Robert Wright: Why (Science Says) Buddhism Is True

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, best-selling author Robert Wright speaks with Tricycle’s web editor, Wendy Joan Biddlecombe, about how evolutionary psychology supports what the Buddha taught us about suffering and not being satisfied in the present moment. In the talk, Wright explains why we haven’t evolved past difficult emotions such as anxiety and how mindfulness meditation can provide a way to work through—and maybe even free us from—them.

Transcript

Welcome to Tricycle Talks.

I'm James Shaheen,

Editor and publisher of Tricycle the Buddhist Review.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks,

Our web editor,

Wendy Joan Biddlecombe,

Speaks with Robert Wright,

A journalist,

Author,

And professor of religion and psychology.

Wright's latest book,

Why Buddhism is True,

The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Discipline,

Has spent multiple weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

In this book,

Wright tells us how evolutionary science can shed light on what the Buddha noted about human nature 2,

600 years ago,

Our seeming inability to achieve lasting contentment.

Along with this,

However,

There is some good news.

Wright also explains how Buddhist practice can significantly change this equation.

Now let's listen to Bob and Wendy.

Bob Wright,

Thanks for being with us.

Well,

Thanks for having me.

As we're sitting and recording,

Your book,

Why Buddhism is True,

Is number four on the New York Times bestseller list.

So congratulations about that.

Thanks very much.

So early on in the book,

The reader kind of joins you at your first retreat at Insight Meditation Society in Berry,

Massachusetts.

Can we step back a bit?

When did you first start meditating and why?

Well,

I probably tried to meditate going back all the way to college,

Which was a pretty long time ago.

I had never had what I felt was success,

Although I know you're not supposed to talk about success with meditation.

Anyway,

I talked about it and felt I hadn't achieved it.

Then in 2003,

Somebody suggested that I try a week-long retreat.

So I went to a retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts and the effects were sufficiently dramatic to keep me meditating.

After a couple days of the kind of frustration that people who have been on retreats may be familiar with,

Especially your first retreat,

If you're not much of a meditator,

You know,

I had trouble focusing on my breath,

But then things started happening and it was pretty amazing by the end.

So you went from somewhat experienced to going on a longer retreat?

Were you sitting daily?

I went from someone who had dabbled at most and never gotten anything rewarding out of it to someone who was a believer and felt I should keep doing this and should go to more retreats.

In fact,

I came out of that feeling I should write about it.

I had evangelical fervor,

But I didn't get around to writing about it for some time later.

So the seed was planted?

The seed was planted and the plant was starting to grow.

Yeah,

You write in your book about taking notes at that first retreat and that obviously served you well.

Yeah,

I mean,

I tend to take notes.

I mean,

That was the one violation of the law that I committed there.

You're not supposed to read or and I abided by all the rules except for I did take some notes.

They say you're not supposed to write,

But I'm afraid I broke that rule.

And I mean,

The experiences were so dramatic,

I wanted to commit them to writing.

I mean,

Just,

You know,

The sense of the beauty of things I hadn't considered particularly beautiful before were just so profound.

And the sense of clarity,

I mean,

Leaving aside particular experiences I had while meditating,

Which were notable in themselves,

Just the the way that my day to day consciousness slowly transformed was just striking.

What were some of those specific moments that made you think,

I'm going to stick with this?

Okay,

Well,

My first kind of breakthrough,

I guess you could say was,

I think it was the third day.

It was a morning session,

I had had too much coffee.

And I felt this kind of grinding sensation in my jaw,

Like my teeth were grinding.

It was it was an over caffeinated kind of stressed feeling.

And it was like,

I felt like grinding my teeth,

It felt very uncomfortable.

And it was intruding on my meditation.

And finally,

I realized,

Well,

It's mindfulness meditation,

What you're supposed to do is not run away from negative feelings,

Sense them,

Observe them.

Not that I had ever done much of that,

Much less done it to much effect.

But I said,

Okay,

I'll try that.

And all of a sudden,

I got this feeling like,

Well,

Okay,

The feeling is still there in my jaw,

That kind of tooth grinding feeling.

But I'm not in my jaw,

I'm up in my head.

And so it's not a problem.

I'm just watching the feeling.

And it had totally lost its grip on me.

