Author Robert Wright says mindfulness can help us live better lives and 'endure the Trump era'

Buddhists had it right all along, and we have the science to prove it.

Thats 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 weve 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 Powells 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 ideological divides: BloggingHeads.tv and TheMeaningOfLife.tv.

Street Roots recently spoke with Wright about his new book, how natural selection has led to delusional thoughts and how mindfulness meditation can help calm anxiety during the era of Trump.

Emily Green: First, its probably important that we establish what aspects of Buddhism your book argues are true. Can you explain what secular, or naturalistic, Buddhism is?

Robert Wright: If you take away all the supernatural parts of Buddhism, like reincarnation, youre still left with a kind of amazing claim, which is that the reason we suffer and the reason we make other people suffer is that we dont see the world clearly.

We have illusions about ourselves, about other people, about the world broadly. Buddhism offers a practice, a path, to solving the problem. Its a path that includes meditation. Im defending both the diagnosis that our problem is that we dont see the world clearly and Im also defending the cure; that is mindfulness meditation in particular can help us become happier people, become better people and see things more clearly.

Most of us dont 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 that we evolved in.

But natural selection does not design animals to be happy or to see the world clearly, necessarily. If suffering or having illusions will help you get genes into the next generation, then suffering and illusions will be built into us by natural selection.

A good example of that is the gratification we feel upon indulging our senses, like when eating junk food or whatever, tends to evaporate, and we tend not to really reckon with that in advance.

In other words, when youre pursuing any gratifying goal, whether its food or sex or getting a promotion, you focus on the gratification it will bring and not so much on the fact that the gratification will be fleeting.

When you think about that, it makes sense as a way for natural selection to engineer animals. Right? If after eating a meal, we were contented forever, we would never eat another meal and we would die. If after one sexual encounter, we just lay there basking in the afterglow forever, wed never have sex again, and natural selection wants us to have sex multiple times because that increases our chance of getting genes into the next generation. So this is a case where both suffering, that is to say the restless longing that ensues after gratification evaporates, and a certain kind of illusion, that is to say, not fully anticipating the evaporation of the gratification, are built into us by natural selection. And this particular thing not really reckoning with the impermanence of things, especially the impermanence of gratification was a central theme in Buddhism from the beginning.

E.G.: What are some of the ways that our modern environment tricks our hunter-gatherer minds?

R.W.: There are two problems: One is that natural selection built suffering into people that they will experience even in the kind of environment they were designed for, like a hunter-gatherer environment. The second problem is that the modern environment can make things even worse.

For example, its natural to feel anxiety about the safety of your children, or about what people think of you. You would expect to find a certain amount of anxiety for that reason even in a hunter-gatherer environment. But in the modern environment that natural selection had no way of anticipating, you get whole new forms of anxiety. Like dropping your child off at a day care center where you dont know anybody; thats something that doesnt happen in the environment that we were designed for. Or having to give a presentation in front of people youve never met before; that didnt happen in the environment we were designed for, so you get whole new kinds of anxiety, and fortunately, meditation is pretty good at dealing with anxiety at least it can be if you work at it. And it can change your relationship to unpleasant feelings in general.

Ive had experiences where, if I start out by just accepting an unpleasant feeling like anxiety and experiencing it and examining it, ironically, I wind up viewing it from a critical distance, with a kind of detachment or non-attachment that reduces or even eliminates the suffering it causes me. And more broadly, mindfulness meditation promises to let you examine your feelings carefully and choose which ones you want to be guided by, and since some of these unpleasant feelings are not only unpleasant, they actually blur our vision in a certain sense, anxiety can sponsor crazy, apocalyptic scenarios about whats going to happen to you while public speaking or whats going to happen to your child in some situation. Given that some of these feelings that make us suffer also distort our vision, it only makes sense to approach them with some skepticism and lessen their grip on us, and meditation can help us do that.

E.G.: How would you describe mindfulness meditation to someone who is unfamiliar with it?

