Buddhism is one of the major religions of the world, and it comes with the usual garbage of its kind. Deities, demons, creation myths, miracles, reincarnation, commandments, heaven and hell. I'm happy to report that this book doesn't waste a word on them. Instead, it explains the radical insights into human psychology the Buddha discovered 2,500 years ago and science largely confirms today. This aspect of Buddhism is often called Secular Buddhism or Western Buddhism.
The central common tenet of all schools of Buddhism is that the world is maya, illusion. Our instincts, desires, preconceptions, judgments, and expectations hide reality from us, and we seldom penetrate their veil. Robert Wright, an evolutionary psychologist whose one earlier book inspired the movie Matrix, explains not only that this "dogma" is indeed a spot-on observation, but also what is responsible for our predicament. Which is....spoiler alert... Evolution. The human brain hasn't evolved to help us see the world as clearly as possible. It has evolved to help us survive it long enough to get our genes into the next generation. Someone who literally sees a snake in every rustling bush where the menace is real in only 1% of the times, has a better chance to leave offsprings behind than one who correctly measures up the situation, let's say, half of the times (and thus has a 50% error rate as opposed to the 99% of his more paranoid peer).
Our concepts of personality, time, morality, and such were bred by Nature and selected for usefulness, not veracity. They are useful mental models to help humans navigate in a volatile and dangerous world. They were wired into us 100,000 years ago, fine-tuned for hunter-gatherer life on the savannahs in tribes of some 150 people. Our basic instincts, love, fear, lust, rage, the desire of belonging, haven't changed in a hundred millennia, but many of them are obsolete or even dangerous in the world of today.
Sweet tooth urged humans to gorge on precious sources of nutrition on the rare occasion they could get their hands on them. Today one only needs to get a bar of chocolate off the shelf for a couple a cents and indulge himself into obesity. Retaliation for a public slight was once necessary to prevent losing the respect (and as a consequence, future support) of our peers. Today road rage is only good for decreasing our chances of survival. Female choosiness in mate selection was paramount to have healthy children with a supporting male. In the era of contraception, the worst (smart) females may face is moral judgment. Fear of strangers used to pay off, today xenophobia is a poison of society. And so on... As it is sometimes put, our brain runs an operating system designed for a world of cavemen.
Wright is certainly not the first Westerner to try to explain and defend Buddhist philosophy and practice, not even the first scientist, but as one who does it based on evolutionary psychology, he has brought something novel to the table.
The scientific part of the books dives deep into thought processes, mental models, and, as the glue that holds the whole shebang together, feelings - and the reader gets a good introduction into what Wright's own field holds over the matter. It's common knowledge that feelings have evolved as a secondary mechanism to support the individual's decision-making process. Compared to rational thinking, feelings are the quick and dirty tools to trigger changes in behavior. Jumping up a tree the instant you see a lion is probably safer than thinking through all the possible options before acting. Thinking over in detail how children will affect one's life is less reliably produces them than lust.
But according to many scientists, the role of feelings is much more than that. They not only affect but fundamentally form our perception to the extent that different observers can literally have a different visual experience looking at the same thing based on their internal mental and emotional states. Feelings also fuel our thought processes. If multiple modules in our brains compete for our attention (see later), the winner could be the one that powers the thoughts it generates with the strongest emotional fuel (if you are jealous, related thoughts will occupy your mind more frequently than the ones about the shopping list).
Interleaved with Evo psychology 101, Wright focuses on three basic tenets of Buddhism, namely suffering as a basic human condition, the concept of Emptiness, and the idea of Not-Self, and uses the tools and discoveries of evolutionary psychology to examine them.
The doctrine of suffering or, in another interpretation, unsatisfactoriness claims that because of our desires we are never satisfied with the world and suffer for it. This the easiest to explain from an evolutional point of view. Our basic desires for food, shelter, sex, and human contact prompted our ancestors (and us) to actively seek them out. Any individual lacking these impulses exempts herself from the common gene pool quickly. And once we acquired a good meal or a willing sexual partner, the feeling of satisfaction quickly fades away, which ensures we constantly keep ourselves healthy and try to spread our genes. Being uncomfortable is the price of survival.