So,

You know,

I don't know that I'd ever before had the experience of observing and in some sense,

Experiencing an unpleasant feeling without the unpleasantness.

It just,

The feeling persisted for a while before it kind of dissolved,

I guess,

But it was no longer unpleasant.

It had just totally lost its grip on me.

And then,

You know,

Later,

When you have a comparable experience with other feelings like anxiety,

It's a very,

Very rewarding,

Productive thing in a strictly therapeutic sense,

Leave aside the kind of Buddhist philosophical context of these kinds of experiences.

And I,

I try to focus on those in the book,

You know,

And try to try to emphasize that therapeutic benefits of meditation can be a step toward deeper experience that has clear connection to Buddhist philosophy.

When I first read that about your job,

My jaw went from totally tight to totally relaxed.

Is that right?

And that just happened again.

So thank you.

We have some of the same ailments.

I had no idea that I had such powers.

Even the power to relax jaws.

Yeah.

Great.

Well,

Your book examines Buddhist psychology in the lens of science.

What can evolutionary psychology teach us about the way our mind works,

Especially when it comes to these difficult things like anxiety,

Remorse,

Self-loathing,

Things like that?

Yeah,

I think evolutionary psychology can shed light from a couple of different kinds of angles on Buddhist meditation.

But one of them,

And a big one is,

As you suggest,

Helping to explain how our feelings kind of came to be what they are.

So according to evolutionary psychology,

You know,

Some features of the mind are kind of designed by natural selection.

I put designed in quotes because it's not a conscious designer,

But it does,

It does create traits that serve certain evolutionary functions.

That includes our feelings.

So things like fear and anxiety seem to exist because they motivated our ancestors to do things that would ultimately contribute to getting genes into the next generation.

That might mean just keeping the organism intact.

So if you have a fear of predators,

And it's triggered whenever there's danger of a predator,

And if that helps you keep safe,

Then that would be favored by natural selection.

So things like fear and also social anxiety.

I mean,

According to evolutionary psychology,

Because being highly thought of was conducive to genetic proliferation during evolution,

Then social anxiety,

Not just worrying about what people think of you,

Is natural.

But when you get into a modern environment,

These feelings often misfire.

You know,

Of course,

You could ask,

You know,

Are they firing very reliably to begin with?

In other words,

You could decide that,

Look,

Even if you're living in the environment of our evolution,

And the feelings were kind of working as designed,

You might say,

Look,

Well,

Natural selection wants me to live in fear of the opinion of others because that's conducive to genetic proliferation,

But I don't want to play that game.

I don't want to be quite so anxious.

So you could,

You know,

You could have skepticism about the actual evolutionary functions of these feelings.

That's one grounds for skepticism,

If you choose to have it.

But in a modern environment,

These feelings cease to even work as they are,

Quote,

Designed to work.

So with anxiety,

We find ourselves in these situations that did not pertain during evolution,

Like you might have to give a talk to a bunch of people you've never met.

That doesn't happen in the kind of hunter gatherer environment that we were designed for,

Walking into a cocktail party where you don't know anybody,

You know,

And you,

You may feel this sense of kind of paralyzing dread or something.

And these feelings are totally unproductive in every sense of the word,

And yet they are with us.

And so there are a lot of feelings where I think understanding the evolutionary logic behind them and the way they play out in a modern environment may tend to reinforce a sense of skepticism about following their guidance.

And of course,

There's a sense of skepticism toward feelings that's part of mindfulness meditation to begin with.

You kind of look at them,

Don't assume that you should accept their guidance,

And exert some kind of,

You know,

Reflection on the matter.

And it doesn't mean they won't come back when you walk into a cocktail party?

No,

It doesn't mean they won't come back.

But as you probably know,

If you are a regular meditator,

It may mean that you handle them in a different way.

The feelings don't go away,

You're not totally numb to them.

But they may no longer seize you the way they did.

And you also say,

We've assigned feelings to more and more things as we've gone on.

Can you explain that?

Yeah,

Well,

I mean,

You know,

We assign feelings to a lot of things that didn't even exist during evolution,

You know,

All these material objects,

Homes,

Cars,

And so on.

And we develop feelings about them.

And some of the feelings may be fine,

And may not be causing you a problem,

But some may.