R.W.: It usually starts by focusing on something like your breath. If all goes well, you will stop your mind from wandering restlessly, and it will allow you to start focusing on things.

What you then do is just observe, carefully, things you might not normally notice, including things inside your mind, like feelings, thoughts. You basically heighten your awareness of the elements of experience, and some of the most important elements are parts of your mind.

But in principle, having attained this focus and attained some equilibrium, you can also focus on things like sounds with much more clarity than usual. In fact, you can find beauty in things that you normally might not.

When I meditate, sometimes the refrigerator near me starts humming. Believe it or not, the humming of a refrigerator can be a beautiful thing, and you can notice things about it you wouldnt ordinarily notice. It turns out that the hum actually consists of at least three different noises that are independently varying and together they can create a sound that can be beautiful in a certain way.

E.G.: One thing I think will probably resonate with any reader who has ever dabbled in meditation is the way you humorously and honestly talk about your own failed attempts at maintaining focus during meditation. Is that something that has gotten easier with practice, or does it still happen to you now and again?

R.W.: Oh, I still have trouble. I consider myself the opposite of a naturally good meditator. I have a very limited attention span. I dont, by nature, have a ton of emotional equilibrium. And thats why, in my case, it took a weeklong silent meditation retreat to really make me appreciate meditation. A lot of people can pick it up much easier than that, but for me, the retreat convinced me it was worth developing a daily practice. And it has ups and downs. There are days you just feel you cant concentrate at all and you got nothing out of it, but by and large, I find the day goes better when I meditate and that the rewards are sufficient to keep me doing it. I also find the more time I find to do it each day, the better things go and the fewer regrettable things I do.

E.G.: I had an Aha! moment while driving the other day, and I thought of your road rage explanation that you describe in your book how evolutionary psychology created the road rage phenomenon. Just thinking about that really helped me to let go of the anger. Im having a harder time letting go of negative feelings when it comes to annoying people who I know. Any tips on how to do that with mindfulness?

R.W.: Natural selection designed us to have this category of enemy, and once somebody is in that enemy category, its hard for them to get out because we are designed to evaluate their behavior in ways that reinforce the enemy label.

If they do something good, we tend to explain it away as some kind of ploy or some kind of showing off, but if they do something bad, we say yeah that is the real them emerging.

I think it helps for starters to understand the cognitive bias that creates and sustains the enemy category and to understand that our labeling of enemies is biased in favor of selfishness.

Its not an objective view. Its not a pronouncement of Gods that this person deserves your wrath. Its a reaction you had while pursuing your own agenda. Which isnt to say there arent people who have truly earned the enemy label; its just to say that not everybody has. That is step one, and then I think meditation can help, but I think it can help more if you first understand what I just said about the very origins of the concept of enemy.

Now, there are specific types of meditation designed to deal with this one is called loving-kindness meditation. I have never had huge success with that, but everyday mindfulness meditation does sometimes put me in a frame of mind that allows me to think of someone that I basically dont like, and just think about them in a more charitable way almost like their mother might think of them where I suddenly understand that there are reasons that they behave in a way that bothers me. You know how good mothers are at explaining stuff like that She didnt get her nap and I find that meditation can give me a little of that perspective, but its a real challenge. This stuff isnt easy.

E.G.: You started this journey with a meditation retreat back in 2003, and since that time, smartphones have proliferated society. Do you think they add another hurdle to liberation from delusion, considering what theyre doing to our attention spans always being on with notifications?

R.W.: I think one reason meditation retreats are becoming more popular is because they allow you to get off the grid. At most retreats, youre encouraged to leave your smartphone at the desk. When I go on retreat, Im totally out of touch with the world. But even daily meditation, if you focus on the problem, can make you less enslaved to your electronic devices.

One thing mindfulness meditation can do in general is make you more aware of how little subtle feelings tug at you and govern your behavior and your thoughts. So like when youre doing work and suddenly you have this urge to check in with Twitter or Facebook, or do some online shopping, if you meditate, you are more likely to recognize the feelings that are at work.

