeing the mind from suffering.
The Buddha described four foundations of mindfulness, which he
taught as “the direct path for the purification of beings, for the
surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of pain
and grief, for the attainment of the true way, for the realization of
Nibbana” (Sanskrit,
Nirvana). The four foundations of
mindfulness are the body (breathing, changes in posture, activities),
feelings (the senses of pleasantness, unpleasantness, and
neutrality), the mind (in particular, its moods and attitudes), and
the objects of mind (which include the five senses but also other
mental states, such as volition, tranquility, rapture, equanimity,
and even mindfulness itself). It is a peculiar list, at once
redundant and incomplete—a problem that is compounded by the
necessity of translating Pali terminology into English. The obvious
message of the text, however, is that the totality of one’s
experience can become the field of contemplation. The meditator is
merely instructed to pay attention, “ardently” and “fully
aware” and “free from covetousness and grief for the world.”
There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say
that it expresses a specific kind of passion—a passion for
discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of
cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and
(ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of
thinking
more clearly about experience; it is the act of
experiencing
more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves.
Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s
mind or body—thoughts, sensations, moods—without grasping at the
pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant. One of the great strengths
of this technique of meditation, from a secular point of view, is
that it does not require us to adopt any cultural affectations or
unjustified beliefs. It simply demands that we pay close attention to
the flow of experience in each moment.
The principal enemy of mindfulness—or of any meditative
practice—is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by
thoughts. The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of
thinking without knowing that we are thinking. In fact, thoughts of
all kinds can be perfectly good objects of mindfulness. In the early
stages of one’s practice, however, the arising of thought will be
more or less synonymous with distraction—that is, with a failure to
meditate. Most people who believe they are meditating are merely
thinking with their eyes closed. By practicing mindfulness, however,
one can awaken from the dream of discursive thought and begin to see
each arising image, idea, or bit of language vanish without a trace.
What remains is consciousness itself, with its attendant sights,
sounds, sensations, and thoughts appearing and changing in every
moment.
In the beginning of one’s meditation practice, the difference
between ordinary experience and what one comes to consider
“mindfulness” is not very clear, and it takes some training to
distinguish between being lost in thought and seeing thoughts for
what they are. In this sense, learning to meditate is just like
acquiring any other skill. It takes many thousands of repetitions to
throw a good jab or to coax music from the strings of a guitar. With
practice, mindfulness becomes a well-formed habit of attention, and
the difference between it and ordinary thinking will become
increasingly clear. Eventually, it begins to seem as if you are
repeatedly awakening from a dream to find yourself safely in bed. No
matter how terrible the dream, the relief is instantaneous. And yet
it is difficult to stay awake for more than a few seconds at a time.
My friend Joseph Goldstein, one of the finest
vipassana
teachers I know, likens this shift in awareness to the experience of
being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you
are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall.
Your perception is unchanged, but the spell is broken. Most of us
spend every waking moment lost in the movie of our lives. Until we
see that an alternative to this enchantment exists, we are entirely
at the mercy of appearances. Again, the difference I am describing is
not a matter of achieving a new conceptual understanding or of
adopting new beliefs about the nature of reality. The change comes
when we experience the present moment prior to the arising of
thought.
The Buddha taught mindfulness as the appropriate response to the
truth of
dukkha, usually translated from the Pali, somewhat
misleadingly, as “suffering.” A better translation would be
“unsatisfactoriness.” Suffering may not be inherent in life, but
unsatisfactoriness is. We crave lasting happiness in the midst of
change: Our bodies age, cherished objects break, pleasures fade,
relationships fail. Our attachment to the good things in life and our
aversion to the bad amount to a denial of these realities, and this
inevitably leads to feelings of dissatisfaction. Mindfulness is a
technique for achieving equanimity amid the flux, allowing us to
simply be aware of the quality of experience in each moment, whether
pleasant or unpleasant. This may seem like a recipe for apathy, but
it needn’t be. It is actually possible to be mindful—and,
therefore, to be at peace with the present moment—even while
working to change the world for the better.