I mean,

The thing is,

The environment has for a long time been very different from the environment we were designed for.

And it's just every year,

Getting weirder.

I mean,

You know,

Online life,

For example,

Social media is so unlike what the brain is designed for.

And that's why it can become addictive,

You know,

Even in a way,

It can become addictive in a not necessarily pernicious way.

You can,

You know,

There are things that you do habitually that aren't bad.

But social media and various other online enticements can get the better of us.

And I think,

You know,

Increasingly,

In terms of meditation retreats,

Part of the benefit of the retreat comes from just being off the grid.

You know,

That in itself is like,

Whoa,

You breathe a sigh of relief.

And then from there,

The meditation can take you further.

Absolutely.

And as time passes,

You can get ready to maybe replug or wondering what's going on in the world.

Yeah,

And replug in a healthier state of mind in a way in a way that better enables you to to deal with it.

You're right at one point that natural selection isn't all that bad for us.

How so?

It's not all bad for us.

I mean,

You know,

On the one hand,

I say,

You know,

Natural selection,

You know,

It created the human predicament.

Okay,

I mean,

The one reason I wrote the book was because the previous book of mine is about evolutionary psychology had really driven home to me that A,

We're not designed to be happy by natural selection,

Gratification naturally evaporates.

It is impermanent,

As is emphasized in Buddhism.

And so clinging to it is futile at best.

And we're not designed to see the world clearly.

Things about ourselves are built into us by natural selection,

According to evolutionary psychology,

Including illusions that are very much like the ones that Buddhism emphasizes.

And it fills us with these,

You know,

These cravings and which are themselves exacerbated in a world with like junk food and drugs and other enticements.

So in a way,

You could say if you seek liberation in the Buddhist sense,

In a certain sense,

You're rebelling against natural selection.

And I say,

If it's helpful to look at it that way,

Do it makes sense.

At the same time,

Natural selection did build in some good things.

I mean,

Love is a natural part of us,

Compassion.

The problem is that natural selection builds brains that naturally tend not to deploy those resources equitably,

You might say.

We shower them disproportionately on not just our family,

But kind of members of our tribe in various senses of the term,

Whether it's our ideological tribe or whatever.

But it did give us those resources.

And it also gave us a kind of reflective intelligence that is capable in principle of observing the workings of our mind and even to some extent,

Transcending them,

Which is what mindfulness meditation is about.

So some of the tools we use when we meditate were given to us by natural selection.

So I think it deserves some measure of gratitude,

Maybe.

At the same time,

I think some people actually find it helpful to think,

Wait a second.

So that's the thing that created the problematic parts of the human predicament.

So that's the thing I'm going to think of myself as in some sense,

Rebelling against or trying to get some liberation from.

You mentioned tribalism.

Maybe this would be a good time to kind of shift into what you write about not self,

Not wanting to harm the self.

And if we get some more people meditate in perhaps,

How will all be better off?

Well,

Not self,

I mean,

It has a lot of dimensions,

Of course.

One interesting thing about the idea of not self in Buddhism to me has long been that the connection between seeing clearly that the self is not nearly what you thought it was.

And it isn't this,

You know,

Your conscious self isn't this CEO thing.

And you don't have to cling to the things that give you such a tight sense of boundedness,

You know,

Of self that the connection between seeing that and then the moral sense of not self.

In other words,

Selflessness in the sense of seeing that you don't really have the kind of self you thought you had can make you more selfless as a person.

And one,

You know,

Experience I had on retreat was really powerful in that regard.

It was almost a sense that the bounds of myself had dissolved and that there was much more continuity between me and other beings than I had previously thought and,

You know,

Very adept meditators and I am not one of those but very adept meditators.

When you report an experience like that,

They tend to recognize and say,

Yeah,

Keep going,

You know,

That's part of the path.

And they often say it has made them more considerate,

Less self absorbed,

Less of a problem.

So that's one sense in which I think meditation could erode tribalism.

But there are also other senses like,

You know,

If you look at what drives the political polarization today,

Part of it is to get back to social media.

You know,

You've heard about the spread of so-called fake news.

Well,

I think we've all been guilty of that a little.

I certainly have retweeted things that I hadn't examined sufficiently.