The idea of Not-Self espouses that the "self" we subjectively feel as some unchanging essence is an illusion. Even though we know that we change in time, and we are not exactly the same person at the age of 40 as we were at 10, we feel that there still is some immutable kernel in us that defines "I". As far as I understand, modern psychology and neurology refute this. Our very self, our personalities can be changed by external factors, like brain damage, drugs, diseases with neurological implications, etc. Furthermore, what is subject to constant change is probably not even a single entity. According to one mainstream model of the mind, it is an aggregate of overlapping functionalities, or in some terminology, multi-modules. Multi-modules are the sources of thoughts arising in consciousness; they cooperate but also constantly compete for air-time. Thus the thought-generation process is decentralized and our idea of being the CEOs of our mental faculties is really just an illusion. We are not originators but mere observers of the thoughts popping into our consciousness from somewhere. Wright presents a couple of the current mainstream explanations for why we evolved this way, which are interesting, but the current state of the science is far from conclusive.
The concept of Emptiness is even stranger, and more fundamental, than our non-existence. It's related to another Buddhist term, interdependence or interconnectedness. To explain it, we need to take a step back and think about what we mean by the "essence" of something.
In short, we imbue objects, ourselves, and other people with some kind of essence. Grandfather's old watch is somehow different from any other watch of the same type, even if they are physically indistinguishable. An original Picasso is worth thousands of times more than a perfect copy as if it still held a touch of the Master's soul. When we say the words "Englishman", "table", or "dog", we instantly associate them with emotions and preconceptions. When we realize that we made a mistake and the Englishman turns out to be a second-generation immigrant from Africa, the table to a stool, and the dog to a fox, our "feelings" (conceptions, expectations, opinions, affections, ...) to them change instantly as if they themselves had been magically replaced. The best example of the tenuousness of the concept of essence or identity may be the paradox of Theseus's Ship. According to legend, the hero's ship was preserved by the Athenians. To protect it from the ravages of time, the parts of the ship were gradually replaced, one plank at a time, until not a single bit of it was original. The question is: is it still Theseus's Ship? If not, when did it cease to be? If yes, what makes it the same as the original? If the form, even that could have gradually changed with time to the point of unrecognizability. If because of what people think of it, then would it have stopped being itself if all those people who knew about it perished?
To the question of whether essence (or identity) exists, Buddhism's answer is an unhesitant and resounding "No". Nothing can exist and stand-alone, only in the context made of other parts of the world. It's not the simple "everything connected to everything" trope, but the realization that things have meaning only in relation to other entities. On its own, everything is "empty". To erode the concept of identity even further, nothing is permanent, everything is in constant flux.
These insights don't sound like something that would make people automatically happy. And in the case of Wright, they didn't. But as he discovered, Buddhism doesn't simply diagnose the human predicament but also offers a prescription for it. The Buddhist recipe for liberation is conscious detachment from these notions of essence, self, and feelings themselves. To view them as useful tools, but not to be ruled by them. The aim is not to become cold and insensitive, but to hone the ability to consciously engage or disengage with one's emotions. As a result, one becomes more relaxed and less judgmental, and consequentially, just happier.
The way to achieve this state is meditation, and a substantial part of the book is dedicated to the practice and theory of it. The form of mediation Wright introduces is the Vipassana tradition, often simply referred to as mindfulness meditation. Sit and observe your thoughts, feelings, and emotions without letting yourself carried away by them. This is, probably surprisingly for those who never tried, very hard, almost even impossible. There are reasons why it is so, and Wright explains the science behind it very well.
Hard as it is, Wright argues that the Buddhist prescription is a stone to kill multiple birds with. Meditation helps you see the world clearer, be a better person (less moralizing and judgmental), and feel better about yourself at the same time. He also dedicates a couple of pages to the question of whether being less judgmental and having the ability to distance one's self away from emotions really makes one a better person at the end of the day. Distancing yourself from empathy or avoiding moralization over your own deeds does not necessarily sound like an improvement at first. And the not very small number of spiritual teachers who rose to second fame as sexual predators drive the point home almost alarmingly. But in Wright's experience, these are the few bad apples. Meditation makes most people more compassionate, not less, and being more engaged in the world instead of moving toward nihilism.
Wright's approach is to present a piece of Buddhist wisdom, and then try to interpret it in light of modern psychological insights. His writing is warm and approachable with a healthy dose of dry humor and peppered with personal anecdotes. He is not an evangelist but a scientist. As far as he tries to convince the reader to give a shot to mediation, he draws on his own personal experience and the scientific justification for it. If you are at least moderately interested in Buddhism, but allergic to bullshit, this is one of the few books that won't disappoint.
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