Mindfulness meditation is extraordinarily simple to describe, but
it isn’t easy to perform. True mastery might require special talent
and a lifetime of devotion to the task, and yet a genuine
transformation in one’s perception of the world is within reach for
most of us. Practice is the only thing that will lead to success. The
simple instructions given in the box that follows are analogous to
instructions on how to walk a tightrope—which, I assume, must go
something like this:
1. Find a horizontal cable that can support your weight.
2.
Stand on one end.
3. Step forward by placing one foot directly
in front of the other.
4. Repeat.
5. Don’t fall.
Clearly, steps 2 through 5 entail a little trial and error.
Happily, the benefits of training in meditation arrive long before
mastery does. And falling, for our purposes, occurs almost
ceaselessly, every time we become lost in thought. Again, the problem
is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking
without being
fully aware that we are thinking.
As every meditator soon discovers, distraction is the normal
condition of our minds: Most of us topple from the wire every
second—whether gliding happily into reverie or plunging into fear,
anger, self-hatred, and other negative states of mind. Meditation is
a technique for waking up. The goal is to come out of the trance of
discursive thinking and to stop reflexively grasping at the pleasant
and recoiling from the unpleasant, so that we can enjoy a mind
undisturbed by worry, merely open like the sky, and effortlessly
aware of the flow of experience in the present.
How to Meditate
Sit comfortably, with your spine
erect, either in a chair or cross-legged on a cushion.
Close your eyes, take a few deep
breaths, and feel the points of contact between your body and the
chair or the floor. Notice the sensations associated with
sitting—feelings of pressure, warmth, tingling, vibration, etc.
Gradually become aware of the
process of breathing. Pay attention to wherever you feel the breath
most distinctly—either at your nostrils or in the rising and
falling of your abdomen.
Allow your attention to rest in
the mere sensation of breathing. (You don’t have to control your
breath. Just let it come and go naturally.)
Every time your mind wanders in
thought, gently return it to the breath.
As you focus on the process of
breathing, you will also perceive sounds, bodily sensations, or
emotions. Simply observe these phenomena as they appear in
consciousness and then return to the breath.
The moment you notice that you
have been lost in thought, observe the present thought itself as an
object of consciousness. Then return your attention to the breath—or
to any sounds or sensations arising in the next moment.
- Continue in this way until you can merely witness all objects
of consciousness—sights, sounds, sensations, emotions, even
thoughts themselves—as they arise, change, and pass away.
Those who are new to this practice generally find it useful to
hear instructions of this kind spoken aloud during the course of a
meditation session. I have posted guided meditations of varying
length on
my
website.
THE TRUTH OF SUFFERING
I am sitting in a coffee shop in midtown Manhattan, drinking
exactly what I want (coffee), eating exactly what I want (a cookie),
and doing exactly what I want (writing this book). It is a beautiful
fall day, and many of the people passing by on the sidewalk appear to
radiate good fortune from their pores. Several are so physically
attractive that I’m beginning to wonder whether Photoshop can now
be applied to the human body. Up and down this street, and for a mile
in each direction, stores sell jewelry, art, and clothing that not
even 1 percent of humanity could hope to purchase.
So what did the Buddha mean when he spoke of the
“unsatisfactoriness” (
dukkha) of life? Was he referring
merely to the poor and the hungry? Or are these rich and beautiful
people suffering even now? Of course, suffering is all around us—even
here, where everything appears to be going well for the moment.
First, the obvious: Within a few blocks of where I am sitting are
hospitals, convalescent homes, psychiatrists’ offices, and other
rooms built to assuage, or merely to contain, some of the most
profound forms of human misery. A man runs over his own child while
backing his car out of the driveway. A woman learns that she has
terminal cancer on the eve of her wedding. We know that the worst can
happen to anyone at any time—and most people spend a great deal of
mental energy hoping that it won’t happen to them.