And in retrospect,

They weren't really reliable things.

And if you ask,

Why did I retweet them?

It's because it felt good.

It's because it was information that reflected badly on the other ideological tribe or reflected well on my ideological tribe.

So I let my feelings get the better of me and I clicked retweet.

And I think mindfulness meditation,

Even if you're not having some kind of profound not self experience,

Tends to make you more aware of your feelings as you go through the day.

If you're meditating every morning,

I think that as you go through the day,

You're more likely to see a feeling welling up and make a decision.

Do I want this to govern my behavior?

And if the feeling is like while you're on Twitter or Facebook,

If it's like,

Yeah,

This will show the other team,

You know,

Then maybe think about it or at least examine what it is that you're sharing and spreading to make sure that it's reliable information.

So I started a website called mindfulresistance.

Net for people who are concerned about,

You know,

Trumpism,

You might say,

And want to take a mindful approach,

Whether they meditate or not,

If they just agree with me that sometimes overreaction to what we perceive as this problem could get in the way of kind of skillfully dealing with it.

I don't know what this retweet was,

But did you go through any any channel to correct your fake news dissemination?

Was it that big of a deal?

I've done it more than once.

The short answer is no.

The example I'm thinking of,

I guess I'm sorry to say that it wasn't quite an error that I was replicating.

It was more just amplifying the voice of someone who in retrospect,

There may have been a subtle misrepresentation going on.

And it just didn't warrant the outrage that actually I was amplifying,

I would say.

I was going to reveal my my fake news retweet.

Well,

I want to hear it.

It wasn't fake news.

A few months ago,

There was something about young girls getting on an airplane and being turned away because their outfit wasn't appropriate.

And I got really swept up in the I remember being appropriate and being a woman and between the actual news and the response.

This response was great.

It was women sharing the first time they felt ashamed by someone else for what they were wearing.

And I think that dialogue was very helpful.

But as it turned out,

There was some airline policy about what you could wear when you were flying on a free ticket or right.

They had some connection to the airline.

They were getting a ticket that was right.

I remember this exact cycle.

This happens a lot.

I mean,

You know,

You see the news,

You get outraged.

And then there's some qualifying information that shows up.

Yeah.

So lesson learned,

Even though I think the dialogue was helpful.

Yeah.

But I feel a little sheepish about that.

You have a chapter in the book you mentioned called the full title is your CEO is MIA.

If we're not in charge of ourself,

Who is?

Yeah,

Well,

You mentioned evolutionary psychology earlier and its connection to feelings.

There's also a second kind of light.

I think it sheds on meditation.

People who have been to retreats in particular may have heard meditation teachers say thoughts think themselves.

And what they mean is that if you get to a sufficient state of calm and equanimity,

And you're observing the contents of your mind,

It may start to seem like thoughts are just kind of floating in from left field rather than being generated by you.

We generally think of ourselves as I am the thinker of my thoughts.

It came from me.

I am the CEO.

But to a calm mind,

It can seem like thoughts are being kind of injected into consciousness more than generated by it.

And there's a model of the mind that comes out of evolutionary psychology,

Mainly the so called modular model.

The idea is that actually the mind consists of a lot of actors,

A lot of little modules that were designed maybe at different points in evolutionary time to do different things.

So simple example is,

You know,

There may be a module that's in charge of kind of getting you to eat enough to stay alive in a module that encourages you to impress people who seem worth impressing.

And you may be at a cocktail party,

Talking to someone who's worth impressing,

You see hors d'oeuvres,

And you feel attention,

Right?

Like you feel your attention stray.

You could see that as like a struggle between two modules.

And you're not really in charge.

I mean,

You may feel that you're the one who makes the decision in the end.

But according to the modular model,

That may be an illusion.

And moreover,

There may be lots of actors thinking their little thoughts and a lot of that may be subterranean,

You may not even become aware of the competition among modules.

And it may be that the winning module kind of sends its thought into your consciousness.

And that's what's going on.

And that's very consistent with this description you get from meditators where thoughts just seem to kind of show up.

I mean,

Something must be creating them,

Right?

If you assume they're coming from somewhere in the brain.

And this modular model gives one explanation of why that might be.

And it makes a lot of sense to me.

