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Street Roots • September 1-7, 2017
The science of Buddhism
Robert Wright says mindfulness can help us
escape our delusions and live better lives
BY EMILY GREEN
STAFF W R IT E R
uddhists had it right all along, and we
have the science to prove it.
B
That’s the premise of a new book
from New York Times best-selling author,
journalist and Princeton University professor
Robert Wright (“The Evolution of God,”
“Nonzero”).
In his new book, “Why Buddhism is True,”
Wright examines the Buddhist practice of
mindfulness meditation from a scientific
perspective to explain how it can hold the key
to letting go of harmful illusions.
Thought patterns we’ve developed through
evolution served a purpose historically, but
they are often at odds with the modern world,
Wright explains. Our natural tendencies can
result in excessive anxiety and apocalyptic
daydreams and lead us to crave pleasures
without considering the consequences.
But with the simple practice of mindfulness
meditation, Wright contends, we can begin to
see these delusions for what they are and begin
to experience a life free from their influence.
His book blends evolutionary psychology and
evidence from various neurological studies with
Buddhism truths and his own personal
meditative path. The result is an approachable
and at times humorous introduction to
Buddhism, meditation and how the human
brain functions.
The book guides readers to view their own
thoughts with more objectivity, and it may lead
some to question the old philosophical adage “I
think, therefore I am.”
Wright will be at Powell’s City of Books on
West Burnside at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 15 for
a book signing and discussion.
Wright has written for The New Yorker,
Time, The New Republic, Slate and The
Atlantic, and he has been a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle
Award.
He is also the president of The Nonzero
Foundation, which operates two websites
featuring split-screen interviews aimed at
bridging national, religious, cultural, ethnic and
Most of us don t have time for a meditation
practice that might promise us full-on
enlightenment, as they say in Buddhism, but I
think we can all make real progress with a
fairly reasonable commitment of time.
E.G.: Lets talk about the diagnosis first. This
is as much a book about how the brain works as it
is about Buddhism - and about how natural
selection has shaped our thought patterns. How
does evolutionary psychology affect the way we
perceive the world around us?
R.W.: A key point is that natural selection
basically designs animals to get genes into the
next generation, period. Humans are designed
to be good at doing that in a particular
environment: the hunter-gatherer environment
P H O TO BY BARRY M U N G E R
that we evolved in.
R obert W right
But natural selection does not design
- animals to be happy or to see the world clearly,
necessarily. If suffering or having illusions will
ideological divides: BloggingHeads.tv and
help you get genes into the next generation,
TheMeaningOfLife.tv.
then suffering and illusions will be built into us
Street Roots recently spoke with Wright
by natural selection.
about his new book, how natural selection has
A good example of that is the gratification
led to delusional thoughts and how mindfulness
we feel upon indulging our senses, like when
meditation can help calm anxiety during the
era of Trump.
eating junk food or whatever, tends to
evaporate, and we tend not to really reckon
E m ily Green: First, it’s probably important
with that in advance.
that we establish what aspects of Buddhism your
In other words, when you’re pursuing any
book argues are true. Can you explain what
gratifying goal, whether it’s food or sex or
secular, or naturalistic, Buddhism is?
getting a promotion, you focus on the
R obert Wright: If you take away all the
gratification it will bring and not so much on
the fact that the gratification will be fleeting.
supernatural parts of Buddhism, like
reincarnation, you’re still left with a kind of
When you think about that, it makes sense
amazing claim, which is that the reason we
as a way for natural selection to engineer
suffer and the reason we make other people
animals. Right? If after eating a meal, we were
suffer is that we don’t see the world clearly.
contented forever, we would never eat another
We have illusions about ourselves, about
meal and we would die. If after one sexual
other people, about the world broadly.
encounter, we just lay there basking in the
Buddhism offers a practice, a path, to solving
afterglow forever, we’d never have sex again
the problem. It’s a path that includes
and natural selection wants us to have sex
meditation. I’m defending both the diagnosis -
multiple times because that increases our
that our problem is that we don’t see the world
chance of getting genes into the next
clearly - and I’m also defending the cure; that
generation. So this is a case where both
is mindfulness meditation in particular can help suffering, that is to say the restless longing
us become happier people, become better
people and see things more clearly.
See MINDFULNESS, page 5