But more subtle forms of suffering can be found, even among people
who seem to have every reason to be satisfied in the present.
Although wealth and fame can secure many forms of pleasure, few of us
have any illusions that they guarantee happiness. Anyone who owns a
television or reads the newspaper has seen movie stars, politicians,
professional athletes, and other celebrities ricochet from marriage
to marriage and from scandal to scandal. To learn that a young,
attractive, talented, and successful person is nevertheless addicted
to drugs or clinically depressed is to be given almost no cause for
surprise.
Yet the unsatisfactoriness of the good life runs deeper than this.
Even while living safely between emergencies, most of us feel a wide
range of painful emotions on a daily basis. When you wake up in the
morning, are you filled with joy? How do you feel at work or when
looking in the mirror? How satisfied are you with what you’ve
accomplished in life? How much of your time with your family is spent
surrendered to love and gratitude, and how much is spent just
struggling to be happy in one another’s company? Even for
extraordinarily lucky people, life is difficult. And when we look at
what makes it so, we see that we are all prisoners of our thoughts.
And then there is death, which defeats everyone. Most people seem
to believe that we have only two ways to think about death: We can
fear it and do our best to ignore it, or we can deny that it is real.
The first strategy leads to a life of conventional worldliness and
distraction—we merely strive for pleasure and success and do our
best to keep the reality of death out of view. The second strategy is
the province of religion, which assures us that death is but a
doorway to another world and that the most important opportunities in
life occur after the lifetime of the body. But there is another path,
and it seems the only one compatible with intellectual honesty. That
path is the subject of this book.
ENLIGHTENMENT
What is enlightenment, which is so often said to be the ultimate
goal of meditation? There are many esoteric details that we can
safely ignore—disagreements among contemplative traditions about
what, exactly, is gained or lost at the end of the spiritual path.
Many of these claims are preposterous. Within most schools of
Buddhism, for instance, a buddha—whether the historical Buddha,
Siddhartha Gautama, or any other person who attains the state of
“full enlightenment”—is generally described as “omniscient.”
Just what this means is open to a fair bit of caviling. But however
narrowly defined, the claim is absurd. If the historical Buddha were
“omniscient,” he would have been, at minimum, a better
mathematician, physicist, biologist, and
Jeopardy contestant
than any person who has ever lived. Is it reasonable to expect that
an ascetic in the fifth century BC, by virtue of his meditative
insights, spontaneously became an unprecedented genius in every field
of human inquiry, including those that did not exist at the time in
which he lived? Would Siddhartha Gautama have awed Kurt Gödel, Alan
Turing, John von Neumann, and Claude Shannon with his command of
mathematical logic and information theory? Of course not. To think
otherwise is pure, religious piety.
Any extension of the notion of “omniscience” to procedural
knowledge—that is, to knowing how to do something—would render
the Buddha capable of painting the Sistine Chapel in the morning and
demolishing Roger Federer at Centre Court in the afternoon. Is there
any reason to believe that Siddhartha Gautama, or any other
celebrated contemplative, possessed such abilities by virtue of his
spiritual practice? None whatsoever. Nevertheless, many Buddhists
believe that buddhas can do all these things and more. Again, this is
religious dogmatism, not a rational approach to spiritual life.
[14]
I make no claims in support of magic or miracles in this book.
However, I can say that the true goal of meditation is more profound
than most people realize—and it does, in fact, encompass many of
the experiences that traditional mystics claim for themselves. It is
quite possible to lose one’s sense of being a separate self and to
experience a kind of boundless, open awareness—to feel, in other
words, at one with the cosmos. This says a lot about the
possibilities of human consciousness, but it says nothing about the
universe at large. And it sheds no light at all on the relationship
between mind and matter. The fact that it is possible to love one’s
neighbor as oneself should be a great finding for the field of
psychology, but it lends absolutely no credence to the claim that
Jesus was the son of God, or even that God exists. Nor does it
suggest that the “energy” of love somehow pervades the cosmos.