Is there an estimate of how many modules are competing for us?

And I should say this model is not universally accepted in psychology.

It has a lot of supporters.

It makes a lot of sense in terms of evolutionary psychology.

And also,

You could break it down in different ways.

I mean,

Like I've heard some psychologists say,

Well,

Maybe there's a mate acquisition module.

I personally think that's a little pretty large category.

And you could equally well say,

Well,

When you're romantically attracted to someone,

When you have that feeling,

It will trigger various little submodules.

And some of them might be the same modules that would be triggered if you're meeting someone who's,

You know,

Some high status person in your profession you want to impress.

I mean,

With both a perspective mate and that person,

You'd like to be seen as smart and witty,

Right?

And so it gets complicated.

Is there an impress people module that can get activated in these different ways?

We haven't figured it all out.

But the basic idea that different things are getting activated and notably getting activated often by feelings and that those things then come to dominate your consciousness for a while,

I think is a very fruitful model.

And it suggests,

By the way,

That,

You know,

If indeed feelings are triggering the modules,

Then the kind of mindfulness of feelings you get through mindfulness meditation can help shape,

You know,

Which modules are allowed to control your consciousness.

And there's no beer drinking module not yet,

Right?

No,

I mean,

That's a good example of where the environment of our evolution changes things.

So like there is just a reward center,

There's mechanisms for generating pleasure in the brain.

And the pleasure,

Historically,

During evolution was doled out for a lot of things that evolution wanted you to do.

It might be a certain kind of pleasure for eating food,

Eating sweet foods like fruit,

Having sex,

Whatever impressing people.

But in a modern environment,

You have these shortcuts,

You know,

Junk food,

Pornography,

Drugs like alcohol that can activate the pleasure centers without doing the work that natural selection quote wants us to do.

And we shouldn't necessarily accept natural selections guidance.

I'm not against all shortcuts to pleasure.

At the same time,

Certain things can become addictive precisely because the access,

It's so easy to trigger the reward center now.

And so that becomes a big problem.

And of course,

There are mindfulness based techniques for dealing specifically with addictions like to nicotine and so on,

Which have shown some success.

We often hear from our meditation teachers that we're not supposed to be overachievers.

You write about several people throughout the book who it's very hard not to be envious of.

I hope you can tell us a little bit more about Gary Weber,

Who you write as a man without stories.

Gary Weber is a fascinating guy.

Now he has studied both in Buddhist and Hindu traditions.

He's kind of eclectic in that way.

But one interesting thing about him is when he was part of this brain scan study at Yale Medical School that looked at the brains of very adept meditators as they meditate,

The default mode network,

Okay,

This is the part of the brain that's active when our mind is wandering.

And they found that it tends to get quiet when people meditate.

With Gary,

It was already quiet.

He didn't have to meditate.

And that's consistent with his own report that as he puts it,

He has,

If not quit thinking thoughts,

He has quit thinking self-referential thoughts.

He calls them the I,

Me,

My thoughts,

The you know,

What am I going to have for lunch tomorrow?

Was that a mistake?

The thing I said yesterday,

How can I get more of this for me?

He says that those voices are pretty much silent.

And he has,

He just much more naturally does the things that need doing.

He's entirely devoid of thoughts.

And he says these self-referential thoughts come back,

I think he says when his blood sugar gets low or something.

But he's a fascinating guy.

I had him to my speak to my class,

I taught a seminar on Buddhism for a couple of years at Princeton.

And he came and spoke and the students were completely blown away by his reports of what it's like to be him.

And you know,

People like that,

I talked to other people like that in the book who have devoted many,

Many,

Many hours to meditation and have gotten places I haven't gotten.

Although,

I think on meditation retreats,

I've sometimes had an inkling,

A brush with the kinds of experiences they have more deeply and more continuously.

But they are,

You know,

Models for us all,

I think.

I mean,

It's great to know that further down the path,

These things are attainable.

And one thing I try to emphasize in the book is that people do pass through thresholds,

Leave aside the question of whether there are any truly enlightened people around.

That's a complicated question,

You know,

In the strict sense of the Buddhist term enlightenment,

Whether anyone has a completely clear view of reality and is liberated from suffering and so on.

Leave that aside.