First of all, theres a feeling of aversion to the work itself. Maybe youve gotten to a difficult part in some writing youre doing so it doesnt feel good to keep writing, and then theres the craving, the attraction of Twitter or Facebook, and if you become aware of those feelings before following their guidance, you have the option of just sitting there and experiencing and observing them until their power lessens.

And this is true of self-discipline in general. In fact, there are studies that show this approach to something like quitting cigarette smoking can be very effective. Once you feel the urge, observe the urge in a meditative way, until its power weakens, which isnt the same as pushing the urge away. Ironically, it starts with accepting the urge, at least enough to get close to it, without following its guidance.

E.G.: At Street Roots, we cover social justice issues in a very left-leaning city, being in Portland, and theres been a sort of collective anxiety here since the election. How can someone use mindfulness to kind of calm that anxiety when stressors are external, and in some ways very real?

R.W.: I think daily meditation allows you to endure the Trump era with somewhat more equanimity now there may be such a thing as too much equanimity in other words, if you quit fighting the things that you think are worth fighting.

In my own case, that is just not a danger. I think, if anything, a more common problem is overreacting to Trumps provocations, often in ways that play into his hands and confirm his narrative that everyone hates him and holds his followers in contempt and so on.

In fact, I just started a site called MindfulResistance.net. Were putting out a weekly newsletter. Its not for meditators only, but it is premised on the idea that the kind of mindset meditation cultivates, a mindset of very clear vision and awareness without overreacting emotionally to things, can be helpful in combatting Trumpism.

I also think being aware of how the world is perceived by Trump supporters can be very helpful. Thats called cognitive empathy, as distinguished from the kind of feel-your-pain emotional empathy. Its just a matter of perspective taking. I think the more we understand the various reasons, and I think there are a lot of reasons that people voted for Trump, the better we will be able to make it less likely that someone like him will be president again.

I think meditation is good for cognitive empathy because it can weaken the emotional obstacles to seeing things from the point of view of somebody who is in the other tribe, so to speak. And I think one thing we shouldnt lose sight of is the people who voted for Trump have grievances, and some of them are not imagined.

Globalization, technological change these things have complicated a lot of peoples lives, and we need to think of ways to address the problems they create. I think the more time we can spend doing that thinking, the better, and if we spend too much time overreacting to Trumps daily provocations, we wont have time to do that.

E.G.: It almost seems like he kind of plays into some of those hunter-gatherer brain tendencies, especially with tribalism, as you mentioned.

R.W.: Totally, I think this is a big problem with the world, whether its like sectarian conflict, Sunni-Shia, or national conflict, U.S.-North Korea or ideological conflict in America. Its what you could call the psychology of tribalism and the cognitive biases that entails, and I think it inflicts both sides.

I think anyone on either side who thinks the other side is the entire problem is deluded. I think almost all of us have spread fake news. I know I have sometimes retweeted things without really carefully examining the information I was spreading, and the reason I did it is because it felt good to do it. It was information that reflected badly on the other tribe, or on Trump, and again, I think mindfulness meditation can make you a little more aware of when you are being pulled into something like that by your feelings, and it can help you step back and ask yourself, wait a second, do I really want to retweet this? And if everybody on both sides did this, America would be a massively better place.

E.G.: Anything else youd like to add for anyone who might be interested in reading your book?

R.W.: What you hear most about mindfulness meditation, that its good therapy and can help you deal with anxiety and stress and so on, is true in my view. But I think its also true that this therapeutic view of meditation can be the first step toward a deeper kind of exploration that is philosophical and even spiritual in nature. In the book, I tried to provide enough information about the Buddhist philosophy that is the context of Buddhist meditation to help people who are so inclined explore that path.

Email staff reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.

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The science of Buddhism: 'Real progress' through meditation - Street Roots News