These are historical and metaphysical claims that personal experience
cannot justify.
However, a phenomenon like self-transcending love does entitle us
to make claims about the human mind. And this particular experience
is so well attested and so readily achieved by those who devote
themselves to specific practices (the Buddhist technique of
metta
meditation, for instance) or who even take the right drug (MDMA) that
there is very little controversy that it exists. Facts of this kind
must now be understood in a rational context.
The traditional goal of meditation is to arrive at a state of
well-being that is imperturbable—or if perturbed, easily regained.
The French monk Matthieu Ricard describes such happiness as “a deep
sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy
mind.”
[15]
The purpose of meditation is to recognize that you already have
such a mind. That discovery, in turn, helps you to cease doing the
things that produce needless confusion and suffering for yourself and
others. Of course, most people never truly master the practice and
don’t reach a condition of imperturbable happiness. The near goal,
therefore, is to have an
increasingly healthy mind— that is,
to be moving one’s mind in the right direction.
There is nothing novel about trying to
become happy. And
one
can become happy, within certain limits, without any
recourse to the practice of meditation. But conventional sources of
happiness are unreliable, being dependent upon changing conditions.
It is difficult to raise a happy family, to keep yourself and those
you love healthy, to acquire wealth and find creative and fulfilling
ways to enjoy it, to form deep friendships, to contribute to society
in ways that are emotionally rewarding, to perfect a wide variety of
artistic, athletic, and intellectual skills—and to keep the
machinery of happiness running day after day. There is nothing wrong
with being fulfilled in all these ways—except for the fact that, if
you pay close attention, you will see that there is still something
wrong with it. These forms of happiness aren’t good enough. Our
feelings of fulfillment do not last. And the stress of life
continues.
So what would a spiritual master be a master
of? At a
minimum, she will no longer suffer certain cognitive and emotional
illusions—above all, she will no longer feel identical to her
thoughts. Once again, this is not to say that such a person will no
longer think, but she would no longer succumb to the primary
confusion that thoughts produce in most of us: She would no longer
feel that there is an inner self who is a thinker of these thoughts.
Such a person will naturally maintain an openness and serenity of
mind that is available to most of us only for brief moments, even
after years of practice. I remain agnostic as to whether anyone has
achieved such a state permanently, but I know from direct experience
that it is possible to be far more enlightened than I tend to be.
The question of whether enlightenment is a permanent state need
not detain us. The crucial point is that you can glimpse something
about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you from
suffering in the present. Even just recognizing the impermanence of
your mental states—deeply, not merely as an idea—can transform
your life. Every mental state you have ever had has arisen and then
passed away. This is a first-person fact—but it is, nonetheless, a
fact that any human being can readily confirm. We don’t have to
know any more about the brain or about the relationship between
consciousness and the physical world to understand this truth about
our own minds. The promise of spiritual life—indeed, the very thing
that makes it “spiritual” in the sense I invoke throughout this
book—is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off
knowing. What we need to become happier and to make the world a
better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding
of the way things are.
The moment we admit the possibility of attaining contemplative
insights—and of training one’s mind for that purpose—we must
acknowledge that people naturally fall at different points on a
continuum between ignorance and wisdom. Part of this range will be
considered “normal,” but normal isn’t necessarily a happy place
to be. Just as a person’s physical body and abilities can be
refined—Olympic athletes are
not normal—one’s mental
life can deepen and expand on the basis of talent and training. This
is nearly self-evident, but it remains a controversial point. No one
hesitates to admit the role of talent and training in the context of
physical and intellectual pursuits; I have never met another person
who denied that some of us are stronger, more athletic, or more
learned than others. But many people find it difficult to acknowledge
that a continuum of moral and spiritual wisdom exists or that there
might be better and worse ways to traverse it.