Clearly,

People like Gary,

It seems to me,

Have passed through thresholds.

But I don't think we should think of it as a binary thing where,

Okay,

I'll meditate for years and years and finally,

Poof,

I pass through the threshold.

I think it's a little more incremental than that.

And even Gary describes his progress that way.

And so I think when you manage to change your relation to something like anxiety and don't identify with it so closely,

I think of that as being a little bit of not self.

And you can get a little more not self.

And I think when you like,

See somebody in the checkout line who's rude to the clerk or something,

Or they're rude to you,

And you don't feel essence of jerk,

You pause and reflect and realize that for all you know,

They just found out that their spouse has cancer or something,

You don't know whether they're habitually rude or whether they're like,

As we all have had have just had a horrible day.

If you refrain from feeling that kind of like essence of jerk feeling that will then govern your perception of everything they do,

If you let it creep in,

I would call that a little an increment of so called emptiness.

You know,

The idea,

One way of looking at the experience of emptiness is things don't have essence.

Essence is something we impose on things.

So I think they're,

You know,

These are two of the deepest experiences in all of Buddhism,

Not self and emptiness.

And I think even those of us who are meditators of modest attainment can think of ourselves as moving incrementally in the direction of these things,

Leaving aside the question of whether we ever pass through a threshold that is completely transformative.

I think we can all make progress and then we can make a little more progress.

One of your meditation teachers told you she didn't approve wholly of you writing this book because of your own progress.

Why did she think it would be disruptive?

I think I know what she meant.

What she said was it was,

I think this is at the end of a retreat at the Insight Meditation Society.

And what she said was,

I know I was talking to her alone,

She said,

I think you may have to choose between writing this book and liberation,

Which I thought was kind of funny because I don't consider myself a very serious candidate for full on liberation.

You know,

I mean,

I just meditating is difficult for me.

But that makes sense to me at some level,

Which is this,

That if when you have some experience,

Maybe on retreat,

Maybe during your daily practice,

You immediately think,

Oh,

This can go in the book or oh,

How would I describe this?

It just impedes the experience to in a certain sense become self conscious,

Right?

Because you start thinking,

Oh,

Well,

How will I as the narrator relay this to people?

It gets in the way.

I have done one retreat since the book was pretty much wrapped up,

But it was months before it was published.

And I'm really looking forward to doing retreats without thinking of myself as an author.

It's interesting because I think if you're a writer or any kind of creative,

You're narrating,

You're reporting back.

Your thoughts are thinking I need to record this.

I need to think about it.

It's hard to get out of that.

You made a few references to being evangelical meditator.

And you're also toward the end of the book,

Talk about a void that opened up,

Leaving your Southern Baptist Church as a teenager.

And I noticed you don't call yourself a Buddhist now.

Do you think it'd be easier to fill that void if you did?

Since writing that,

That I don't call myself a Buddhist,

I've been interrogated about that and wondered whether maybe I should.

I mean,

It's a tough call.

I meditate.

I do a Buddhist kind of meditation,

You know,

Vipassana kind of slash mindfulness,

You might say.

And I do it in the explicit context of Buddhist philosophy.

And the reason I don't call myself a Buddhist is because I know that in Asia,

Buddhism means a lot more than the philosophy and psychology of Buddhism and meditating.

And in fact,

Most lay Buddhists in Asia don't meditate.

And they do have something I don't have,

Which is very firm convictions about reincarnation and the connection of karma to that and so on.

And I just kind of wonder if they would find it disrespectful or something for Westerners like me,

You know,

Who are doing something very different to call it Buddhism.

Now,

I'm fine with people,

Western Buddhists calling themselves Buddhists.

I don't really have a firm opinion about this.

And maybe I'm being too reticent about it.

I'm not all that dogmatic about the question of cultural appropriation more broadly,

Certainly.

I mean,

I should also say that when I'm at retreat and I walk in the meditation hall and I see people bowing to the Buddha,

I just feel,

I don't know,

Is that quite right for me?

You know,

It just feels like a little artificial or something.

I don't know how to put it.

And so I just wonder if I'd be faking it.

I mean,

Sometimes I do it.

If it seems like a retreat where it's kind of expected,

Then I think it would be disrespectful not to do it.

But no one's ever asked what you just asked,

Which is,

Would it be a more fully spiritual thing that is a more complete replacement for the Christian faith that I lost if I started calling myself a Buddhist?

I don't know.

It could happen.

It might happen yet.

I mean,

At the same time,

One thing I note early in the book is that the kind of Buddhism I'm talking about,

The kind of naturalistic version of Buddhism is compatible with other religions.

I wouldn't want the word Buddhist to get in the way of Jews,

Christians,

Muslims supplementing their own spiritual practice with mindfulness meditation because I think it's compatible with the values that their religions profess.

So if the Buddhist label gets in the way of people actually doing the practice,

Then I wouldn't want that.

Sure,

Absolutely.

And we see even people,

The Mormon faith starting to practice mindfulness.

Yeah,

I think there's a Mormon mindfulness podcast or something.

But I feel the need to come to your defense too,

Because you write about science being disenchanting,

But you also write about Buddhist meditation,

Bringing some of that enchantment back.

Yeah,

I think maybe Stephen Batchelor wrote about mindfulness re-enchanting the world.

And of course,

He's associated with the phrase secular Buddhism,

Which is another phrase I'm a little ambivalent about just because some people take secular as excluding spiritual.

And I personally think that a practice can be spiritual,

Even if it doesn't rest on any supernatural beliefs.

Now,

Maybe that's a misunderstanding of the term secular on their part,

But I think some people feel that way.

But anyway,

I think that's where I first saw in his book,

Maybe it's his book after Buddhism,

Or Buddhism without beliefs,

Where he talks about how mindfulness can re-enchant the world.

And it's so true,

Right?

I mean,

It's like,

It's hard to describe,

But you see a beauty and richness in the world that just almost seems deeper than a merely material world could furnish,

Right?

I mean,

It's a kind of a beauty and charm that can give rise to a sense of wonder and awe.

And I think re-enchantment,

I think it's his word,

And I think it's a perfect word.

So you've been on a book tour,

You've done a lot of interviews.

What about readers?

How are they responding at maybe book talks?

I mean,

I was really gratified to go to bookstores and find large and engaged audiences.

This was mainly out west,

But a little on the East Coast.

And I was surprised because I've been on book tours before and it's never been this good before.

And I think many of these people were meditators and some were not.

But I think the meditators,

And there were some casual meditators who were interested in learning more about Buddhist philosophy and how it relates to kind of moving a little further down the path than they have moved.

I've been very happy with it and I've been actually surprised with how the book's been received.

Bob,

Thanks so much for talking with us and telling our readers a little bit more about evolutionary psychology and Buddhism.

Well thank you.

This was a great conversation.

I really appreciate it.

You've been listening to Wendy Joan Biddlecombe and Robert Wright,

Author of Why Buddhism is True.

If you'd like to offer your feedback,

Please email us at feedback at tricycle.

Org.

This is James Shaheen.

Thank you for listening to Tricycle Talks.

Reviews

Thought provoking and practical!

Informative and interesting.

Having read the book and now listening to this talk I have a greater awareness and understanding of the feelings and experiences I have had. This provides an excellent foundation to build my practice on. Many thanks. 🙏

If you are interested in Wright’s work as I am, and would like to learn more from him, I recommend his Buddhism and Modern Psychology course offered by Princeton University available at Coursera. https://www.coursera.org/learn/science-of-meditation

Really informative and enjoyable. Thank you for this.

Very thought provoking. I may need to buy his book!

I’m happy to hear someone speak about evolution in the present tense. This talk was very informative on many levels.

I really relate to Bob’s experiences and his ambivalence about labeling his beliefs. I’m encouraged that he’s tapped the community of active meditators. Grateful for this talk!

Fantastic conversation. Thank you for sharing such inspiring thoughts 🙏

Absolutely brilliant. You have clarified so much for me. Thankyou 💗💗

Very interesting. Enjoyed the talk. Looking forward to reading the book.

Fascinating talk! Really enjoyed it. Thank you 🙂

Well described on the journey to Buddhist meditation without str

I found this very interesting in particular who owns our thoughts....the thinker, or......? 🙏

Excellent talk. Informative, honest and reflection-provoking. Many thanks. ❤️🙏

Informative talk. I want to read the book!