Stages of spiritual development, therefore, appear
unavoidable. Just as we must grow into adulthood physically—and we
can fail to mature or become sick or injured along the way—our
minds develop by degrees. One can’t learn sophisticated skills such
as syllogistic reasoning, algebra, or irony until one has acquired
more basic skills. It seems to me that a healthy spiritual life can
begin only once our physical, mental, social, and ethical lives have
sufficiently matured. We must learn to use language before we can
work with it creatively or understand its limits, and the
conventional self must form before we can investigate it and
understand that it is not what it appears to be. An ability to
examine the contents of one’s own consciousness clearly,
dispassionately, and nondiscursively, with sufficient attention to
realize that no inner self exists, is a very sophisticated skill. And
yet basic mindfulness can be practiced very early in life. Many
people, including my wife, have successfully taught it to children as
young as six. At that age—and every age thereafter—it can be a
powerful tool for self-regulation and self-awareness.
Contemplatives have long understood that positive habits of mind
are best viewed as skills that most of us learn imperfectly as we
grow to adulthood. It is possible to become more focused, patient,
and compassionate than one naturally tends to be, and there are many
things to learn about how to be happy in this world. These are truths
that Western psychological science has only recently begun to
explore.
Some people are content in the midst of deprivation and danger,
while others are miserable despite having all the luck in the world.
This is not to say that external circumstances do not matter. But it
is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines
the quality of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you
experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others.
Given this fact, it makes sense to train it.
Scientists and skeptics generally assume that the traditional
claims of yogis and mystics must be exaggerated or simply delusional
and that the only rational purpose of meditation is limited to
conventional “stress reduction.” Conversely, serious students of
these practices often insist that even the most outlandish claims
made by and about spiritual masters are true. I am attempting to lead
the reader along a middle path between these extremes—one that
preserves our scientific skepticism but acknowledges that it is
possible to radically transform our minds.
In one sense, the Buddhist concept of enlightenment really is just
the epitome of “stress reduction”—and depending on how much
stress one reduces, the results of one’s practice can seem more or
less profound. According to the Buddhist teachings, human beings have
a distorted view of reality that leads them to suffer unnecessarily.
We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry
about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic
self that doesn’t exist. This is stressful—and spiritual life is
a process of gradually unraveling our confusion and bringing this
stress to an end. According to the Buddhist view, by seeing things as
they are, we cease to suffer in the usual ways, and our minds can
open to states of well-being that are intrinsic to the nature of
consciousness.
Of course, some people claim to love stress and appear eager to
live by its logic. Some even derive pleasure from imposing stress on
others. Genghis Khan is reported to have said, “The greatest
happiness is to scatter your enemy and drive him before you, to see
his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in
tears, and to gather to your bosom his wives and daughters.” People
attach many meanings to terms like
happiness, and not all of
them are compatible with one another.
In
The Moral Landscape, I argued that we tend to be
unnecessarily confused by differences of opinion on the topic of
human well-being. No doubt certain people can derive mental pleasure—
and even experience genuine ecstasy—by behaving in ways that
produce immense suffering for others. But we know that these states
are anomalous—or, at least, not sustainable—because we depend
upon one another for more or less everything. Whatever the associated
pleasures, raping and pillaging can’t be a stable strategy for
finding happiness in this world. Given our social requirements, we
know that the deepest and most durable forms of well-being must be
compatible with an ethical concern for other people—even for
complete strangers—otherwise, violent conflict becomes inevitable.
We also know that there are certain forms of happiness that are not
available to a person even if, like Genghis Khan, he finds himself on
the winning side of every siege. Some pleasures are intrinsically
ethical—feelings like love, gratitude, devotion, and compassion. To
inhabit these states of mind is, by definition, to be brought into
alignment with others.
In my view, the realistic goal to be attained through spiritual
practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of
no further efforts but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the
midst of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already
solved most of the problems you will encounter in life.
